The fundamental imperative of the state, at least from the perspective of the state, is to maintain sufficient political hegemony, such that no subset of society can challenge the authority of the state. This maintains the security of the state, and prevents the damaging conflicts that come with the struggle for political dominance. The "struggle" for political dominance should, in this view, be predictable and very one-sided - the house always wins - such that there is no point having a struggle with the state at all.

But someone may still wish to have a disorderly and antisocial struggle with their neighbor, which, while it may not be a political problem, is still bad for business. So the fundamental imperative of the state is extended. The extended imperative of state is to achieve not just sufficient alignment of powers for hegemonic security, but total alignment of all powers in society with the state and with each other. A totally aligned state and society can act as a unit against coordination problems, external and internal, and can thus focus on solving non-political problems.

Obviously the problem of total political order is optional and aspirational. It will never be achieved this side of the mythical future golden age. It is to be pursued incrementally, when possible, efficient, and profitable. But the more fundamental problem of sufficiently secure political order is necessary to the existence of the state, and thus must be pursued by any means necessary.

Securing sufficient and then total ordering of the political forces in society can be called in general the problem of political order.

But not all sufficient means are necessary, or good ideas. Political order could be achieved at significant damage to the structure of society, as in your classic 20th century totalitarian horror-state. Thus we must achieve political order by any means necessary and efficient, or if you prefer, by any means necessary and proper. This modified problem statement is the problem of efficient political order.

Let's therefore analyze the efficiency problem.

To achieve the end of political order, all states and state-like coalitions have an array of powers, which are used to modify the alignment of powers in society, and build their system of political hegemony.

Each power that the state has will have characteristic costs and results that make it suited for one problem or another:

• Policemen are useless against paramilitary gangs.

• Paramilitary riot police and national guard troops are inappropriate against petty criminals.

• Paramilitary security forces can't fight a war.

• Propaganda and information control is inadequate a sole measure against a hostile and unsupportive population.

• Arrests and crackdowns are inappropriate against grumbling by confused subjects.

If one applies the wrong tool for the job, bombing criminals and trying to arrest and charge paramilitary gangs, one will find that one has trouble achieving political order, and to achieve it, the downsides of the inappropriate methods used will have added up into a frightful problem.

So the efficiency problem is basically the problem of using the right tool for the job. This boils down to a few factors:

1. Having the right tool available and ready for use, with knowledge of how to use it.

2. Knowing the results and costs the tool achieves, and that it is the right tool for the circumstances.

3. There being no constraining ideological or structural reason why the tool can't be used.

For #1, political tools and powers can be built. It takes a while and it's complex, but it happens. The progress of the power of empires over time is the construction of more and more powerful political control tools. Not much to say here.

Factor #2 is not important to discuss in abstract. Given a particular tool of political control, and a tradition of wise statecraft, much can be said about its appropriate use, costs, and benefits. But that's out of our scope here.

Factor #3, the structural and ideological barriers to political control, are a common and preventable cause of inefficient or failed political order. We can discuss this in more depth in this study, as it is an important factor in the general problem of efficient political order:

We can list a few different historical examples of structural barriers to political order, and discuss them to get a feel for the issue:

• Democracy. Democracy is actually a complex of related machanisms, rather than a single institution. Besides the voting thing, it mostly boils down to inability of a ruling coalition to use the most efficient parts of the state apparatus, like the legal system, police, state funds, official propaganda, and so on, directly against the opposition. It's not democracy if you can just arrest the opposition for crimes against political order. But even if you can't just arrest the opposition, the imperative for the governing coalition to neuter the opposition by any means necessary remains, and is redirected.

• Separation of Powers. If powers in the government are divided between multiple weakly-coordinated agencies, this is almost by definition a violation of political order. Taken as a whole system, the state is unable to wield its powers wisely and efficiently, because it is not internally coordinated. Looking at a subagency as the legitimate state, there are key powers the state doesn't have, and it has other powerful state-like entities to contend with.

• Separation of church and state. As a common case of the above, the separation between church and state is another violation of political order. There are two classic cases: The first being the Catholic state case, in which the church is official, but does not fully obey the state. The second being the secular state case, in which the government is just unable to use religion as part of its power system, though it will use religion-like education and value system control as a partial substitute, and other entities will use religion as a now-uncoordinated power system.

• Lack of explicit legal command authority. Many problems are most efficiently solved with a simple order from the state, backed by the full force of the law. And many big legal cases are of political nature, and thus are the proper domain of the state. But some modern states explicitly separate the judiciary, and the powers of the court, from the powers of the state. Without full subordination of the legal system to the state, many problems cannot be solved in the most efficient manner.

These are the big ones. We can see that these structural barriers to total state power are often created deliberately, backed by ideological considerations. The above features, for example, are some of the foundational ideological planks of the liberal republican design of the US constitution.

It is often the case, and it is so in our case, that the primary glue holding the state in a certain configuration, whether it is structurally dysfunctional or efficient, is ideology. If the elites did not really believe in the liberal republican theory of government that says division of power is good, and instead believed in a holistic theory of government that said unification of power is good, then a coalition could be quickly arranged to restructure things. This also goes the other way. It is ideology that is the primary source of long-run institutional momentum.

The major questions that come out of such an observation are what a new ideology of political structure would look like, and how exactly it would gain currency in elite circles. But that is outside the scope of this study; here we are concerned primarily with the underlying structural issues.

In our framing of the problem of political order as being the problem of the state having the right tools for the job, we have not yet addressed what happens if the state cannot use the right tools.

If the state cannot use some efficient tool for the job of securing political order, the fundamental imperative remains; they need to maintain political order. In finding a way to secure political order despite the lack of the best tools, the state will be forced to use tools which are less efficient. This can mean two things:

1. Secure political order is achieved, but at greater cost. Not that it's realistic, but for example if you don't have policemen, and have to use a combination of lynching and martial law to maintain social order, society just isn't going to work as well. As a more realistic example, if you can't just arrest the democratic opposition, you might try to systematically reeducate the population, and import favorable voters to bolster your own coalition, keeping the overall democratic outcomes in your favor; this also results in a damaged society.

2. Secure political order is not achieved. You still try a bunch of the above society-damaging stuff, but it doesn't work well enough, and the opposition gets in. If this goes back and forth, the damage escalates, and power shifts to nearby state-like institutions that are not vulnerable to replacement, like bureaucracies and universities. These pseudo-state institutions are unfortunately likely even less capable of ruling efficiently, lacking formal power and legitimacy, and thus the efficiency of the state degrades further.

So restricting the powers of the state, by structural or other means, means that the struggle for political order is less decisive, and thus more escalated, and more damaging to society.

The side-effects of restriction of powers on the stuggle for political order are a decisive consideration from the perspective of the state; the state wants lots of power. But we have not yet shown whether this holds from the perspective of society in general. It may yet be that the escalating collateral social damage of the permanent political struggles inherent in limited systems is the lesser evil compared to what an unleashed and powerful state would do to society.

On that question, we can briefly note that when the government is in a state of political security, whatever its interests are, it is aided and solely enabled by a strong and healthy social ecosystem under its command. It would no sooner abuse its society than you would abuse your left arm. You might abuse your left arm if it had a mind of its own and was constantly causing trouble for you, but not if you were in control of it. Likewise for the state and society. Almost all abuse of society by state therefore comes as a result of ongoing inefficient political struggle, and state decision-making stupidity or irrationality.

When it has political security, the state has strong incentive to to organize society as a unified social and economic ecosystem that can be directed to whatever the purposes of the state are. This would mean proper application of decentralization wisdom like subsidiarity and market mechanisms, but also centralization of political authority and elimination of those rights and freedoms of individuals and subgroups which conflict with the harmony of the social whole. This sounds radical, but is just the normal nonpolitical operation of the state on society; all states reshape their societies into power bases for their goals. The first and most obvious "rights" taken away are those which negatively impact the strength of the community.

Two more important questions remain before we can take solving the problem of efficient political order, and its social results, to be a good:

1. Whether reorganization of society as an explicit political and social unit with overall purpose, rather than for example a loose association of materially self-interested individuals, is a good thing. Certainly there are many in our modern semi-liberal societies who profit from greed, exploitation, and parasitism of various kinds, who would be greatly inconvenienced by a resurgent political holism.

2. Whether we agree with the purposes the state might set for society, what those purposes might be, what they ought to be, and how we might construct a state that systematically cares about the right things.

These are both difficult questions that are outside of our scope here.

To conclude, we have introduced here the problem of efficient political order, which is how and at what cost the state maintains political order, which is when the state has coordinated most or all power in society such that it has no remaining significant political enemies. This analysis produced the following interesting core claims:

• That the state is fundamentally, at its core, a political entity with a primary goal and purpose of organizing and unifying all political power in itself.

• That all states will strive for the fundamental imperative of state, which is the maintenance of political order, because they will be replaced if they don't.

• That in achieving political order, the state has many tools at its disposal, some of which are more efficient than others. Efficiency is counted as the metaphorical ratio of political results to damage to society and more direct state resources.

• That the crux of the problem of efficient political order is the ability of the state to deploy the right political tool for the job.

• That the primary barriers to the state being able to deploy the right tool for the job, and thus to achieving efficient political order, are structural limitations, usually backed by explicit limited-government ideology.

• That the right ideology, installed by unspecified means, could reorganize the modern united states to be much more politically efficient.

• That if a state is unable to use the right tool for the job, it will escalate the use of alternative less efficient methods to maintain the fundamental imperative of political order. Or it may fail and be replaced by a new system more able to coordinate power, often at even lower efficiency, and thus with higher collateral damage to society. Thus there is serious downside to ideologies of state limitation.

• That once a state is able to achieve secure or total political order, it shapes the society under its command into a holistic ecosystem to generate useful work on the non-political aims of the state, whatever they are. This is normal for all states.

• That free authority of the state to command all political power and use all available means to maintain political order is a good thing, provided we can agree that a more fully coordinated society is acceptable or better, and that the state can be given a good overall telos.

This has been an overview of the issue, and introduction of the problem of efficient political order. All of this need to be looked at in more depth in future, and then revisited and refined.

Plato once said, “One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Actually, that’s not quite what he said. It’s a summary that’s floating around on the internet. He really said:

But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves or to their like. For we may venture to say that, if there should be a city of good men only, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now, and there it would be made plain that in very truth the true ruler does not naturally seek his own advantage but that of the ruled; so that every man of understanding would rather choose to be benefited by another than to be bothered with benefiting him.

In Plato’s city of good men, the virtuous compete to avoid political office. Nowadays, our virtuous men compete to be as independent of politics as possible. They may call themselves “independent”, “moderate”, “skeptical”, “centrist”, or “altruistic.” They avoid political office, they avoid voting, and they even attempt to avoid thinking about politics.

If more virtuous men participated in politics, would politics get better? Is this the implication of Plato’s quote? No, the political problems in our current age are due to incentives from the political system, not just due to a lack of good men. Placing virtuous men in a bad political system eventually corrupts them.

Good men are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for good government. Although they may not be effective as political leaders or voters, they could be effective as political thinkers, if they could get over their aversion to political thought.

Plato’s quote may not imply that we can improve politics by sprinkling in a few virtuous men here and there. Politics is too broken for that. But the quote does imply something else:

Ignoring politics doesn’t make it go away.

When good men attempt to opt-out of politics, they do not actually avoid politics. They are still in a polity, a polity run by bad men. Now they are subjected to the bad politics of bad men. In our case, these are people like politicians, journalists, bankers, bureaucrats, professors, and social engineers at the big foundations.

You can’t opt out of politics.

If you are the kind of independent, moderate character that I am speaking to, then it may mildly aggravate you when I make pronouncements like this. However, I think it’s quite likely that some of the observations I’m about to make will resonate with your experience.

This article is for the independent thinkers of the world who are tired of getting pushed around by politics, and who are tired of living in a world that seems to suddenly be going crazy while they don’t understand why.

Why not just ignore politics?

When virtuous thinkers first see people rolling around in mud of the political playing field, their first instinct is to run as far away as possible. We could call this the “ostrich heuristic.”

But sticking your head in the sand doesn’t work anymore. Many independent thinkers are discovering that even if you aren’t interested in politics, politics is interested in you.

Although you might try to avoid it, politics has a way of worming itself back into your business and decreasing your quality of life. Even if you try to ignore politics, it will get into people around you in your community. It’s getting harder and harder to have sophisticated, nuanced conversations about controversial matters, thanks to politics.

Politics puts different tribes of people at odds with each other. Politics divides family members. Politics whips up your friends in culture wars. Politics hijacks your organization.

Our independent, moderate-minded intelligentsia has been trying to ignore politics, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so. You would have to ignore all politicized information sources and politicized people, which would require being a hermit.

Because you are not a hermit, trying to ignore politics inevitably fails, because you eventually encounter some form of politics. And when you do, you don’t have any defenses. Paradoxically, trying to ignore politics makes you easily influenced by politics because you have no political immune system. The first bacteria that get into your system have a heyday.

Let’s switch to another analogy. In driving school, they teach you about “defensive driving.” We could say that “defensive politics” is the study of politics for the purpose of defending yourself from other people’s atrocious politics. Defensive politics would include resisting any political attempts to emotionally browbeat you, to confuse your understanding of the world, to poison your community, to take over your organization, to beat you in zero sum games, or to otherwise harm your interests and people you care about.

Politics has gotten a little bit out of hand. It’s time to face politics and figure out what the heck is going on.

Why does politics matter?

The study of politics is the study of human power and agency. By claiming that politics matters, I am arguing that power is powerful. Agents exercise agency.

This sounds like a tautology, but the independent, moderate, altruistic crowd fail to grasp it, because they think in terms of reason, utility, and humanitarianism, not in terms of agency, incentives and power. We could say that they are “power-blind,” like a form of mind-blindness.

Non-elite, powerless people pursue ideals like truth, justice, or altruism (at least, they believe they do). The politically powerful are different. They pursue power. That’s how they got power in the first place and how they hold onto the power they have. There is nothing inherently wrong with this behavior. It is best to view it as amoral rather than immoral. Of course, politics is full of moral language, and powerful people are perfectly capable of parroting humanitarian language when it suits their goals, but it’s important to note that this moral posturing is often empty.

If you want to understand the world, if you want to do good, if you want to have an impact on the future, then you cannot afford to ignore politics. You cannot afford to ignore power. Politics touches everything.

The state of a society at any given time is a function of the powerful agents in that society. If you want to understand a society and get anything serious done inside it, then you will need to understand the political actors and factions in that society. You will need to understand their goals, incentives, and history.

You will especially need to understand the conflicts of political forces, because political conflict damages society, alienates friends, tears apart families, exacerbates ethnic tensions, and causes nations to fund weapons development. Once you understand competition over power, then you have begun to understand politics.

By studying human agency, you will become more powerful yourself, even if you just use that power for defensive politics. By studying the history of the exercise of human power, you will greatly improve your model of the world by learning to sniff out propaganda and spin. You will become much better at resisting all the moral posturing in politics instead of getting browbeaten by the latest campaign.

What should you do?

What should you actually do about politics? Should you vote? Should you run for office? Should you support other people running for office? Should you donate to some political cause? Should you go to a march? These are the actions that most people associate with politics. But they are mostly ineffective.

What most people should do about politics is play defense.

When you don't have responsibilities that touch the political arena, and when you don’t have sophisticated political goals and a plan to achieve them, then there is nothing constructive to do as an individual. Play the game of passive resistance to avoid being sucked in. Political ambition without understanding will only make things—and you—worse. Go with the flow, mime the social signaling of the masses around you, and try not to think too hard.

What if you do have goals or responsibilities, like a decision-making position in an organization or community? Then your defensive politics can become even more active. You can’t fix politics, but you can resist political forces that would seek to conscript you into conflicts, and you can avoid jumping on bandwagons. You can protect your organization, community, and family from ideological hijacking, or at a minimum, you can refrain from saying “faster, comrade!” and burning them down for the sake of political signaling.

If you have goals that demand actually understanding the world, or you are cursed with burning curiosity, then what? Then there is another useful thing you do: understand political theory. You have to understand how politics works if you want to discount its corrosive intellectual effects. If you study politics in a deep way, then eventually you may be able to make your own contributions to political theory.

Although we can’t fix politics by getting a few more virtuous men involved in holding office or voting, we do need virtuous men involved in political thought to figure out how to fix our rapidly decaying political system. If virtuous men don’t engage in political theory, then they will be ruled by the political theory of worse men.

Absolutism is the idea that conflict is bad, that conflict is reliably caused by division of power, therefore division of power is bad, therefore decisive power in some domain should be held by a single undivided office. The single office being the King, the Crown, the CEO, the Officer, the Leader, the Captain, the Father, God, the Pope, etc.

This way, there is no one who can challenge the leader, and thus minimal conflict, and thus as little as possible of the damage to society that comes from political conflict. A company with two CEOs who didn't cooperate, or a CEO who couldn't fire people at will, wouldn't work; it would be a mess. Therefore authority should be absolute and undivided.

But we also know that overcentralized micromanagement can be crippling for complex social systems. Local authority, decision making in local contexts, the rule of law, property law, due process, negotiated boundaries between indepentent powers, distributed market mechanisms, and even restraint on the actions of power, are often superior to attempts to centralize absolute power and decision making. "Localism" isn't a great name for this set of notions, but it will do.

Absolutism might seem to contradict localism, but if we're nuanced about it, it doesn't.

Let's look at the hierarchical chain of command as a case study:

The localist principle, informed by absolutism, demands that the head man of the local context in some hierarchical domain should have full authority in that context. For example, the father is effectively king of his family, the businessman is king of his company, the count is king of his county, the security guard acts with the full authority of the owner in defending his property, the judge wields the full authority of the crown in dispensing justice, and so on.

The absolutist principle, building on this basis, demands that while the head man in a local context is given the widest possible leeway for action, boundaries and orders from above are obeyed in the strictest possible manner. This way, the local man manages his local context, but does not challenge higher authority and create political conflict; his superior can issue orders to manage the political and strategic issues of the higher level.

So:

• Companies should be run in an absolute manner by the owners, but those that get big enough to exert political influence have to coordinate with the state, because companies are subordinate to the state. This happens in all societies, but is done in a corrupt and inefficient way in our society because of the lack of honesty and formalization, and because of the general weakness of the state.

• Local counties and provinces and states are ruled absolutely by their governors, who have free rein to adjust the operation of the state to the local conditions and ideas, but are responsible to the higher authority of the central state to conform to higher strategic directions.

• Officers of military units have more or less absolute authority to do whatever is necessary to achieve their tactical objectives, but obviously have to fit into a larger strategy and chain of command.

• In general, subdomains should be governed by absolute personal rule, but also fully subordinate to higher authorities and boundaries who are managing the health of the whole domain.

We can see both localist and absolutist ideas being applied here without contradiction. Absolutism in final political power does not imply centralized management in practice, and freedom of action for local authority does not imply limitation of the authority of the crown.

The alternative, niether absolutist nor localist, is a sort of homogenizing bureaucracy, in which all decisions are global in scope, and no one actor has the power to make any decision, and no one has a personal relationship to any institution. This is an arbitrary, oppressive, and dysfunctional nightmare that breeds a degenerate culture of avoidance of responsibility, lack of skill, and learned helplessness.

The localist-absolutist chain of command on the other hand, has the advantage of creating a culture in which many men have experience with personal rule in complex domains without being in much conflict with each other, thus building up a developed culture of personal rule, and a large elite within this culture from which leaders can be drawn. This can be useful for the succession problem; the emperor can be replaced by an experienced king, the CEO with an experienced division manager, and so on, if necessary.

Structuring what precisely are the scale and organization of the subdomains, and governing their interactions and efforts well, is of course substantial problem in its own right. But fortunately, there is a man in the system with precisely that problem as his job description. You can't ask for much more.

The point here is that absolutism need not imply centralization, and localism need not imply anarchy. When we go to structure our domains, the hierarchical chain of command is a useful piece of social technology that has the virtues of both localism and absolutism.

Strict hierarchical chains of command are not appropriate for everything, though, and absolutism and localism apply differently in other cases. We'll look at that some other time, because that gets into a whole other set of concepts.

One of the more interesting documents I have come across recently is the 1982 Interview of Norman Dodd by Edward Griffin, where Dodd goes into his experience with the banking system around the time of the depression, and of the investigation of the big charitable Foundations by the Reece Committee.

In this interview he claims that the Foundations were essentially acting outside of constitutional means to bring about collectivist society and the merger of America with the Soviet Union, and that they were even doing this with the blessing of the White House at least at the time of the FDR regime.

Apparently Edward Griffon, the interviewer and publisher of the interview, is some kind of classical American individualist and anti-communist ideologue, so naturally the thing is a bit propaganda-ish, but at least it's not the usual propaganda. Propaganda from sincere and honest enemies of the ruling regime is often very enlightening. And as propaganda goes, it is seemingly rather sincere and honest.

Without further ado, a video of the interview and a link to the transcript:

http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/dodd/interview.htm

But the interview is in a sense about the Dodd Report itself, which is also available, and has some more direct and comprehensive information for the student of history.

The Dodd report itself and the response of the government must be understood in context: my understanding from everything I've read is that there was something of a revolution in how the elite viewed and managed society in the first half of the 20th century, which was not done with fanfare, and did not openly claim to be a revolution, nor even know itself as one. By the 40s and 50s, this change was quite advanced. Things like the Dodd report are the result of the older classical American civic tradition looking into one part of recent history and realizing that there had been something really fishy going on, that didn't fit the narrative they had been educated to believe in, and raising the alarms. The reason not many cared is that the people raising alarms were behind the times, most others already knew what had happened, or were complicit in it one way or another. It's the same deal with Senator McCarthy's anti-communism; a straggler realizing that the commies have all but taken over, and eventually being marginalized for raising such a ruckus over what essentially amounts to accepted reality.

Anyways, the the report contains some interesting pieces of evidence on the origin of the modern schooling system, the origin of modern social science, and where the statistical-data-based "empirical" approach to social science came from, and so on. It really is worth reading if you want to understand the modern regime:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-Reece-Committee-on-Foundations-1954

The Overton Window is a concept in political sociology referring to the range of acceptable opinions that can be held by respectable people.

"Respectable" of course means that the subject can be integrated with polite society. Respectability is a strong precondition on ability to have open influence in the mainstream.

Thus the Overton window becomes a mechanism of political control. If you can define the coordinating ideologies of all enemy political coalitions as outside the Overton window, then respectable society, which is your own power base, will be free of their influence, and they will be fatally marginalized. It is difficult to get your people to play along just by fiat, but it can be done. This is the basic insight behind official ideologies and religions, inquisitions, political repression of speech, and so on. It is an indispensable system of power for any ruling coalition, and is thus present in all societies.

The trouble with the Overton window as a mechanism of political control, and with politicization of speech and thought in general, is that it causes significant collateral damage on the ability of your society to think clearly. If some thoughts are unthinkable and unspeakable, and the truth happens in some case to fall outside of polite consensus, then your ruling elite and their society will run into situations they simply can't handle.

Thus a wise elite uses the politicization of speech very sparingly, only in situations where immediate political security is threatened, and they use it in concert with other destructive but effective mechanisms like martial law, state seizure of assets, and such, to quickly and decisively return to a state of political security. Once political security is restored, the lawful freedom which is necessary for clear thought and prosperity can be reinstated.

There are two things that can go wrong with this:

1. The elite is not wise, and thus does unwise and destructive things despite not needing to.

2. The elite is permanently insecure, and is thus forced to do destructive things to maintain their position.

An unwise political elite is one incapable of thinking clearly about their strategic situation, acting in concert, or sticking to a plan. One source of lack of wisdom is lack of unity and coherence of the core elite, for example if it has become too large and informal instead of small and hierarchical. Another is that thought and speech have become so weaponized that the inability to think leaks into the core elite itself. This is a root problem much less often than most people realize. It's usually downstream of insecurity:

An insecure political elite is one which has either no sufficient mechanisms of political power short of the politicization of speech and thought, or is faced by such powerful but somehow never decisively powerful enemies that they need to permanently escalate to a state of vigorous politicization of speech and thought. We can compare this state to "intellectual martial law", for its structural similarity to the physical-security equivalent.

The Overton Window and Democracy

A permanent political opposition that is powerful enough to threaten, but never powerful enough to fully overthrow, and a lack of the more efficient power mechanisms like simply criminalizing political opposition, are of course key features of our old friend Democracy.

Democracy deprives the elite of the formal power to efficiently use official propaganda, the legal system, and security forces directly against their opposition, or in service of their own power. It also makes building a viable and threatening opposition as easy as credibly promising preferential treatment to a majority of the electorate, which is almost always possible through wealth redistribution at least, and usually other ways. This creates a state of politics with at least two serious political factions in conflict, none of which can ever fully lock down their power.

When hegemony, alliance, or understanding is reached between these factions by extra-democratic means, so that there are no immediate political threats, governance can focus on order and prosperity. But the democratic system makes such situations highly unstable, and too easy for part of the elite to defect, or for some counter-elite to emerge, and so more serious conflict between the factions emerges.

In the last half century of the 20th century in America, one of the most critical extra-democratic mechanisms of stability has been hegemonic control of the intellectual landscape by an elite-managed consensus in the media companies, publishers, and universities. This made it extremely difficult for anyone to organize a truly hostile and effective counter-coalition. Having some level of security, the elite only needed speech to be politicized to a certain extent. They were of course still too insecure to be able to openly explore less fashionable ideas like segregation and real anti-communism; they had a restrictive overton window, and still had to fight to keep it. But thanks to the hegemonic control of key intellectual spaces, it was relatively easy to keep more or less all intellectuals inside safe bounds.

New Media and the Overton Bubble

But with the rise of the Internet, self-publishing, and social media, it has become much easier to build intellectual conversations outside of the overton window of the universities. This blog and all of our co-intellectuals, for example, exist mostly outside the overton window. Donald Trump, another example, used the mainstream media, but was critically able to speak directly to his fans through social media and self-publishing, and exploit weaknesses in the media's information control system, and thus operate entirely outside of their control, and thus build a real existential opposition, as small and disorganized as it is. An older example, Hitler, likewise exploited emerging technologies like cheap publication, radio, voice amplification, and motor transportation to directly educate himself, reach people, and build his coalition through new uncontrolled channels.

At the same time as this recent breakdown of hegemonic intellectual control by the elite consensus, we have seen a radicalization of that consensus, a rapid shifting of the Overton window to require affirmation of ever-newer political correctness norms, and to require disavowal of opinions widespread among the elite even 10 years ago. Despite an increase in the power and availability of "right wing" and other unorthodox ideas, folks within the Overton window are less willing to hear and understand ideas outside the mainstream than ever before in Western history. Even at the height of religious persecution of heretics, top theologians were engaging more honestly and openly with the best heresies than Harvard does today. The Overton window has become an Overton bubble, with most respectable people trapped inside of it, unable to hear or think thoughts outside it.

We believe these two trends - breakdown of the intellectual power of the Overton window, and radicalization into the Overton bubble - are related.

If we interpret the actions of the consensus inside the bubble in the context of their old hegemony, they make perfect sense. When media and universities had hegemonic control over the intellectual space, an effective, if destructive, tactic was to radicalize the thing a bit to flush out the insufficiently loyal, and then purge everyone who doesn't step in line. The heretics, thus exiled, would be doomed to wander the intellectual wasteland outside of the universities, and would not be able to organize any kind of counter-thought. Thus the Overton window occasionally shifting and expelling the "bigots" was an effective means of political control.

Today, it is no longer effective; the expelled intellectuals go on thinking and publishing and working together, they just do it over the internet in an uncontrolled fashion. It's still weaker out here for the most part than inside the bubble, but that has been rapidly changing over the past few years, and we can expect the trend to continue. It is no longer effective because exclusion from the bubble, no matter how vigorous, is no longer intellectually fatal, and is even becoming liberating.

It is no longer effective, but almost by definition, those within the Overton bubble are unable to accurately perceive or understand what is happening outside the bubble, lest they be purged. And all this analysis is quite outside the bubble, so they have a hard time realizing that Overton radicalization and expulsion is no longer a viable mechanism of political control. That combined with institutional momentum holding them in the operating pattern that has worked for them for the past few hundred years, and they keep on with business as usual, responding to dissent with radicalization and exclusion, despite its impending failure.

The Impending Crisis of Democracy

And so now we are stuck with a really nasty situation: A closed bubble of mainstream left-wing thought unwilling and incapable of engaging with anything outside itself, which is rapidly shifting so that almost all principles of good governance and civilization are outside it. And on the other side an uncontrolled free-for-all outside the bubble, not mature enough to reliably settle on truth and the principles of civilization, but quite economical enough to organize effective and fully hostile challengers to the elite consensus.

The viability of a true opposition makes democracy much more dangerous. With two viable intellectual-political coalitions with no moderating ties to each other, the low-level conflict inherent in democracy can get much closer to total war. Civilian partisans, facts, social institutions, family ties, and conceptions of morality all become legitimate targets in the struggle for power. I know people in the trenches of this conflict on both sides, and that is how they think; everything is a legitimate target. The word-of-the-year for 2016 was "post-truth" for a reason.

If this trend continues, deepening sociopolitical division and developing maturity of the conflict will lead to a crisis of democracy, when we will face a fully developed clash of civilizations within one society. This will terminate in civil war, a military coup, revolution, and/or tyranny; it is hard to predict how said conflict will go, because the sides have very different strengths. Roughly, most of the guns on one side, and most of the brains on the other. We can't tell which will be the decisive dimension of conflict, but from the perspective of civilization, either outcome looks disastrous.

If two factions won't talk, war is inevitable. If the elite mainstream won't open to dialogue and understanding with the outside, and the outside doesn't make good-faith attempts to engage with the intellectual mainstream, the intellectual-political landscape will divide, and we will get civil war.

There are three major factors of this pessimistic prediction, which, if changed, could ameliorate the situation:

1. Uncontrolled new media will make truly hostile well-developed dissent and well-organized opposition possible.

2. The information channels between the mainstream and the opposition will remain closed, so that there is no responsiveness to good points on the other side.

3. Democracy will incentivize the deepening of this conflict. Your voters can be more effectively mobilized if they are radicalized. Enemy voters are less effective if you ruthlessly attack every aspect of their coalition.

So if we avoid a crisis of democracy, it will be because new media and the opposition it enables is somehow reined in by the elite, the Overton bubble pops and earnest honest and open dialogue occurs between the factions, or because we undergo an orderly transition away from democracy, or at least away from effective democracy; it is possible to retain democracy-in-name while not having it in substance, but this is less stable than formally getting rid of it.

Each of those is various shades of massively damaging, absurdly unrealistic, and politically impossible. I find the last option, transition to post-democratic politics in which tight control over the range of acceptable opinions is no longer necessary for the elite to maintain its position, to be the most promising, especially as such control is shaping up to become some combination of impossible and destructive.

But not just any post-democratic system will do. It will have to be quite well thought-out, and executed responsibly, to work. It's almost like someone should be studying and preparing for that transition full time...

Or maybe my whole hypothesis here is wrong. I hope so, but I don't think so.

In the mean time, the least we can do is to avoid bringing the political struggle to the dinner table with our families this thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving!

Suppose you want to understand human society. You should; you're in one!

What I mean by "understanding" is a strong enough independent understanding of the dynamics of society to be able to navigate its complexities under your own power, rather than relying on the trustworthiness and functionality of the social systems and received traditions around you to guide you. This becomes increasingly important in the modern era as those systems and traditions break down.

The classic method for understanding human society, at least for great men in the areas relevant to great ambitions, has always been to read the thoughts and deeds of past great men, to understand what they did, why they did it, what kind of challenges they faced. Having a detailed corpus of such information and some creative skill, one is much better prepared to handle the complexities of the world than if one is going in blind. Detailed understanding of how great men navigated history becomes a map that can be used for navigation of your own history.

And of course this principle generalizes. To do great science, one ought to read the great scientists. To improve your local community, study the best communities and the less-than-great communities that fell into decay, and how they worked. To have a great family, study the most functional families you can find information on, and examples of them going wrong. Information isn't always easy to get, but actual example data of the kind you will want to navigate is always the best thing to train on.

If we're going to be building up a map of the challenges and solutions of history, there are a lot of methodology questions to answer before doing so. Do we simply take the mainstream historians at face-value? Do we read the contemporary sources and commentators? Do we examine purely the economic and material conditions? Do we look only at ideologies and psychological condition of the time? How much to the existing social institutions matter? Do we attribute everything to the whims of great men? Do we use common sense or mathematics, formal models, and logic? Do we read particular highly trustworthy books, or try to piece together facts from all available sources? Can we infer general principles from one case, and apply them to another? Should we focus our efforts on a deep dive of a particular person or event, build a breadth-first survey of all of history, or do deep-dive surveys of particular factors across many civilizations? Methodology for this problem is complex and not obvious.

In our studies here, we have built up a method that works for us on the kind of studies we do, though it is not fully developed and mature yet. We will describe it, but leave the justification with respect to the above questions for another time.

We call it the "Slow History Case Study Method". "Slow History" for Moldbug's hip rebranding of actually reading old books, and "case study" because we structure our inquiries as case studies into particular people, events, and institutions. Without further ado, the recipe:

• Have some purpose for which historical knowledge would be useful. For example, maybe you want to understand how serious political power transfers and institutional restructurings work, for which looking at past sovereign power transfers and organizational restructurings would be useful.

• Pick some particular event, person, or coherent trend in history for the subject of an in-depth case study. For example, if we take the above, we might want to study one of Charlemagne, Hitler, Mussolini, the early Christian church, the Meiji restoration, and other such events.

• Set out major research questions with respect to that subject. What are the key unknowns and things to look at to inform our particular goals with this? For example, how did the Meiji restoration happen? Was it done with a single unified coalition like Hitler, or was it a natural reconfiguration from many independent forces?

• Start a document, preferably a simple text file, will all your notes on the subject, and record every significant piece of evidence, and what you learned form it there.

• Trust modern historians to some extent on raw facts, but not on broader narrative. Look around Wikipedia and other useful orienting sources to piece together basic timelines and associations, but don’t just take their word for everything. Your trust for even the facts should run out when the narrative becomes politicized. When there is a lot of political ideology riding on some "facts" going one way or another, there's just too much incentive to distort information, so that information is more likely to be unreliable.

• Even though we use modern historians for basic facts, try as much as possible to drill down to the level of particular primary or contemporary sources, especially highly-talented commentators who are speaking from their own perspective about things they witness first-hand. For example, for Charlemagne, we ought to read his personal biographer, Einhard. For 19th century history, many men traveled around and left very insightful documentation.

• As you piece together your evidence, build timelines, associations, particular challenges faced and skills acquired by the people involved. The point here is to structure what you know before you are able to make key insights that make it all fall into place. This means information structure that relies on only very solid theory, like the relationship between time and causality, basic facts about how humans learn and act.

• When this interpretation-less report is filled out to a greater extent, broader narrative, key causal, and essential interpretations become viable, and you can try to build hypotheses. These are not always possible, sometimes you need more info than you have, or the situation is actually just random and chaotic, but your goal with all of this is to pull out the key elements of the story such that you can see similarities between this situation and other situations you will analyze or find yourself in later.

• Your research should then turn to focus on the validity of the hypothesis, and the questions it raises. Once the data suggests your hypothesis, validate it by gathering more data, and checking its predictions, so that you can be confident in your read, and refine it.

• At some point, you get bored, satisfied in your inquiries, or run out of time and decide to move on.

• To wrap up, produce two documents, or one big document with a summary subsection:

  1. Executive summary focusing on the key facts, key inferences, and key narratives. For publication to users of the information and the curious, omitting irrellevent details. Could be posted on a blog.

  2. Comprehensive notes that record everything you looked at and what you learned from it, for close collaborators and your future self, who may want to pick up where you left off.

Such structured inquiries will leave you with a much better understanding of the subject, and ability to speak and think fluently about it, which is key to using it later in practical contexts.

The dominance of politics over science has serious implications for future technological projects, such as artificial intelligence.

To tackle the nexus of AI and politics, let’s first review the model we have developed so far. In my article, Politics is Upstream of Science, I explored several examples of politics controlling science:

• Lysenkoism. Soviet agriculturists rejected genetics in favor of Marxist science for 30 years with the blessing of the party. Famines occurred across the Soviet Union, China, and other communist countries.

• Deutsche Physik. In Nazi Germany, a clique of scientists rejected Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum mechanics as “Jewish Physics,” and persecuted Werner Heisenberg.

• World Ice Theory (Welteislehre). German theory that ice was the building blocks of the cosmos, popularized in Nazi Germany to be contrarian towards “Jewish Physics.”

• Project Camelot. US military social science project with a $6 million budget for counterinsurgency in Latin America during the Cold War.

• POLITICA. A successor project to Project Camelot, where a computer program was used to forecast politics in Latin America based on inputs of social science data. Used in the planning of Pinochet’s coup in Chile.

In the big three 20th century regimes, politics and science were heavily entangled. In the case of Lysenkoism, Deutsche Physik, and World Ice Theory, the results were deeply insane and held back the scientific community of their respective states. In the case of Project Camelot and POLITICA, the results were more successful, but they also demonstrate how the state drives science.

Next, I took a closer look at what it means to say that politics is upstream of science. I concluded that politicians have executive authority over scientists. Politics has an intellectual influence on science, more than the other way around.

The entanglement of politics and science does not bode well for AI risk, or for risk emanating from other future technologies. A common question in AI risk research is whether AI will be “friendly” to humans, i.e. whether it is likely to behave consistently with human values.

If AI occurs, politics will make it less friendly to humans. To have friendly AI, you need friendly institutions. Human-friendly AI is not just a computer science problem, it’s a political problem.

State AI

Technology is developed by humans inside institutions governed by states. To understand the influence of politics on AI, it is necessary to imagine the relationship between states and AI projects. Typical discussions of AI focus on the relationship between the AI and the researchers, but I believe we should be examining the entire stack that creates the AI—which includes the state.

It’s likely that AI projects will be funded by states, and even if they are not, the state will be unable to stay away if the projects show any signs of progress. States cannot afford to leave potentially powerful technology on the table, especially when there are security implications. They have a mandate to monitor any dangerous technologies, and they want to stay at the cutting edge of technology themselves.

Try thinking like any of the major superpower states, and you will get a better sense of what that state’s incentives are. If other states are developing advanced technologies, then states have to participate in an arms race. An arms race is a pessimistic subject, but my analysis suggests that states have already formed opinions about the game theory of future technologies. That ship has sailed.

The United States government is looking into AI research. The US Air Force Center for Strategy and Technology (CSAT) is conducting a series of studies called Blue Horizons to identify technological security threats. It is clear that they are watching the developments in the areas of transhumanism and artificial intelligence.

A slide from the Blue Horizons 2012 briefing mentions AI:

Blue Horizons is likely only one of many government agencies that are looking into AI. Defense and intelligence agencies of other states are undoubtedly doing the same thing.

How states view AI may not be aligned with how AI researchers view AI. What AI researchers say, and what the bureaucrats hear, may be two different things. Such misalignment would be significant given that state actors have authority over AI researchers. If states are studying AI research, then AI researchers need to study states and account for their potential influence on AI safety.

In theory, it would be in the interest of states to ensure that AI is built in a friendly way, but this realization would require that state actors are rational and unified agents exercising good judgment. It would require that they understand the risks and have the incentives to care about those risks over the long-term.

To make matters more difficult, states are not always unified and may have competing entities, bureaucracies, and proxies. The state is not a single actor, but a combination of multiple actors. Different parts of the state may have different views of AI.

When science and technology are enthralled by states, and states are focused on internal or external political factional conflicts, then this upstream political influence will increase the risk of the project going wrong. If you have a case of bad government, then the project is even more at risk of going wrong.

It it likely that any significant AI research project is either funded by the state, or funded by institutions with ties to the state. If any AI research project was not involved with the state, and began to show promise, then the state would have to involve itself with that project, which would be easy, given the money and power of the state. And even if somehow an AI project was allowed to be supposedly separate from the state, it would still be immersed in a political environment of journalism and values that are influenced by the state.

All superintelligent AI will be state AI, one way or another.

Can Math Save AI?

In the AI safety world, there are various ideas about how math might ensure that an artificial intelligence is friendly to humans: schemes for aggregating or extrapolating from human values. In theory, such a solution might get around the problem of institutions and states injecting locking their own values into AI.

We already see cases of tech companies helping the state spread its values, such as Google’s Jigsaw, using algorithms to target propaganda at international and domestic populations.

Even if AI that is friendly to human values is possible, there is no guarantee that the researchers would be allowed to build it. The state might have other priorities: political priorities. Comrade, you must change your math because it seems to be reaching oppressive conclusions. Remember, Comrade, you are building a Friendly AI of Social Justice. It must be friendly to the people.

Think this can’t happen? It’s already happening. The outcome of algorithms is already attracting criticism of bias due to politics (more sober analysis here).

Mere mathematical correctness will not save an algorithm if it is deemed politically incorrect.

From the examples of Lysenkoism, Deutsche Physik, and the political bandwagon behavior of present-day US tech companies, there is a trend of ideology attempting to insert itself into technical endeavors. Ideological commissars—state-backed or opportunistic—are a risk for any high profile technology project. Any serious AI project needs to maintain its own values and ideological security, or else it will get hijacked and turned into something else.

Who programs the programmers?

AI researchers recognize the mathematical problem of keeping an AI’s goals stable, but they also face the political problem of keeping their own projects’ goals stable.

Even aside from heavy-handed ideological intervention into AI projects, there is another political problem: If politics has an intellectual influence on science, then politics has an intellectual influence on AI researchers. See the other arguments in my last article about the intellectual influence of politics on science.

You can’t keep bad politics out of AI development if it’s already on the inside.

Given that AI researchers would be trying to solve complex mathematical and philosophical problems about human values, their intellectual backgrounds and moral education would be very important. AI researchers might use human values as inputs or training data to algorithms.

We should carefully scrutinize the values and politics that AI researchers might bring into their work. As any programmer will tell you: garbage in, garbage out.

If AI researchers decide the inputs to the AI, who decides the inputs to the AI researchers? Who programs the programmers?

If Soviet AI researchers went home from work and opened up Pravda, then Pravda would have an ideological influence on Soviet AI development. If American AI researchers go home from work and open up the New York Times, then the NYT would have an ideological influence on American AI development. Ditto for Russia Today and People’s Daily.

Lenin holding Pravda

Politics is upstream of all the information sources that technically-minded people ingest, while innocently believing themselves to be “moderates” or “independent thinkers.”

If AI researchers are trying to design algorithms that solve human values, then it seems like they would need to be really, really good at moral and political philosophy to get it right. Instead, they are trapped inside the present-day Overton Window—a filter bubble of high-prestige sources at the mercy of the current political climate. The modern independent thinker is a Philistine who discards all the historical data on human values, which is exactly the opposite of what any potentially high-impact project should be doing.

Thought Experiment: Soviet AI

To understand the gravity of political influence on AI, imagine if the Soviet Union had created Sovetskiy Iskusstvennyy Intellekt. Imagine if Nazi Germany had created Nazi künstliche Intelligenz. Imagine if Maoist China had created 人们对人工智能. Would AI coming out of those political environments be remotely friendly? What math could save it?

I’m asking these questions to provoke you to think outside the media bubble of your current society and recognize the gravity of political influence on futuristic technologies. It’s easy to imagine how Soviet AI or Nazi AI would be unfriendly to humans. In this hypothetical scenario, these states, of course, would claim that their AIs were friendly.

The Politics of AI

My arguments about AI and politics also apply to other future technologies and weaponry, including dangers that we are not yet aware of. Any other advanced technology projects will be subject to political ideology and the attention of states, such as biological engineering. Politics finds its way into everything.

The general problem is that political conflicts drive political behavior that is deeply unfriendly to human welfare: weapons development and ideological warfare.

What can be done to deescalate these conflicts? The first step is to look at the history and try to put together theories about what went wrong.

In historical context, it was the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars which were responsible for modern total warfare and nationalism. They opened the door for the world wars, communism, and the Manhattan Project in the 20th century. The Cuban Missile crisis was one of the greatest existential risks that humanity has faced.

Technological progress has contributed to ideologically-motivated total warfare, but a purely technological analysis fails to capture how human agency and politics has stimulated the development of dangerous technologies. Technology doesn’t develop or use itself (yet), big red buttons don’t push themselves (yet); human agents and institutions do.

Building friendly AI is a political problem and an institutional problem, not just an algorithmic problem. If so, then we need to solve this problem on a political and institutional level.

Conclusions

• AI researchers are intellectually influenced by their present political climate
• AI researchers will be subject to the whims of states, political actors, and ideological commissars
• Present-day values are narrow, politically influenced, and unsuited for any serious project about human values
• Friendly AI and other technology can only be developed by friendly institutions

Recommendations

• Study the history of state influence on technology, particularly the case studies of Lysenkoism, Deutsche Physik, Project Camelot, and the Manhattan Project
• Study human values and morality from a historical perspective and take full advantage of all the historical data
• Identify political ideologies that could lead AI or other advanced technologies to be used in harmful ways
• Practice ideological hygiene in AI research projects
• Study the political history behind dangerous technological development

Full series

• Politics Is Upstream Of Science
• Why Is Politics Upstream Of Science?

I once worked with a doctor who spent the entire morning complaining about the cost of 30k Montessori preschool for his two kids, not to mention paying for a part-time housekeeper. Fortunately, his wife is also a doctor, so with her second income they’re making an extra $120k, post-tax $80k, post preschool $20k, post housekeeper…let’s be generous and say $10k.

Stuff is cheap, people are expensive

I’ve got a few friends who went through business school, and as one might expect, they talk about success a lot. Not just how to succeed in business, but what success even looks like in modern society. When you break it down, people seem to have very different ideas of what success means – does it mean staying cashflow positive as a single person, supporting a family at an upper-middle class level, or kicking back on your private island? But one thing that everyone agrees on is that families are expensive.

So why is that? Let’s take a look at a study breaking down the costs of raising a child in 1960 and today:

The cost of material goods - food, clothing, and transportation - have fallen precipitously, even as their quality has improved over time. But at the same time, the cost of healthcare and childcare/education have together more than quadrupled, and housing, the largest expense, has remained roughly constant.

The overall pattern here is that stuff is cheap, people are expensive. Wherever we’re buying a straightforward material good, with minimal change in social technology, things have gotten much cheaper in the past half-century. Clothing, which has almost halved in price, is probably the purest example.

But why have other categories gotten expensive? Well, healthcare is its own little bundle of brokenness, so let’s set that aside. Instead let’s look at childcare/education, which shot up, and housing, which remains puzzlingly stagnant for what should be a product of physical technology that benefits from technological advancement.

The increase in childcare expenses is largely driven by the rise of dual-earner households, childcare being part of the cost of working moms. It’s worth noting that dual-earner households also probably prevented the decline in food expenses from being as dramatic as for clothing. Here, gains from technology and globalization are partly clawed back by greater reliance on prepared foods and eating out as women no longer have as much time to cook.

Rising education expenditures are largely due to inflating college costs and increasingly mandatory college attendance, the results of higher education dysfunction and inefficient constraints on companies’ hiring practices that force them to rely on expensive credentials.

Housing costs are largely driven by zero-sum competition for good school districts and safe neighborhoods, which were in much greater supply in 1960. It’s true that houses have gotten larger, reflecting improved construction technology, so people are getting more house for their money. But part of the reason people are buying more house than they used to is that they’re using laws that indirectly discriminate against people you’d rather not have as neighbors, since the most effective ways to discriminate against bad neighbors have become infeasible. Minimum lot sizes, maximum occupancies, various environmental initiatives, and migration to exurbs all increase the amount of housing purchased. But people are buying more house not because they intrinsically like McMansions, but because what they’re buying is good neighbors and good peers for their children. Right now, McMansions are the easiest way to do that.

In an age of globalization and continued improvement in material technology, it should be cheaper than ever to support a large family. But we end up giving up these gains and then some by having to throw cash at social technology failures, in a way that extends well past Baumol’s cost disease. The escalating cost of acceptable educations and houses in acceptable neighborhoods is not a fact baked into the universe, but a tax that we pay for social dysfunction. More precisely, they represent a silent, unreported form of inflation.

The formal way to calculate inflation is to ask how much things cost, and track the prices over time. For potatoes and t-shirts, this formula works fine. By adding some mildly questionable but broadly accepted adjustments for changes in quality, you can even track the prices of cars and iPads over time. But when you’re looking at spending on social technology, this sort of robotic calculation breaks down. What people are buying with education is not a year of instruction in a Gothic building, it’s a credential that helps guarantee their employability. What people are buying with a house isn’t a pile of timber and concrete, it’s a space to live and raise children in a congenial environment. And these prices have been relentlessly increasing.

Two-income trap, one-income solution

Now, you can complain about these failures and push for political change. But it’s also entirely possible to solve them yourself by replacing these institutions at home and through local community. Parenting can replace daycare. Strong communities can replace ritzy housing. And homeschooling, either solo or in community, can replace schooling.

In practice, making this happen pretty much requires that one parent, almost always the woman, give up a traditional career track. This doesn’t preclude working. But it does mean the departing from the standard view of a life-fulfilling career that demands primary dedication and in exchange provides a narrative and social role for your life. Rather, she should treat work as a straightforward exchange of time and effort for money.

Doing this produces underappreciated benefits. For one, it can save a great deal of money; indeed, as our opening anecdote illustrates the “shadow housewife salary” can be very competitive with a market wage. One interesting thing about the housewife premium is that it scales almost linearly with class. For the average household, the shadow housewife wage is something on the order of cheap daycare, meal prep, and fixing inefficiencies at home, which can approach the median female pretax income of $40k.

As we ascend the income scale, the opportunity cost of the wife's income is higher, but so too is their spending on things that a housewife could produce herself. You expect to spend more on things like housing, schooling, and maid service, and the housewife's shadow salary increases commensurately. If the family is willing to homeschool - admittedly a large step - they could also save on the real estate premium of good school districts, which in larger cities runs to several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In many cases, too, home production is simply qualitatively superior to the market alternative. Parenting is better than daycare and local community is better than fancy neighborhoods, for the same reason that a nursing home is no substitute for a loving child taking care of her parents. And there are many other benefits besides these headline ones. Home cooking can be cheaper, healthier, and more personalized than eating out or precooked meals. Having a single person focused on making the home run smoothly can problem-solve and wring out efficiencies in ways that are simply impossible for two ego-depleted employees.

Finally, a housewife can add value simply by not having a career that needs prioritization. In an age of multiple career jumps, two earnest careerists often can’t make the geographic moves that would be ideal for their careers – if, say, he’s a coder who’s best off in the Bay Area while her law firm has a plum opening in Atlanta. The job of a housewife, by contrast, is location independent, freeing up a single-income family to go all-in on optimizing that one income.

To Dream The Impossible Dream

This isn't just an abstract theory. Indeed, there’s widespread vague desire for this sort of life – a life both more gracious and civilized, and one that empowers people to shape their home life to their liking, rather than being stuck with what life hands us as defaults. Reality show producers, fingers ever on the pulse of the collective id, have produced a proliferation of cooking shows and home makeover and fixer-upper shows. Interior decorating blogs and Pinterests abound. [1]

And it’s not only women who find a more domestically-oriented life preferable. Consider the dream of many tech workers: to have a “reasonable” ~10m exit from their company and not have to work again. When you think about it, their dreams actually have a lot in common with the stereotypical housewife. They want to flexibly spend time with their family, devote energy to their hobbies, get involved in community projects, gossip groups. Now, their hobbies might be paleo dieting rather than crochet, their community projects might be nonprofits rather than PTAs, and their gossip groups might be angel investors rather than morning powerwalkers. But the outlines remain the same.

And yet, a housewife’s lifestyle does not have to be aspirational. Martha Stewart and the Gaineses may be one-of-a-kind, but any family can choose to live in a less-sprawling house, invest in community relationships, cook fresh meals at home, and look after their own kids. But, crucially, to make this work requires an entire cultural package and the community to support it.

Consider the example of the dual-doctor couple we discussed earlier. There’s certainly no financial barrier to them reverting to one income. But nevertheless, the social barriers are high. They invested their youth in medical training, which means in practice that their social ties are primarily with other doctors, without a durable community outside the hospital. In this milieu, the wife would be taking a huge social hit upon becoming a housewife. Even though she’d have more free time to socialize, she’d miss most of the serendipitous social encounters that can be found only at work. By the same token, she doesn’t know enough people outside work to fill that gap, and her working friends, at any rate, will be too busy working to meet up frequently.

And so, boredom. Running a household may have been a full-time job in 1900, but since the advent of dishwashers and washing machines, it’s no longer a full-time job. The ‘50s housewife had PTA meetings and groups of friends to fill her time; our doctor-housewife today largely no longer has these things. Churches and meetup groups do exist, but the sorts of professionals that end up as doctors and the like are precisely the sort of people who spent their youth grinding for the MCAT and not investing in them. It’s considered far more dangerous to underinvest in your career, where your performance is measured quarterly and promotions are public, than in family, where consequences emerge years or decades later and dysfunction can be papered over for public view with a few professional Facebook photos.

Having been seeped in a culture where medical prowess (and more broadly, money and career) is the consensus status metric, it would also be a struggle for her to hold a narrative of why what she does as a housewife is meaningful. The main thing keeping this couple in a dual-income household is the shackles of social poverty, not the lure of material success.

Elizabeth Warren talks about the two income trap, the idea that the middle class is still financially struggling despite having moved from one or two. She’s right on the description. Not only has GDP not doubled from doubling the number of workers, but declining social technology has actually increased the cost of having a family. But perhaps the answer is simple – not easy, but simple – the way out of the two income trap is to return to one income families. To do that requires not only individual will but a community of families who can provide social ties, support one another, and provide an alternate narrative of the good life.

[1] While many women are indeed focused on career today, ambition is more flexible than you’d think. If the high-status thing for an adult woman was to be an excellent mother and a pillar of informal community institutions, we’d see lots of current happy career women happily pursuing a housewife’s lifestyle, just as the mainstream of Austen’s women were happily chasing pianoforte skills and marriages to wealthy men. In such a world, it’s entirely possible for a woman who legitimately loves a particular field of work (rather than the status we currently give to careers) to pursue advanced-amateur work in that area. But only the Emmy Noethers of the world would really want to do so.

What does is mean to say that “politics is upstream of science”? My last article made this case with several historical examples: Lysenkoism, Deutsche Physik, and Project Camelot. This article will take a closer look at the nexus of politics and science, and explain why politics is upstream of science.

“Upstream” implies that something flows from politics to science. That something might be authority, influence, ideology, decisions, or demand. In my model of the politics-science relationship, there are several claims:

• Politics creates a market for bad science. Politicians and regimes give explicit or implicit signals of what kind of science they will reward (or punish), and scientists create that science. Example: In the Soviet Union, the party created a demand for Marxist agriculture and denunciation towards “bourgeois science” like genetics, and Lysenko stepped up to fill this demand.

• Politicians have executive authority over scientists. Politicians hire scientists, fire scientists, and set their priorities. Example: In Nazi Germany, Heisenberg was at the mercy of Himmler when persecuted by the Deutsche Physik clique for studying Einstein’s “Jewish Physics.”

• Politics has intellectual influence on science. Scientists are ideologically influenced by the political climate of their time. Politicians only have interest in science for providing legitimacy, propaganda, or weaponry.

• Politics determines which scientifically-revealed option is chosen. Science influences politics by communicating the parameters of nature, but politics determines where societies operate within those parameters, and sometimes tries to step outside them.

We will look at some of these claims in more detail, and address some potential counterarguments.

Politicians have executive authority over scientists

Politicians and government official have executive authority over scientists because they fund them, hire them, fire them, and determine what projects they work on. Even if a scientist is working for an institution that is supposedly separate from the state, they can still be fired or persecuted for political reasons.

Scientists can get fired for getting politics wrong. No politician was ever fired for getting science wrong.

Scientists run labs, but political elites run states and journalists run websites. Which do you think is more powerful? When push comes to shove, it is the politician and the journalist who get their way—and not the scientist. Scientists are human beings, who like living in heated rooms and attending award ceremonies, and who don’t like being stuck in infamy—or stuck in a cell. If you have to change a few words in your speech for the good of your career, or tweak an algorithm a little bit, then such is life.

If you try to do apolitical science on politicized subjects in a politicized environment, then at best you might be denied funding, and at worst, you might be harassed and need to have your mother speak to someone else’s mother to go easy on you—like Heisenberg. Depends on what kind of state you are in, of course.

If scientists can convince officials of the virtues of their approach, then they might be allowed a longer leash. The executive influence of scientists on politicians isn’t completely zero, but it’s small.

Political actors can create scientific institutions, like when Charles II created the Royal Society, or the United States government created the Manhattan Project.

Political actors can also set the priorities of scientists, such as when Margaret Sanger met scientist Gregory Pincus in 1951 and gave him a grant from Planned Parenthood to work on hormonal contraceptives. The science of “the pill” was upstream of the Sexual Revolution, but Sanger’s political cause was already upstream of the technology and instigated its creation. Politics was upstream of technology which was upstream of the next generation of politics.

Politics selects within a space of options revealed by science

A potential objection to the “politics is upstream of science” thesis is that science has actually had a large influence on human politics. Look at industrialization, contraception, and the germ theory of disease. These technologies greatly changed the landscape of society.

Science changes our understanding of the natural world and brings us technology. Technology and scientific understanding influence politics. Therefore, science does have some sort of upstream influence on politics, right?

While there is an influence of science on politics, there are several reasons to still maintain that in general, the influence of politics on science is larger, especially in the short-term.

Although science does influence society through technology, I want to make a distinction between science and technology. I am particularly interested in intellectual or ideological influence. While technology changes the landscape, science rarely makes politicians change their view of the world. The main examples I can imagine of fields that intellectually influenced the thinking political actors were game theory (during the Cold War) and evolution.

Aside from technology, the primary intellectual influence of science on politics is through revealing the workings of the natural world. Although science changes our understanding of the natural world, and this background knowledge eventually filters into politics, it is political power which determines how we interact with the natural world—not scientists, and not the wishes of scientists themselves.

Nature imposes a space of possibilities. The shape of this space is communicated by science. Political power determines where humans operate in this space. In some cases, politics tries to step outside of the boundaries of this space, in which case you see events like Soviet famines under Lysenko’s agriculture.

Science communicates Nature’s boundaries, but this signal is also made very noisy by politics pressuring scientists to say what power wants to hear. The signal goes through another level of degradation when the results of science are communicated to the public through the propaganda organs.

Science reveals evolutionarily stable strategies, also known as “natural law”. Politics fights natural law kicking and screaming.

Be cautious about the notion that science and technology “cause” political change. Every political actor likes to claim that their favored policies were “inevitable,” in order to gain greater legitimacy. Technologies only come into play because human agents decide to create them or unleash them, and these decisions are influenced by politics.

The final shape of a society is dictated by politics, especially in the short-term. Thanks to survivorship bias, we never hear of all the potentially society-changing technologies that were nixed due to lack of funding or lack of support from political actors.

Even if mandatory features of reality are revealed by science and altered by technology, politics will dominate the choices that are optional, and it will try to say that some of those mandatory constraints are actually optional—or nonexistent. Political power will try to use technology to change the features of reality according to its own agenda, which is always focused on winning short-term conflicts, without caring about long-term human welfare.

Does science eventually win?

Politics has executive authority over science, it holds intellectual influence over science, and it determines where we operate within the options that Nature gives us.

Politics dominates science in the short-term, causing boom-bust cycles of bad politicized science, hopefully followed by corrections, as the next regime finds it expedient to denounce the bad science of the previous regime. After all, German physicists now follow Einstein and Russians believe in genetics again.

In some cases, scientists might be able to do serious work by staying out of sight of politicians, or they might be able to convince politicians of the merits of their work. Sometimes they eventually get the last laugh after being persecuted. Science expands our knowledge of the natural world and creates technology and weapons, which eventually influence politics. Nevertheless, in the short-term, politics dominates science, and it can cause scientific fields to get screwed up for decades, or even longer.

What about the long-term? Do scientists always win eventually? We have examples where it does, like Heisenberg, but if we only look at the success stories, we risk falling prey to survivorship bias. There could be many cases where science is choked by politics, and we never hear about them because the scientists lost.

Between the Golden Age of Greece and the Middle Ages, a lot of science was destroyed, it would be surprising if that was the last time that science was lost.

Why does politics dominate science?

So why is politics so much more powerful than science? Because political actors have power due to spending all their time pursuing it, while scientists have very little power because they are spending all their time doing actually useful things. It’s not surprising that people who focus on the social world are more powerful than people who focus on the natural world.

The priority of politics is to win short-term coalitional conflicts, and the powerful are only interested in science and technology when it helps them achieve this goal. Power depends on influencing people—not on scientific advances or technological inventions. Science and technology influence politics by creating bigger populations, bigger weapons, and bigger megaphones. But these changes are continuous and do not change the game of domestic politics in any fundamental way, and they only change international politics if there is a large military differential between countries.

Science and technology cannot be upstream of domestic politics because politics operates in a low-tech world of human wetware, a world that only changes incrementally over time. Social sciences such as psychology and sociology examine this wetware, but those fields are not any more powerful than the intuitions of socially-skilled people, so they do not cause significant political changes.

Perhaps my case in this article is a truism, that power is powerful, and short-term power is powerful in the short-term. Powerful people (like political actors) exert agency on society; powerless people (like scientists) do not. Regimes are powerful while they exist, and weak when they have fallen. Political actors tend to produce the results they are trying to produce—short-term victories, not natural law, and not the scientific advancement of humankind.

Though perhaps they are truisms, recognizing them requires abandoning romantic notions about the status of science, its accuracy in the short-term, and the feasibility of technocracy under present-day political systems. If decisions, ideology, and priorities flow downwards from politics to science, then the potential of science to improve the human condition is limited by politics.

In the relationship between science and politics, politics wears the pants.

In a previous article, I introduced the possibility that civilization might be at risk. In this essay, we will begin to examine a specific risk to civilization: human politics. We are going to put together several historical examples to show that science is downstream of politics. By “downstream,” I mean the political considerations determine the goals of science and the parameters of how it is practiced.

Case Study: Lysenkoism

Lysenko giving a speech with Stalin watching. Bourgeois science? Talk to the hand.

Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet agronomist who tried to grow peas in the winter using Marxist-Lenist theory. The Lysenko scandal is one of the biggest scientific scandals in history.

To understand how Lysenkoism happened, you need to understand the political environment for science in the Soviet Union. Here is a quote from the Lysenko Affair, the definitive book on Lysenkoism:

The specialists were warned that declarations of Bolshevik sympathy were not enough; they must prove their dedication by bringing Marxist-Leninism into their specialties. […] Now Marxist scientists were were supposed to prove their loyalty by establishing unique positions in science—by showing how different Marxist science was from that of bourgeoisie specialists. They could not do so; but they could and did add their voices to the penitent chorus of the scientific community echoing the call for a revolution in science, for an end to the ivory tower, for science that would at last be a useful and faithful servant of the toiling masses.

Lysenko delivered the new revolution in agriculture that the Party was looking for. As the son of farm peasantry, Lysenko was the perfect poster boy for the new Soviet science.

With Lysenko’s new agrobiology, the Soviet Union banned genetics as a “bourgeois pseudoscience.” This agricultural experiment went on for nearly 30 years and spread to other communist countries like China.

There was just one problem: Lysenko’s science was bunk, because it rejected Mendelian genetics. Lysenko believed he could make peas grow in winter with Lamarckian theories about environmentally acquired inheritance. He claimed that putting plants close together would result in them “cooperating,” rather than competing, rejecting the notion of “natural selection” in favor of “natural cooperation.” He promised to transmute rye into wheat.

Unfortunately for the Soviets, banning genetics didn’t stop it from being true. Mother Nature was not impressed by Marxist-Leninist politics, and the Soviet Union and China suffered massive famines that you’ve probably heard about. Lysenko’s politicized pseudoscience was a big part of the problem.

Lysenko claimed that he could make peas grow in winter, but his initiatives failed. He falsified his results, and the press trumpeted his success.

You would think that some of the other scientists would point out that Lysenko’s methods weren’t working and were complete pseudoscience. And they did, which resulted in them suffering firing, imprisonment, execution, or mysterious death. 3000 scientists suffered one of those fates for trying to get in the way of the new cooperative agriculture.

In the early 1950’s, scientific criticism started to be allowed again, and Soviet scientists started picking apart Lysenko’s ideas, though they hung on until the 1960’s.

But the story gets even weirder.

In 1989, historian Kirill Rossiyanov was reading a draft of one of Lysenko’s speeches, and he noticed some curious notes in the margin. They were written in a confident and sarcastic voice, making comments like the following:

Ha-ha-ha!!! And what about mathematics? And what about Darwinism?

Rossiyanov was eventually able to prove that the mysterious editor was Stalin himself. He summarizes Stalin’s edits:

Lysenko's original text had included an extensive section entitled "The Fundamentals of Bourgeois Biology Are False." Stalin crossed out the entire section. Next to Lysenko's remark in this section that "Each science is class oriented by its very nature," Stalin sarcastically wrote in the margin: "Ha-ha-ha!!! And what about mathematics? And what about Darwinism?" Stalin also carefully deleted the terms "bourgeois science" and "bourgeois biology", which had been used almost 20 times throughout the original text. He either excised, them, or replaced them with "reactionary" or "idealist" biology or science.

On the whole, Stalin made Lysenko's discourse sound less "political" and more "objective".

I’m not sure what is more disturbing here:

• That Stalin was editing the speech of a scientist and inserting his own ideological views
• That a political leader was try to make ideological science come off as more objective
• That Lysenkoism was too politically extreme even for Stalin
• Stalin allowed Lysenko full reign over agriculture for decades, while doubting whether Lysenko had fully justified parts of his theory (“and what about Darwinism?”)
• That the peasants’ traditional knowledge of agriculture was thrown away in favor of politics

Under Lysenkoism, agricultural science could have been used to benefit the Russian population, but instead it was completely politicized and turned into an instrument of famine and persecution. Soviet politics created a demand for Marxist science. Lysenko stepped up to supply this science, and rapidly took over his field with the help of the state. Party members had the ability to review and override the work of scientists. Dissenters were purged. Only Stalin had enough power to dissent without punishment.

Case Study: Deutche Physik and World Ice Theory

Deutsche Physik (“German Physics”) was the movement of German physicists who rejected Albert Einstein’s work as “Jewish Physics.” Deutsche Physik was also known as “Aryan Physics.” Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark led a crusade against Jewish physics in favor of their own theories, ingratiating themselves with the Nazi Party.

Stark’s writing attempted to bring Nazi identity politics into physics. Scientific American recounts:

In an article titled “National Socialism and Science”, Stark wrote in 1934 that science, like any other creative activity, “is conditioned by the spiritual and characterological endowments of its practitioners”. Jews did science differently from true Germans. Echoing Lenard’s fantasy, Stark claimed that while Aryans preferred to pursue an experimental physics rooted in tangible reality, the Jews wove webs of abstruse theory disconnected from experience. “Respect for facts and aptitude for exact observation”, he wrote, reside in the Nordic race.

Stark pandered further:

The scientist does not exist only for himself or even for his science. Rather, in his work he must serve the nation first and foremost. For these reasons, the leading scientific positions in the National Socialist state are to be occupied not by elements alien to the Volk but only by nationally conscious German men.

Unfortunately for German physics, Einstein’s physics was sound despite him being of the wrong ethnicity. By being so contrarian towards Einstein, the Deutsche Physik group pressured German science to ignore his advances, which made other scientists unhappy.

Lenard set his sights on Werner Heisenberg for teaching about relativity, quantum theory, and Einstein, labeling him a “White Jew.” Heisenberg tried to be apolitical, but his persecution continued. Eventually he surmounted Lenard’s harassment by having his own mother talk to Himmler’s mother and explain that Heisenberg was a good boy. Through this maternal intervention, Heisenberg invited an investigation into his work and loyalty, in hopes of clearing himself. Himmler investigated Heisenberg and pronounced him to be clean, forbidding further attacks against him.

Heisenberg at the blackboard.

Despite all of the obsequiousness of the Deutsche Physik clique, they never fully attained the esteem of the National Socialist party. Lenard and Stark bungled many of their political maneuvers in the complicated political environment of Nazi Germany. When they went after Heisenberg, he marshaled the support of several of Germany’s top physicists and acquired 75 signatures in his defense. Their failure to take him down revealed the weakness of their support.

While the Nazi party had encouraged Deutsche Physik, their actual policies were much more practical. Physicists also had freer reign in Germany than other types of scientists, who were restricted under Gleichschaltung, the National Socialist policy of “coordination”:

But the truth was that, while the dispute rumbled on through the late 1930s, the Nazis tightened their grip on German science regard­less. In some disciplines, such as chemistry, scientists fell into line in short order. In a few, such as anthropology and medicine, the collusion of some researchers had horrific consequences. Physics was another matter: just docile enough for its lapses, evasions and occa­sional defiance to be tolerated. The physicists were errant children: grumbling, arguing among themselves, slow to obey and somewhat lazy in their compliance, but in the final analysis obliging and dutiful enough. If they lacked ideological fervour, the Nazis were pragmatic enough to turn a blind eye.

The Nazi brass were smart enough to see that Heisenberg was doing useful work. But they still had some funny ideas about science:

When Himmler explained his decision on Heisenberg to the head of the Gestapo Reinhard Heydrich, he wrote with icy pragmatism that “I believe that Heisenberg is decent; and we cannot afford to lose this man or have him killed, since he is a relatively young man and can bring up the next generation.” Moreover, Himmler concluded with a bathetic indi­cation of his scientific ignorance, “we may be able to get this man, who is a good scientist, to cooperate with our people on the cosmic-ice theory”.

What was this “cosmic-ice theory” that Himmler was talking about? That would be Welteislehre, “World Ice Theory” (also known as Glazial-Kosmogonie, “Glacial Cosmology”), the notion that ice was the building-block of the universe. World Ice Theory was created in 1894, and it hitched itself to the NSDAP:

The third period (1931–1945) involved the adoption of the cosmic ice theory by the National Socialists and its institutionalization in their research organization Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage). The Welteislehre had already been heavily and successfully promoted as the “German antithesis” of the “Jewish” theory of relativity in the late 1920s. After Hörbiger’s death in 1931, the followers of the cosmic ice theory came to the conclusion that, given the changing political situation in Germany, aligning the theory with National Socialism would eventually lead to its acceptance.

World Ice Theory, Lysenkoism, and Deutsche Physik all share a contrarian impulse: they mainly became popular because of what they were against. They were against “bourgeois science” or “Jewish physics.” They were not for serious scientific theory, they were in favor of injecting the reigning political ideas about class or race into science. They relished the opportunity for a moral crusade.

World Ice Theory illustration

Like Deutsche Physik, Welteislehre was a political weapon passing itself off as science. Without the National Socialists, cosmic ice would have likely fallen into obscurity much sooner. And similar to Lysenkoism, we are seeing that political environments select which theories to popularize based on their needs.

The similarity between Deutsche Physik and Lysenkoism is that both involved a clique of people attempting to take over a scientific field by pandering to the ideology of the ruling party. The difference is that in the case of Lysenkoism, the ideological hijacking was complete, but in the case of Deutsche Physik, it was only partial. In both cases, dissenters were persecuted, but Heisenberg had a better fate than most of Lysenko’s critics. The damage of Deutsche Physik was less substantial, but it definitely set back German physics at the time.

In Nazi Germany, politics was upstream of science. Political considerations allowed Deutsche Physik and World Ice Theory to become popular, due to their appeal to the party. The political decisions of highly-ranked people like Himmler dictated which scientists were allowed to operate in the field. Himmler was judging the entire careers of scientists based on a very shaky understanding of science, evidence by his sympathy for Welteislehre. He got it wrong by letting Lenard and Stark operate, and he happened to get it right by letting Heisenberg operate, but it’s very easy to imagine a political leader throwing Heisenberg to the wolves.

If we extend the supply-demand model: under Lysenkoism, the state created demand for politicized science, and Lysenko created the supply. In National Socialist Germany, the state allowed multiple suppliers of science (Deutsche Physik and Heisenberg) and allowed them to compete. In both cases, the state determined the market for science.

Case Study: Project Camelot

After looking at Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, you might be tempted to believe that political domination of science is a totalitarian problem. Surely nothing like that could happen in modern, liberal, Western countries, where we never, ever persecute scientists for political reasons and where we keep identity politics out of science entirely, and we believe in genetics and evolution.

For our third example, we will move from Europe to America and discuss the strange story of Project Camelot in 1964.

What was Project Camelot? Project Camelot was the $6 million military social science project to counter Soviet influence in Latin America. Under the project, a large team of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists studied Latin America to advise the military on counterinsurgency tactics. Project Camelot was like the Manhattan Project of social science.

This org chart of Project Camelot shows who is upstream of whom

During the Cold War, Soviets were trying to start communist revolutions in Latin America. The goal of Camelot was to predict communist insurgency and to give the military recommendations on how to counteract it. Eventually, the Chilean government got wind of the project and threw a fit, so it was shut down.

The choice of the name “Project Camelot” explains a lot about the goals of the program. Solovey continues:

The project's name resonated with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' growing confidence in social engineering as the key to social harmony. 'Camelot', explained Vallance, referred to the Arthurian legend about 'the development of a stable society with domestic tranquility and peace and justice for all. This is an objective that seemed to, if we were going to have a code label, connote the right sort of things'. After Kennedy's death, 'Camelot' had also become associated with his legendary idealism and youthful vigour.

“Peace and justice for all.” And already, we are seeing the politics involved.

We have discussed the political ideology of Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany, but what about the United States? What was its ideology, and how did this ideology relate to science?

We can start to uncover the political ideology of Cold War USG through these quotes from Ellen Herman, in The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts:

Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist who had worked with Harold Lasswell at the Library of Congress during World War II, was a key figure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies, which had been founded and supported throughout the 1950s (with Ford Foundation and secret CIA funds) "to bring to bear academic research on issues of public policy." Sola Pool was probably the most enthusiastic proponent of a "humanizing" alliance between social science and government. "They [the social sciences] have the same relationship to the training of mandarins of the twentieth century that the humanities have always had to the training of mandarins in the past.... The only hope for humane government in the future is through the extensive use of the social sciences by government." Far from considering Camelot's participants to be spies, Sola Pool went so far as to accuse critics of "a kind of neo-McCarthyism."

Neither Camelot's supporters nor its detractors were politically homogeneous, and the project cannot, therefore, be easily dismissed as a perverse brainchild of rabid cold warriors. Many, perhaps even a majority, of participants were liberal anti-Communists; some were critics of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. For them, deploying the theories and techniques of behavioral science to prosecute the Cold War efficiently and nonviolently was evidence of the democratic values embedded in U.S. policy. Indeed, Camelot's critics and defenders all tended to venerate the vital and progressive role that behavioral expertise could and should play in government.

The ideology of Cold War USG could be describe as managerial, scientific, democratic, progressive bureaucracy. This bureaucracy created a ravenous demand for social science.

The government threw gigantic sums of money into social science, in conjunction with the big foundations (such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation’s Behavioral Sciences Division). Solovey calls this the “politics-patronage-social science nexus.”

The idea behind scientific government was that scientists would produce objective, neutral, empirical work under state patronage. The results of their work would inform the mandarins, so they could pursue “humane government” and “peace and justice for all.” Whatever that means.

Project Camelot attracted a large amount of debate. Detractors accused the social scientists of accepting the political premises of the state, and engaging in imperialism in other countries. Defenders argued that social science “humanize” the military. In the end, despite the project shutdown and the firestorm of controversy, the politics-patronage-social science nexus only got stronger in later decades. Similar social science projects appeared under other names.

So how did the bureaucratic patronage of Project Camelot turn out? Unfortunately, there is no good way to assess the quality of the science produced, but we can look at some of the successor projects, such as the Viet-Cong Motivation and Morale Project (VC M&M). From Herman:

VC M&M was a classic example, during the Vietnam era, of the basic axiom about bureaucratic survival and expertise that policy-makers had learned during World War II: government uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamp post, for support rather than light. Its authors' conclusions—that the enemy was near the breaking point and that heavy bombing would quickly end the conflict—told the policy-makers exactly what they wanted to hear in 1965, the precise moment of military escalation. And there is quite a bit of evidence that policy-makers were paying close attention to the findings of VC M&M, rewarding the project's researchers for their good efforts with a 100 percent increase in funding in 1966.

The light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel mentality would, of course, appear tragically misguided later on. One of the project's own staff members would go so far as to call it "a whitewash of genocide." In the aftermath of Camelot, however, the RAND studies illustrated, once again, how politically useful psychological intelligence was to the policy-making process, even when it was entirely wrong.

In this program, it seems that the social scientists produced the conclusion that the government wanted, and the results were bad: Operation Rolling Thunder failed to break the Viet-Cong.

For another example of a successor project to Camelot, there is POLITICA, the computer simulation game that was used in planning Pinochet’s coup in Chile:

Ironically, Camelot's spirit was destined to have its most lethal reincarnation in Chile, the country where it had been exposed, but which had never been one of the intended targets of research. In 1973, almost a decade after Camelot was canceled, its mark could be seen in the secret, CIA-sponsored coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

The connection came through Abt Associates, a research organization located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose president, Clark Abt, had been one of Camelot's consultants. In 1965 the DOD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) contracted with Abt to design a computer simulation game to be used for monitoring internal war in Latin America. Except for the addition of sophisticated computer technology, Camelot's goal remained intact. Dubbed Politica, the game was first loaded with data about hundreds of social psychological variables in a given country: degree of group cohesiveness, levels of self-esteem, attitudes toward authority, and so on. Then it would "highlight those variables decisive for the description, indication, prediction, and control of internal revolutionary conflict."

In the case of Chile, according to Daniel Del Solar, one of Politica's inventors, the game's results eventually gave the green light to policy-makers who favored murdering Allende in the plan to topple Chile's leftist government. Politica had predicted that Chile would remain stable even after a military takeover and the president's death.

Yes, the United States government tried to build a military proto-AI informed by social science. And they called it the most blatant name possible: “POLITICA.” And it was actually used for military decisions about toppling regimes in other countries.

It turned out that POLITICA reached the correct conclusion in this case: The coup did happen, and Allende did die (by suicide), and Chile did remain stable after Allende's death. Yet it's unclear whether a 1970s-era computer program with social science variables was actually any good, or whether it was just used to launder an analysis coming from human judgment.

Science is downstream of politics

Now that we have examined several examples of the politics-science nexus in several 20th century states, we have a better understanding of the relationships between politics and science. The clear conclusion is that politics and science were heavily entangled in 20th century states. Nazi Germany had Gleichschaltung (coordination), and Cold War America had the “politics-patronage-social science nexus.”

Under Soviet communism and National Socialism, the state perverted science entirely and used it as a tool of political propaganda and identity politics. The government of the United States was much more secure, so the state didn’t need to use science as an internal propaganda weapon. Instead, science became a tool of civilian and military bureaucrats seeking “peace and justice” on a geopolitical game board. Rather than science being used to justify the state, science was used to justify particular policies of the state.

In all three of these cases, it was the state that defined the parameters of science. It was the state that controls the funding and livelihood of scientists. It was the state that defined the goals that scientists were working towards, even in the United States, where scientists were on a longer leash.

In all three cases, the state defined the ideological environment for science, and then scientists jockeyed for power and funding within that environment. In the case of Lysenkoism and Deutsche Physik, cliques of scientists took over their entire field by delivering a brand of science that the party wanted to hear.

In the United States, social scientists figured out that the government wanted to know how science could be used for military projects and social policy, and they delivered this behavioral science. The result was the accelerating gravy train of the politics-patronage-social science nexus, which continues today.

The thesis I am advancing is that science is “downstream” of politics. But do we see examples where the science influenced the politics? For example, the proponents of World Ice Theory tried to influence the National Socialists, and many of the social scientists were trying to “humanize” the military and the government. Isn’t this a case of science being upstream of politics? No, it’s a case of already-politicized sciences negotiating with the politics of the state.

There are always lots of theories going on at any given time. The question is: which theories and technologies get selected for funding by the state? The politically useful ones.

These are just a few examples of the politicization of science, and we could find many more in the present-day, particularly in modern social science. Politics is upstream of science.

The next article in this series will make the case that politics is upstream of AI research.

German WWII Uranium

The other day some terrorist in France ran a trailer truck through a crowd for a mile or so, killing about 80 people. That's pretty big, not necessarily involving any plans, nothing illegal, and no weapons. (Though in reality a larger attack was planned and he had weapons in the truck). Basically, if people really want to kill each other, they can.

This reminds me of the old constraint on science fiction universes: "Any interesting starship drive is also a weapon of mass destruction". Thus, if your interstellar civilization is going to work and be at all peaceful, it better have some way of dealing with this. Looks like it turns out we don't need to imagine starships, or even airplanes, for this to be a problem. In the hands of sufficiently motivated terrorists, everyday tools like trucks become weapons of mass killing. There are a few approaches to the problem:

1. Ban or restrict any tool that can be used as a weapon. This is infeasible in the case of trucks.

2. Strongly vet and restrict who can get their hands on powerful tools, like trucks. This can be a real pain and damper on economic activity if the licensing gets too fine-grained, and doesn't really work in the case where you have mixed licensed and unlicensed actors running around in the same space, and want to be able to leave powerful equipment lying around for convenience.

3. Strongly vet people who are to be allowed in your society to make sure they have good intentions, and make sure there are no all-out social conflicts that might drive someone to crash a truck into a crowd at high speed. This solution works best, but can be harder to achieve. If you have existing social conflicts, they can prevent this solution.

4. Take an extremely harsh group-retaliatory approach to large attacks so that no social faction has incentive to act out.

5. Surrender to the coming darkness, and watch your people die.

Every realistic society must use some combination of these, depending on the particular costs and benefits in individual cases. This of course requires a wise and powerful government.

1 (ban) and 2 (licensing) are pretty unrealistic in this case. Especially as a solution to 2, which involves answering the question "who should not be allowed to drive a truck?", can be much better applied to 3 or 4.

The answer of course, is that the West is in a state of insecurity, trending to war, with anti-western Islamic State terrorists. This problem faction needs to be physically removed and restricted from any area that requires high general trust, like any Western country, or otherwise neutralized. To do so reliably however, the French would also have to apply these measures to anyone who thinks anything like them, because you really can't easily tell who is and is not an IS soldier. To do that, the French need to declare a state of emergency, institute martial law, and begin processing people for deportation. And to do that, the French need to defeat and replace the local branch of the international community that refuses to do anything and is bent on flooding Western countries with hostile foreigners and running interference for their acts of war. And to do that, the French need to find within themselves the will to act in self-defense. This has all been said before, the last time this happened. It will continue to be said again, because the French will continue to choose option 5 on the mistaken belief that predators will stop attacking if you aren't aggressive.

But we digress. The point here is that no amount of restriction of tools can ultimately prevent social chaos and determined enemies from causing trouble. It can certainly help, especially with the most dangerous tools, but when even transportation vehicles become instruments of war, the only robust path to a peaceful society free of hatred, is to actually win, and then enact harsher suppression of social conflict, harsher controls on social ideology, harsher restriction of who can be a part of society, and social and political systems in which, unlike in our own, terrorism is not a viable political strategy.

When we think about matters relating to the operation of society - what is right and wrong, how society works, what we should do to improve our communities - we tend to think moralistically, and get very passionate about it.

This is fine; the strong feelings of moral right and wrong, when most people agree on them, are the psychological correlates and mechanisms of our ways of regulating each other's behavior so that we can cooperate. These are a necessary and healthy part of society. They are the motivating force behind any crusade for a better society.

However, they are not sufficient; they can be wrong. Our social technology, like any other technology, can be of degraded quality, or simply not as good as it could be. We are not blessed by default with correct models of our complex social world; we have to learn them the hard way. Worse, our understanding and our moral norms may even be deliberately distorted away from functionality and correctness by powerful political interests who want us to accept or take part in some tyranny that serves their own interests; they fund propaganda and intellectual work to spread and justify the moral framework they want us to have, and we grow up in that framework, internalizing it to the point of being indistinguishable from obvious intuition. So sometimes we can't trust our feelings of moral imperative.

For the everyday, we are mostly just interested in getting along with others, which mostly means following and enforcing the social rules that already exist, as implied in our and our acquaintances' moral intuitions. But even here, prudence occasionally means reflecting on what the rules ought to be, or whether some particular intuition serves our own community or is a weapon in someone else's political games.

For those of us who think bigger, who want to really understand and improve the society around us, this ability to reflect on social matters becomes paramount. We cannot understand and improve society if we cannot even temporarily step outside of our own active participation in it. Imagine trying to service or even understand an internal combustion engine while it is still running. At best you get burned, at worst, you crush your hand and wreck the engine. In neither case do you learn as much as you could if you turned it off and let it cool down first. Your moral judgement works the same way; it is the operation of a complex machine that cannot be serviced while running.

Nearly four years ago now, when I, Harold, Anton and some other friends were just starting out together on our journey to understand and debug our society, we had something like this intuition. But Anton didn't let it stay implied, and launched our first blog with these words:

This is a different world you are walking into, different norms shall apply, unspoken assumptions may be violated. The debilitating morality signaling spirals created by merely denouncing those to the right will be guarded against.

Taken as an imperative about how to approach the problem of sociology, this exhortation served me well when first exploring the work of others who were further along the same track of investigation. I remember flinching away from obvious evil in a particular body of work, catching myself with the above words, and turning that flinch into dispassionate curiosity.

I'm glad I did, because I later came to respect the author of that "evil" body of work as one of the most moral and useful and correct thinkers currently working the field. This has happened over and over; the instinct to denounce or fear replaced by reasoned consideration, replaced by insight and a stronger model of the world.

Do I always come to agree with distasteful ideas? Of course not. Sometimes apparent evil is simply evil, and an accurate comprehension just reveals the full depth of its depravity and the exact nature of its participation in the dark crusade against life. But often we are wrong, and have the opportunity to change for the better. Certainly I have very different ideas about what is right and wrong than I did when I knew much less about the nature of the world. That would not have been possible without what I now call the fundamental skill of sociology:

Don't react moralistically to ideas about society. Don't denounce or disagree or ignore just because something is distasteful. Clarify the logic for yourself, and see if it is correct. If it is incorrect, figure out why it is incorrect. If it is immoral, figure out in detail how it is immoral. If you have a negative psychological reaction to things, that only retards your own ability to see the truth.

Of course this is hard, but I don't believe it is possible to proceed without it.

Being a human is great, except that your lifespan is so short. Just as you start figuring things out, you die. Vampires don’t have this problem.

Let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine a cravat-wearing vampire Count who is one thousand years old. Unlike some vampires, who sleep for centuries, our vampire has been awake the entire time. He has been following what the humans have been doing. As an aristocrat, he appears in high society and keeps up-to-date with philosophy, politics, and current events.

The vampire is immensely knowledgeable. He has been participating in intellectual salons to find victims. He keeps a library of old books in his castle, and he reads avidly in between meals. After centuries of experience interacting with his prey, he has impeccable knowledge of human psychology.

The vampire is old, but he updates his beliefs over time. The vampire would believe in heliocentrism, general relativity, and the germ theory of disease. He would abandon belief in phlogiston. He would accept that the humans have made pretty good progress in the hard sciences.

While the vampire would be impressed with human technological progress, it’s likely that modern moral, social, and political progress would leave the vampire chuckling in the halls of his castle.

Of course, the vampire has a very different morality than humans do, so you wouldn’t want to ask a vampire for moral or political advice. But he does understand human psychology and politics very well, after observing humans for hundreds of years. So we could ask what the vampire would think that humans should do according to their own values, if only they were competent enough to do so.

Epistemology with the vampire

Humans don’t have very much life experience until they get old, at which point everyone decides that they are too cranky to pay attention to.

A thousand-year-old vampire has a lot of life experience (if you can call a vampire’s existence “life”). The vampire has at least ten times more than the average human.

Why is experience so valuable? One possibility is that the more experience you have, the time you have to fix mistakes in your knowledge, like when the vampire abandoned his belief in geocentrism and started believing in heliocentrism because the evidence was persuasive.

Another reason that experience is valuable is that it offers you a sensible set of starting beliefs, background assumptions, or hunches.

A big problem in philosophy is figuring out what beliefs to start out with in the first place. In Bayesian inference, you start with some initial beliefs (called “Bayesian priors” or just “priors”), and then you “update” them as you receive new evidence.

Where do prior beliefs come from? Human philosopher Patrick Suppes has some intriguing ideas:

So, as we turn from truth to the estimation of probabilities, especially Bayesian priors, there are a number of observations with which I want to begin. The first is that such priors are based on a variety of experience, not on the sharp outcomes of well-planned experiments. [...] It is our prior knowledge or experience—and I emphasize experience rather than knowledge, because much of this experience is not consciously articulated—that marks the difference between amateur experimenters and experienced ones. Imagine turning an amateur at loose in a modern physics lab­oratory. In almost any aspect of experiment now conducted in physics, from quantum entanglement to superconductivity, prior experience is the key to success. This kind of experience is gained from the kind of apprenticeship that is very similar to what had been going on for thousands of years in any specialized activity to be found in ancient China, ancient Egypt or ancient Mesopotamia. Put another way, this kind of prior experience is necessary in every aspect of ordinary affairs requiring some kind of learned competence, from driving a car to cooking a decent meal.

This quote says that experience trumps knowledge and experiments. Experience is accumulated over thousands of years. Starting beliefs should be based on prior experience. The amateur in a physics lab thought experiment shows that prior experience matters. You will bungle your investigations if you start out clueless, even if you are going through the motions of doing “science.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could talk to someone with thousands of years of experience who could set us straight?

With a thousand years of experience, the vampire is starting to look vastly ahead of humans. We will now underscore some of the ways that the puny humans fall short.

Social science with the vampire

The vampire is incredibly knowledgeable about humans. He gets his knowledge about humans from centuries of experience interacting with them and observing them. Modern humans get their knowledge of humans from their limited experience, from the social sciences of psychology and sociology. The vampire’s knowledge of humans is far superior to our social science. He knows us better than we know ourselves.

Who do you think will make more accurate predictions about humans: a 25-year-old sociology/psychology graduate student who has read a ton of studies, or a thousand-year-old vampire? If you agree with me that the vampire would eat the graduate student alive, then we can conclude that sufficient experience with people can overpower social science.

When the Count turns 1000, a study comes out that contradicts his understanding of human nature. This study has a sample of a couple hundred college students, a p-value of 0.05, it was conducted by a professor who proudly claims a political cause, and the results just happen to line up with that cause. Would the vampire throw out his 999 years of experience and believe this study?

No, he would stick with his prior beliefs and laugh at the puny humans. College students are only good for dessert, not for generating knowledge.

Typical social science studies, which nowadays pass for serious evidence, are immensely weak in comparison to knowledge accumulated over human history. There are probably very few studies that are strong enough to contradict a vampire’s beliefs. If modern people disagree with the vampire about human nature, it’s most likely that the vampire knows what he is talking about and the humans are just wrong.

Politics with the vampire

The problem with being a puny human is that you are automatically a presentist. You are trapped in the conventional wisdom of the Now. Unlike a vampire, you have a very limited amount of time to come to your own conclusions. The vampire has centuries to form his own conclusions.

Humans are always in the grip of some sort of moral crusade or political fad. States and religions rise and fall. But the vampire sits in his castle library, immune to the biasing effects of human politics, mass media, mass education, and clickbait.

Humans have to believe in all sorts of nonsense because it's politically popular or even socially obligatory. The vampire can’t be purged from society or fired from his job for having unpopular opinions. Nobody can fire him from being a vampire.

The vampire is actually an independent thinker. You are not.

Even worse, modern humans are Philistines. They believe the conventional wisdom of the present, looking disdainfully back on the past as an age of darkness.

Why should we look into the past for knowledge, instead of taking our priors from the present? Haven’t smart people in universities already assimilated the past and told us what we need to learn from it? If so, then the vampire wouldn’t have any advantage in wisdom over college graduate students, but I think we already feel that this isn’t the case.

There are good reasons to believe that the modern conventional wisdom has not adequately digested the past. For one example, human societies are constantly undergoing memory wipes due to political and religious disputes and generational fashions. The winners write the history books. This trend is getting especially bad in the age of mass education and mass media.

Humans are constantly destroying their own knowledge. Either they burn each others’ libraries in war, or they have revolutions where they burn their own libraries. Regularly, human politicians come up with schemes like The New Soviet Man and the The Cultural Revolution where they sweep away a lot of their culture’s past knowledge to solidify a particular regime in the present.

Some states broke from the past so completely that they reset their calendars. The French Revolutionaries declared a Year I. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia decided that even allowing one year of history was too much, and they declared a Year Zero.

A calendar reset is a state symbolically telling their citizens to throw away their entire intellectual history and traditions. If states are willing to forcibly memory-wipe their citizens of culture and tradition, then politics is definitely capable of biasing human knowledge in subtler ways.

Human societies that lose connection with the past are like the protagonist of the movie Memento, whose amnesia causes him to forgot what just happened.

The vampire can’t get brainwashed by human political fads, because he is around the entire time. Unlike humans, he can’t have his entire belief system replaced in between generations. It doesn’t matter that humans keep rewriting their history books; he keeps a fully stocked library of old books in his castle. Nobody can pull a fast one on him.

Approximating the vampire

Unfortunately, we can’t ask a vampire what to believe, because vampires don’t exist—and they are evil.

How can we, with our puny human brains and minuscule lifespans, ever hope to compete with a vampire? Luckily, we are not totally lost. Humans actually have their own sources of vampire-grade knowledge.

Although humans can’t live as long as a vampire, they can still pass down knowledge to the next generation through records, books, art, culture, and traditions. This intergenerational knowledge serves as the starting point for the next generation. We stand on the puny shoulders of the puny humans who came before us. Tradition is Bayesian.

The best approximation for the vampire’s perspective would be to look in the books of the most learned humans of the past.

For all their faults, for all their biases and heuristics, humans went centuries without needing to inflict 5-point Likert scales on college students, and it didn’t stop them from building the entire modern world.

Exercises with the vampire

At this point you might be persuaded that humans are not making the most of their historical experience, and that there is probably something useful from the past that you could learn. You might be wondering how you can think more like a wise, thousand-year-old vampire and less like a puny, Philistine human.

Here are some exercises:

• Imagine digging up a historical figure you admire, getting them up to speed on everything that’s happened since they died, and then seeing what they think about the questions you are mulling over.

• When someone is slinging study in your direction, consider where it would persuade a thousand-year-old vampire to shift his beliefs. If not, then perhaps it shouldn’t persuade you, either.

• Read old books, and talk to your parents and older people. They are your lifeline to the past.

• Take what the wisest humans believed at an earlier point in time, and make those beliefs your priors. Next, mentally replay everything that has been learned since then, updating as you go. See if you get the same answers as the modern consensus, or if you get different answers.

If you base your prior beliefs on the current conventional wisdom and work backwards, then you end up extremely biased towards the present and you throw out a lot of historical knowledge. Being extremely biased towards the present consensus is a bad bet, given all the knowledge that humans have destroyed and given all the times in history where present consensus has been wrong.

If history was a tape, playing it forwards would look very different from playing it backwards.

What happens if you start with past beliefs that were wrong? Well, if the past was wrong, then you should see centuries of damning evidence that overwhelm it as you move forward through time, like with phlogiston and geocentrism. If a past belief is wrong, then you should be able to fix the mistake by playing history forwards, watch the belief get debunked, and then adopt the new consensus.

But what if you choose a past belief that the present consensus says is wrong, but when you look back through history, you can’t find where it was supposedly slain?

Then congratulations, you’ve found something very interesting. Either the present consensus is wrong, or the issue is still an open question. We will look at some examples in the future.

This methodology is the opposite of what you’ve probably been taught: that the bad old days were full of ignorance, that professors running lab experiments are the pinnacle of knowledge, that traditions are outdated, that religious belief systems are irrelevant, and that your parents don’t know anything.

When you take the accumulated experience of human history as your starting point, then you get some pretty interesting results. Next time you encounter a confusing question, you now have the ability to think like a thousand-year-old vampire, and you can see what new ideas you come up with.

Now put on your cravat and crack open a dusty old book.

The other day I was trying to break down some of our theories of power interactions within empires to simpler and more mechanical dynamics that would be easier to study, and I realized I was implicitly relying on a model of property and property rights. So let's get clear on what property is, and how it works.

The division of types of property I came up with are these:

• Primary Property is independently secured by its owner. You own your wallet in that you keep it in your pocket, and it is difficult for me to take it from you without defeating you in a contest of force. Similarly, the Russian State owns a large chunk of Eurasia simply because they are militarily capable of repelling most invaders. Similarly, some companies are owned not just by legal contrivance, but because the owner has detailed knowledge of the domain and the personal loyalty of his coworkers such that it would be difficult or impossible to replace him without his cooperation. Similarly, if I have a skill, or only I know where something is, these things are primary property.

• Consensus Property is secured by general agreement among local forces about who owns what. For example, if I leave my laptop on the table while I go order a sandwich from the counter, and you try to steal it, the other people sitting around may notice that it is not yours, and intervene on my behalf. Also, if we are longtime friends, we can freely leave our stuff with each other because any defection on the implied agreement to give it back would result in a costly termination of the friendship. Also, if I try to take your wallet and you punch me, no one will question your use of force, because you were obviously in the right.

• Secondary Property is dependently secured by the grace of some higher power. For example, if you take my wallet at gunpoint in a cafe, you may be able to overpower me and the other patrons, but you will have a harder time with the police. If my neighborhood organizes a mob to go smash up and loot your neighborhood, the military will come and smash me up on your behalf.

Harsh, but there it is. These are the forces that hold society together. I notice while writing the above that the reliability of Consensus and Secondary property are getting awfully questionable in some circumstances these days. The theoretical possibility of law remains, though, and that is what we are studying.

The types of property are not mutually exclusive. They usually complement each other: My wallet is in my physical possession protected by my own potential for force. Failing that, it is protected by general agreement to respect each other's property and apply the common potential for force against defectors. Failing that, we can always call the police and the military. But they are not always in sync. Sometimes the local authorities will act against consensus, or some force will bend the consensus out of equilibrium.

These probably also exist on a spectrum, rather than being hard categories. The degree to which I securely own my skills and relationships is different from the degree to which I own my wallet - it is physically possible for you to steal the latter from me - but I've placed them in the same category. This kind of thing makes me suspect the model is a bit rough around the edges, and needs work. It seems a good start, though.

Also, credit where it's due, the above is mostly a mashup and restatement of James Donald's account of natural law, and Mencius Moldbug's account of sovereign property. Perhaps they got it from somewhere else. Do let us know if there are other good resources on these ideas.

I mentioned "law". Property rights are a type of law. In The Law of the Jungle, we used the poem as a jumping off point to develop a theory of law that proposed three different types of Law:

• The Laws of Reality, which are enforced by the nature of the world, and not by social consensus or authority.

• The Laws of Society, which are enforced by our peers in a distributed manner, parts of which are known variously as social norms, natural law, culture, and custom, representing or attempting to approximate a peer-enforceable game-theoretic cooperative near-equilibrium between multiple self-interested agents.

• The Laws of Authority, imposed by the local dominant power to steer the behavior of its subjects in ways that are good for the asset-value of the whole. In particular, to conduct the whole in accordance with the laws of reality.

Notice the parallel with the types of property: We have Primary Property, which is the simple reality of who has and can themselves defend what; Consensus Property, which is very obviously enforced by the laws of society; and Secondary Property, which is enforced by authority.

I wasn't thinking of my attempt to understand property rights when I came up with the three-part theory of law, and I wasn't thinking of the theory of law when I came up with the three types of property, but they fit together nicely. That they both make sense on their own, and also fit together is a good sign that these may actually be useful ways of carving up reality, rather than just crackpot theories.

Rudyard Kipling writes, in the second jungle book:

Just to give you an idea of the immense variety of the Jungle Law, I have translated into verse (Baloo always recited them in a sort of sing-song) a few of the laws that apply to the wolves. There are, of course, hundreds and hundreds more, but these will do for specimens of the simpler rulings:

Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep.

The Jackal may follow the Tiger, but, Cub, when thy whiskers are grown,
Remember the Wolf is a hunter—go forth and get food of thine own.

Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle—the Tiger, the Panther, the Bear;
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar in his lair.

When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken—it may be fair words shall prevail.

When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be diminished by war.

The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, and where he has made him his home,
Not even the Head Wolf may enter, not even the Council may come.

The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, but where he has digged it too plain,
The Council shall send him a message, and so he shall change it again.

If ye kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the woods with your bay,
Lest ye frighten the deer from the crops, and the brothers go empty away.

Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man.

If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the head and the hide.

The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must eat where it lies;
And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or he dies.

The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may do what he will,
But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat of that Kill.

Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his Pack he may claim
Full-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may refuse him the same.

Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her year she may claim
One haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may deny her the same.

Cave-Right is the right of the Father—to hunt by himself for his own:
He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the Council alone.

Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head Wolf is Law.

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!

The Law of the Jungle as Allegory

I'm inclined to think that the "Law of the Jungle" is not a fictional work about the laws of beasts, but an allegorical work about the laws of men. This is not a particularly strained interpretation, of course, but let's analyze it through that lens to make it clear:

First and foremost, the Law of the Jungle described by Kipling (via Baloo) is imposed upon the Jungle People from the outside, by reality. It is the basic rules that must be observed on pain of automatic death or injury:

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep.

This is the most obvious instance of the non-social Laws of Reality in the poem, though all the laws mentioned have aspects of being imposed by reality.

The equivalent for man is "Dress well and keep yourself groomed, and don't step in front of a bus". Nobody has to agree that these are good ideas for them to be good ideas; the structure of reality and of social interaction imposes them upon us.

Second, the Law is social protocol. It says who is right in disputes, and it says how to behave in social settings. It is the agreed-on social reality of right and wrong. But though it requires agreement, it's not a purely social construct; it also has to be correct. For example:

When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken—it may be fair words shall prevail.

If everyone agrees on this rule, it works. If they don't all agree, lots of wolves get killed or injured in the fight. If they think it's just about the agreement, and agree on something else, reality probably has a nasty surprise for them. This example is obvious, but many other social rules are less obviously constrained by reality, while still being so just as much.

Another example of the law-as-social-agreement-on-reality thing is James Donald's account of Natural Law:

Natural law has objective, external existence. It follows from the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) for the use of force that is natural for humans and similar animals. The ability to make moral judgments, the capacity to know good and evil, has immediate evolutionary benefits: just as the capacity to perceive three dimensionally tells me when I am standing on the edge of a cliff, so the capacity to know good and evil tells me if my companions are liable to cut my throat. It evolved in the same way, for the same straightforward and uncomplicated reasons, as our ability to throw rocks accurately.

...

Natural law is, or follows from, an [Evolutionary Stable Strategy] for the use of force: Conduct which violates natural law is conduct such that, if a man were to use individual unorganized violence to prevent such conduct, or, in the absence of orderly society, use individual unorganized violence to punish such conduct, then such violence would not indicate that the person using such violence, (violence in accord with natural law) is a danger to a reasonable man. This definition is equivalent to the definition that comes from the game theory of iterated three or more player non zero sum games, applied to evolutionary theory. The idea of law, of actions being lawful or unlawful, has the emotional significance that it does have, because this ESS for the use of force is part of our nature.

In other words, Law is a real beneficial equilibrium of behavior. What James Donald does not mention, but which ought to be understood, is that the smooth operation and application of the law depends on common knowledge of the law. If people disagree about whether some conduct is lawful, or don't understand why it is ok to initiate violence against law-breakers, society cannot work as smoothly.

Thirdly and lastly, Law is imposed by authority:

Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head Wolf is Law.

Even this is more of a social rule to obey authority than it is an example of centralized enforcement. Kipling leaves out explicit mention of the fact that law is usually supplemented by broadcast and imposition by a central power, because it is such an obvious fact of modern life, during his time and ours. But this may be just because the theory of centralized law is not needed by the rank and file of the pack, only its application for them, obedience:

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!

I believe that with this poem, and the related thread running throughout the Jungle Book, Kipling was drawing the reader's attention back to the socially decentralized and reality-imposed essential core of law, because modern men are in such danger of forgetting it. Certainly the philosophical themes are too well-developed, and too consistent with reasonable but uncommon theory of law, to be just backdrop for a children's story about talking animals.

Laws of Reality, Society, and Authority

Let us then extract and repeat the understanding of the nature of law which is implicit in the Jungle Book, and clarify and extend it to a fuller theory of law as it applies to humans:

First and foremost, there are the Laws of Reality, imposed on the individual and on the group by God or Nature, on automatic pain of death or harm. If you fail to take your own side in the competition for resources, you're going to have a bad time. If you get between a mother Bear and her cub, you're going to have a bad time. If you leave your workspace messy, you're going to have a bad time. If your group fails to stay organized and coherent in a conflict, you're going to have a bad time. If your epistemology denies that the pattern of light refracting onto your retina is strong evidence of Shere Khan the tiger... Etc. There is no arguing with or changing these rules, only obeying them or insulating yourself from them.

Second we have the Laws of Society, common understanding of which enables smooth interaction between self-interested agents if they can mostly agree. (The self interest being imposed by reality, as the non-self-interested are quickly eaten.) Examples of this are my rules for brotherhood, most social norms, and classic distributed natural law as told above by James Donald. The key to social law is that defectors can be excluded or defeated by volunteers at relatively low cost, a supermajority finds the terms beneficial or acceptable, and it is easy to agree about who has defected. Social law does not need to be explicit to work; it can work nearly as well when everyone has only an implicit or emotional understanding.

Third we have the Laws of Authority, which are imposed in an empire by agent(s) in solid control of that empire. Why?

1. The Laws of Reality are imposed upon the empire by Nature and/or God.

2. The owner(s) of the empire extract benefit from the health of their empire, which is an asset.

3. The owners have the power to impose rule that changes the overall behavior or evolution of the empire.

4. (1, 2) They are thus interested in steering their empire towards compliance with the Laws of Reality.

5. (3, 4) Being both able and willing, the owners of an empire impose internal Laws of Authority that are a reflection of the external Laws of Reality that focuses their wrath preemptively at the site of dysfunction.

Thus we have our Laws of Authority. For concrete example, there is nothing in the Law of Reality or Society that stops me from ganging up with my toughest buddies to raid a neighboring people across the whale-road. Indeed, it is the historical norm for my people. But once the empire is secured and the subjugated clans yield and begin to pay tribute, such behavior between subordinate clans within the empire brings disorder and loss upon the whole. Thus the owner-king prohibits it for the good of the whole, the good of the whole being the good of the owner-king.

I believe all of ordered law derives from these three sources.

We are accustomed in modern life to think of law as arbitrary imposition from on high, but Kipling reminds us that law is also social and eternal, empowering us to understand and apply it on the local level within our social communities. Even the theory of the Laws of Authority provides a basis for understanding and engineering many of the things we might want to do with local leadership.