And that’s when I realized that nobody goes to Methodist heaven.

Fear not, we intend to be equal-opportunity here! In fact, let’s go nondemoninational and talk about megachurches, which have increasingly become a fixture of the church ecosystem as smaller churches hollow out [1]. These churches can hail from any denomination, or often none at all. There are many reasons for their growth. They’re large enough that you can connect with lots of people in your demographic, which can be a big draw. They’re also often well-run in general. Both the business functions and the production aspect of worship services scale really well, and so the few megachurches I’ve been to have all had excellent sound systems, audiovisual aids, and graphic design. This model has been successful enough that decent-sized cities often have multiple competing megachurches, each with its own spread of services, demographics…and message.

And therein lies the problem. Different amenities are just noise – interchangeable nice-to-haves that don’t much relate to the content of the religion. I’d expect mega-mosques and mega-pagodas in the same city to have similar offerings. Market forces will lead similar groups to trend towards similar practices – towards, say, deciding that having a daycare during services is worthwhile but doing Bingo night doesn’t bring in enough new parishioners to make it worth the cost.

But if market forces can mold churches towards particular amenities, they can mold teaching as well. If people are deciding between different churches, all things being equal they’ll look for a church whose preaching resonates with them, one that they find congenial. In other words, pap. [2]

It’s important to realize that none of this necessarily involves any ill will on anyone’s part. Normal devout people can disagree in all good faith. The problem lies in having a selection mechanism over this normal range of variation in beliefs. If the market rewards populist preaching with bigger congregations, greater revenues, and heightened influence, then it will be the preachers who preach the popular fare – again, in all good faith – who get outsized influence over the content of the religion. From the next generation, raised with the popular interpretation of the religion, the most palatable preachers among them gets additional weight. Round and round we go, and at the other end of this process: market-optimized pap. And because this process doesn’t require ill intent, “examine in your conscience whether it’s true” and other ways to internally guard against mendacity won’t work. As long as people do vary, there’s enough grist for the mill.

The same considerations apply to the Methodist selection process as well. The grades and politicking aren’t the problem – they may not be ideal criteria for advancement but at least they’re reasonably random. The problem is measuring success in part by how popular and well-received your sermons are and how your congregation grows. Once the market-optimization process starts, your principled beliefs will be worn down to pablum in a few centuries.

One defense against this line of reasoning is to claim that people’s preferences are, if examined, deeply aligned with theological truth. If we can just encourage people to introspect a little, then “what sells” will inevitably correlate with what’s true. Yet this explanation doesn’t hold water on several levels. First, introspection is hard and most decisions about what churches to attend will not be made by outstandingly introspective individuals. So while you can encourage individuals to introspect, it’s impossible to do this for enough people to change the selective landscape. Second, the long record of history shows a broad flowering of many mutually contradictory religions. Popular religions do have some common moral themes and mythic tropes, but they contradict each other in nearly every other theological point. The truth does not contradict itself. So at least most people who have pursued intuitively pleasing theology have been badly mistaken. Finally, the entire claim that people’s intuitions are good theology-detectors is flimsy. If you believe in a God who created the universe, you believe in a God who created quantum mechanics. And you expect His theology to be intuitive and appealing?

Imagine for a moment that we conducted science the way we conduct theology. Every week, we gather at the lecture-hall of one prominent scientist or other who gives a talk on his theories and is supported by donations from attendees. Anything that’s too counterintuitive or has too much math would meet with empty pews. Forget quantum mechanics, I don’t think we’d even have moved past geocentrism! [3]

What’s needed is a counterbalancing force, not accountable to the people, and charged with maintaining the integrity of the faith. While the elders of a church can theoretically serve this role, it makes it more difficult when they themselves are drawn from the pastors who won the populist competition. To put it puckishly, if you don’t have an Inquisition, get ready to lose your church.

In fact, many people, some of which were even not named Torquemada, recognized that mere intuition would lead people astray, and have attempted to grapple with this problem. In typically sensible fashion, CS Lewis advocated sticking with a parish church (one whose congregants were drawn from a single district) rather than indulging in church-shopping that can fuel competition between churches. If everyone simply went to the local church and never changed their allegiance, then pastors could feel free to preach their interpretation of scripture without worrying about how popular their message would be. He has his demonic Screwtape inquire of an underling:

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient [that is, a human that the underling is supposed to be tempting] has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches…

The search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where the Enemy [that is, God] wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.

Another fascinating essay addresses the problem a different way. The author dispenses with primitivism (“The current institution-of-the-Church has been corrupted, oh hey I rediscovered the tenets of the original pure Church”) and sola scriptura (“Don’t rely on old teachings, interpret the scriptures yourself and go with that interpretation”) [4] as both being absurdly vulnerable to motivated cognition. He then argues – with some impressive Biblical citations – that since the Christian Church was founded by Jesus, who considered the institution a pretty big deal, it’s reasonable to expect that it has a sort of holy oversight that protects it from falling into major errors. It’s not that individual humans in the church won’t err – humans are human – but that given the importance of its mission, the institution of the Church itself is protected from falling into heresy. This is a fascinating argument in favor of If Christian Then Catholic (or Orthodox, I suppose), but it does have one interesting conclusion, which he didn’t draw. If this were the case, you could actually experimentally derive additional bits of theological information! All you need to do is stir up political fights within the Church and see which faction’s interpretation of scripture wins. It would be pretty awesome if the pope started appointing a Chief Experimental Theologian whose job was exactly to set up these sorts of experiments and publish the results. “Blessed are the troublemakers!”

But let’s not rag on Catholics too much. They have, I think, made one of the best attempts at taking a stab at this question. Namely, they’ve arrived at a doctrine called the Communion of Saints. In its more pure-theology aspect this doctrine states that the Church exists outside of time – it’s the community of all Christians including those who died before and the spirits of Christians in purgatory or Heaven. This is why it makes sense to pray for the intercessions of saints in heaven; because they have the backing of an omnipotent deity, they can act throughout time, including right here, right now. But this doctrine has another aspect as well, which is to bind all Christians together by the thread of a common Christianity. A 3rd century monk is as Christian as you, as is your descendant praying in a cathedral on Mars in the 25th century. If your beliefs start to differ from either of them, Bayesian reasoning suggests that you are probably the odd one out, the one who’s drifting into heresy – you’re probably not the enlightened one who finally, at last, found something that everyone else has overlooked. Now, it’s not obvious that this doctrine actually constrains belief that much in practice, and certainly even Catholics have had a lot of doctrinal drift through the centuries. But it’s a very cool idea – the late Romans developed something that looks like Aumann agreement millennia ahead of schedule – and it’s a way to enforce some restriction on doctrinal drift by pointing out that changing beliefs over generations actually is a potential problem and something to be reasonably skeptical about.

Overall, though, this is a really tough problem. It’s really on the order of “What do you do if the Church has been hijacked by demons?” Only in this case, the demons aren’t the dudes with the horns but rather impersonal, hostile optimization processes. And I haven’t come across any really solid exorcism strategies out there. There are a few stabs at ideas, like Lewis’s approach to tamping down selection pressure, and doctrines that enforce Aumann agreement across space and time. But it’s not enough, and worse yet it doesn’t seem like a problem that most religious folk even recognize.

And although this can be turned into a religion-bashing argument, it has disturbing implications for atheists as well. Values matter to everyone. And the fundamental question that these thoughts raise is: how do you ensure that future generations will continue to hold values you consider worthwhile? Besides the winds of popularity, what’s perpetuating your values, keeping them from drifting? If you don’t have a good answer, get ready to lose them.

[1] In fact, the survival of churches in recent decades have been directly proportional to their size; even among megachurches the biggest have gotten bigger, and even among small churches the smallest have withered away fastest. “For he that has, to him shall be given: and he that has not, from him shall be taken even that which he has.”

[2] Interestingly when I discussed these concerns with several smart Christian friends, they all instantly seized on the same example of erroneous popular preaching – the Prosperity Gospel. Briefly, this doctrine says that financial well-being is one of the blessings bestowed on devout Christians – if you’re faithful, pray really hard, and donate generously, wealth will be your reward. That this heresy, among all the many popular heresies out there, was universally called out for ridicule, was remarkable. It reminded me of how some atheists use religion as the canonical example of irrationality, even when there are much greater irrationalities in the world.

This whole business smelt of politics to me, and I suspect that the reason the Prosperity Gospel is a popular hobbyhorse among my demographic is that it’s so crass, so very very lower-middle-class – the same differentiating impulse that makes just-barely-middle-class people assiduously avoid Dunkin Donuts in favor of Starbucks, or a young teenager vehemently disparage kids’ stuff. It would be much more awkward for them to call out heresies that are popular and high status among educated folks, such as liberation theology or moralistic therapeutic deism.

[3] TED talks are pretty much set up along these lines, with exactly the results that we predict.

[4] I have been informed that this is interpretation, while popular, is not really the true meaning of sola scriptura. The real version makes a much weaker claim – namely that scripture alone is theoretically sufficient to bring a reasonable man unto salvation, and that Church Fathers, tradition, and so on are not strictly necessary. In practice, the content of these authoritative traditions is pretty good and following them is usually the smart thing to do – real sola scriptura looks a lot more like pre-Vatican II Catholicism than modern Protestantism.

By analogy, you can believe that physics can theoretically be rederived from experimental evidence alone but should probably still be mostly reading textbooks and journal articles rather than setting up a lab in your basement to rederive c. In the once-in-a-generation case where an experiment disproves the textbooks, you should go with the evidence – but keep in mind that experimental error and crackpots are much more common than revolutionary discoveries.

This version is significantly less silly and I would only note that it still relies on individual rationality to determine how much to rely on teaching vs. independent thought. In lacking any guidelines except community oversight, it’s still quite vulnerable to decay through pernicious signaling games or just sheer human pride.

There were a few anarcha-feminists around, which worked all right for a while. But then they found a dangerously misogynistic troll who made them uncomfortable, and they got them banned. I think the story was that they were an outsider and troll sent over by the Mens Rights people to spread hate and misogyny or something. Nobody was willing to go out of their way to argue against banning such a person. But then they found a few more. The precedent had been set, and only a few people spoke up against the further banning, and those who did thereby outed themselves as misogyny apologists as well. Then, partially because there were so many "trolls" to ban, and partially because of the weak controls on who got to be moderator, some anarcha-feminists got moderator positions, and started banning and deleting the comments of the "trolls" who were making /r/anarchism an "unsafe and unwelcoming" space for women.

At this point, a more broad backlash started up. People were upset about the seeming violations of free speech, and how much non-spam stuff the moderators were removing. At some point, the moderators decided that the whole discussion was unproductive, and made a policy of deleting complaints about the moderation policy. They also were by this time consistently deleting everything that might make non-whites and non-men feel "unsafe", and banning repeat offenders. Some of the other moderators were against what was happening and started to interfere, so if I remember correctly the anarcha-feminist moderators somehow removed all the other moderators who weren't on board with their program.

Eventually the (anarcha-feminist) moderators replaced the black flag banner with the black and pink, and declared officially that there could be "no anarchism without feminism", and anyone who disagreed was dangerously misogynistic and had to go. I didn't really care one way or the other about feminism, but as something of an outsider, the whole incident seemed totally stupid. I wanted to talk about anarchism, not feminism, but somehow these people had taken over and ruined everything. I got bored and left for greener pastures.

Instead of laughing at anarchists for the irony of creating a totalitarian system for themselves, we should be alarmed and take note; a community of people absolutely opposed to oppression and authority and violations of individual rights wound up oppressing each other with arbitrary authority leading to the destruction of the usefulness of their community. We can scoff and write this off as an isolated incident or an inherent failure of anarchism, but we've seen similar happening or trying to happen all over: Effective Altruism, the Tech Industry, Occupy Wall Street, the Video Game Industry, and many other places. A pattern emerges in these examples and demands some investigation.

The pattern is that "Social Justice" affiliated ideas come to increasingly dominate discourse and then administrative power in a community at an accelerating rate until some drastic outcome ends the process. This usually involves witch hunts and moral hysteria against the community members least in line with some ideological standard (typically presented as "basic human decency"); rhetorical interference, strawmanning, and denial of the existence of legitimate concerns against people uncomfortable with the events; help from naive administrators who try to appease the ideological interlopers or even thank them for their courageous efforts; and people gaining status in the community for ideological policing rather than direct productive achievements towards the shared community purpose. The end stage, if not total collapse with everyone leaving, is typically the community's resources being redirected to some purpose other than its original intended purpose, often the promotion of "social justice" ideas and causes. A sort of "ideological hijacking" of the community.

The ideological hijacking of a community in this way will almost always be harmful to the original purpose of the community. So regardless of one's opinions of the correctness of whatever ideas are involved, if a community is has some real purpose, it has an interest in effective ideological security.

The first steps, I think, in protecting our communities against ideological hijacking is recognizing the existence and pathology of the phenomenon, and understanding how it happens, so that we can design counterstrategies to be implemented by community members and administrators. This is a huge topic, but we can start with a few hypotheses to explain how ideological hijackings happen, and why they so often have the Social Justice features that they do:

1. Ideological hijackings like these are a spontaneous failure mode or result of a widespread vulnerability of human communities, with the social justice leftism stuff just standing in as a common available ideology to take advantage of it.

2. These ideological hijackings are the result of a conscious conspiracy of social justice wizards plotting in the back room to take over the world one internet community at a time.

3. "Hijackings" like this are just the removal of unprincipled exceptions to a widely held moral code that, when consistently interpreted and applied, demands that all communities must be primarily concerned with social justice issues.

4. "Social Justice" is a sort of semi-autonomous collection of ideas evolved or designed like a rudimentary fungus to take root, grow, take over, and expand from communities in certain conditions.

In complex phenomena like this, hypotheses typically aren't mutually exclusive. Each one of these factors is probably insufficient or implausible to explain the phenomenon on its own, but my bet is that each one of them is playing an important role. In any case, a wise program of ideological security will explore and address each one so that no vulnerability exists.

While more extreme responses exist, and we can get very deep into the analysis and theory, there are a few things we can keep in mind that will probably help secure our communities against ideological hijacking without having to install a grand inquisitor:

• Ideological security is an important matter for purposeful communities. You can't avoid politics in primate social groups by pretending it doesn't exist. Every public action has political consequences, and every explicit or implicit policy of action has potential vulnerabilities to ideological exploitation.

• Seemingly overreactive complaints about, for example, creeping social justice totalitarianism in response to seemingly innocent vocalization of feelings of unwelcome or something, are not baseless, and have real precedent behind them. Social Justice Ideological Hijackings are a real phenomenon.

• Do-ocracy or "Shut up and show us the code" or local equivalent is a good immune defence against outsiders and non-contributors manipulating the community without actually doing any good work for the community. If status is tied to advancing the group's shared interest through humble work, then the community will flourish and be secure against many possible attacks.

• Everybody having "no friends to the right and no enemies to the left", that is, everybody being willing to denounce those more "abhorrent" than them as "too far" in the hopes that it will shield themselves from such denouncement, leads to a debilitating moral signalling spiral that can result in ideological hijacking. The antidote is to refuse to simply denounce people for having unacceptable opinions, and instead argue rationally with them.

• A few people taking a stand and growing a spine instead of capitulating to a "majority" that considers their opinions unacceptable do a great public service in that they hold the range of thinkable and expressible positions open as per Asch's Conformity Experiments. Contrarians act as a canary in the totalitarian coal mine, and a dead canary signals people to stop thinking and keep their opinions to themselves.

Politics is not a far away thing; it is a fundamental feature of all primate social groups. Politics is the social maneuvering, moral posturing, coalition building, fighting, and even cooperative work in pursuit of social or economic power and goods. As long as there are gains to be had by social maneuvering, and a dynamic in which to compete, apes will engage in politics. Politics is pervasive, this is unavoidable.

The important question, for the health of our communities, is what particular kind of political dynamic we have, because this determines what kind of things we do to compete for social status and power, and what the overall outcome of that competition is for the community.

If the game is to just maneuver socially, intimidate and use violence, and be holier than the next guy and thus be entitled to his loot and women, then people play that game, and we get a nasty outcome. This is not always open bloody conflict, it can be quite subtle; optimal zero-sum social maneuvering is often unconscious, low-key, plausibly deniable, patient, and (mostly) friendly, so that others can't unambiguously notice and gang up in reaction. So even when things look friendly, there may still be stealthy competition that leads to a bad overall outcome.

On the other hand, if the game is to compete on the basis of most useful service to the group, best value delivered to the customer, and most insightful research produced, then people play that game, and things get good. Science is a great example of this, where it became cool to publish new knowledge about the natural world backed up by documented or replicable observations, and thus all the rich gentlemen went on voyages of exploration and built labs and laid the foundations of Science instead of whatever they were doing before. Modern entrepreneurial Capitalism is another example; the rule of law, specific legal and accounting structures, and markets all became functional enough that the selfish and ambitious pirate types found it easier to become highly productive captains of industry than to raise rebel armies or sail around looting and pillaging.

So getting politics right or wrong, in the sense of which mode of competition we get into, is a matter of very large differences in outcome quality. When we are stuck in a zero sum game, status and other political values are exchanged, but nothing is gained over the long term, and we are little better than animals. But the great thing about Man is that sometimes we can get ourselves into these positive sum games where there are still winners and losers, but the long term trend is to build and build and accomplish great things for ourselves.

This is relevant to any community of people. Even if your goal is simply to live well, part of life is everyone seeking better things for themselves, and a wise community will pay some attention to what mechanisms are provided for that.

But what can we actually do to get politics right in our communities? If you're in an economy dominated by intimidation and looting, you can't just declare that all interaction should be on the basis of peaceful voluntary exchange and rational self-interest; you'd still get looted, even if your buddies agree. If your community is under the control of some advanced stage memetic cancer that makes unproductive holiness competitions the basis of all interaction, you may not even be able to get your buddies to agree that something is wrong without getting mobbed and cast out by the believers. If everyone is milling about like a herd of cats, unable to achieve what they'd all like to achieve for lack of coordination, what can they even do?

Sometimes you just can’t get to a good political dynamic no matter what anybody does, but often you can if someone talented puts in a bunch of work. For example, in the simple case of a straight cat-herding coordination problem, someone could take it upon themselves to build up legitimacy, take a leadership position for the group, and then use their position of authority to change the dynamics, for example by acting as a nexus of coordination for productive work by delegating tasks, making key decisions, and so on, and exiling or executing people who do antisocial stuff. The more complicated cases beyond the simple coordination problem are obviously different, but the fundamental idea is similar; someone can change things with a bunch of work.

But why would they do it? They will have to invest a lot of effort and resources, and are likely to face sometimes very harsh resistance from people who would not benefit from the change. No one wants to expose themselves to that.

Unless they get to take a cut of the new situation they created. Then the political entrepreneur will have incentive to invest his time and effort to fight through the difficulties involved in creating the new political dynamic. It is after all traditional for the guy who takes over something and becomes the new authority to take a few extra wives or something…

But wait, what’s this about “political entrepreneurship”? An entrepreneur is someone who identifies a difficult but valuable problem and puts in the huge amount of work it takes to solve it and scale the solution, and then takes a big cut of the value created. A political entrepreneur someone who does this for a political problem.

The problem with political entrepreneurship is that there’s no market as such and the transactions aren’t all voluntary, so we can’t rely on that as a systematic reason for the outcome to be good; sometimes the political “entrepreneur” is just some guy taking over a space and exploiting it. Even so, the sincerely prosocial political entrepreneur can often make large improvements in the political dynamic, and can do so profitably.

March 9, 1815 The Monster has escaped from his place of banishment.

March 10, 1815 The Corsican Ogre has landed at Cape Juan.

March 11, 1815 The Tiger has shown himself at Gap. The Troops are advancing on all sides to arrest his progress. He will conclude his miserable adventure by becoming a wanderer among the mountains.

March 12, 1815 The Monster has actually advanced as far as Grenoble.

March 13, 1815 The Tyrant is now at Lyon. Fear and Terror seized all at his appearance.

March 18, 1815 The Usurper has ventured to approach to within 60 hours' march of the capital.

March 19, 1815 Bonaparte is advancing by forced marches, but it is impossible he can reach Paris.

March 20, 1815 Napoleon will arrive under the walls of Paris tomorrow.

March 21, 1815 The Emperor Napoleon is at Fountainbleau.

March 22, 1815 Yesterday evening His Majesty the Emperor made his public entry and arrived at the Tuileries. Nothing can exceed the universal joy.

Such is the nature of power, my friends. We may also look at the progress of Nazification in Germany in the 1930s. I don't have a good primary source, but we have all seen the pictures and have heard many stories, so we can imagine the headlines in newspapers and magazines, and the changes in displayed symbology in Germany as we read along with this rough timeline:

February 1924 Hitler's trial for his part in the Munich Putsch began. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison but only served 10 months. During his time in prison Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.

August 1927 The first annual party conference to be held at Nuremburg. Known as the Nuremburg Rally all subsequent annual meetings were held at Nuremburg.

September 1930 The Nazi party gained 18.3% of the vote in the Reichstag elections to become the second largest party.

July 1933 The Nazi party gained 37.4% of the vote in the Reichstag elections to become the largest party.

January 1933 Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg

March 1933 With the Communist party banned Hitler ordered a new election at which the Nazi party gained 44% of the General election vote.

May 1933 25,000 'un-German' books burned in an “Action against the Un-German Spirit”. The move was encouraged by Joseph Goebbels, Head of Propaganda.

July 1933 All political parties except the Nazis were banned

August 1934 President Hindenburg died. Hitler combined the post of President and Chancellor and called himself Fuhrer.

September 1934 In a speech to the National Socialist Women's Organization, Hitler defined women's role stating that a woman's "world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home."

September 1935 Nuremburg Laws defined German citizenship. Relationships between Jews and Aryans were banned.

Etcetera. By 1937, the normal parts of Berlin looked like this:

Note the flag flown by formally unaligned organizations. The symbology is important. It says who's in charge, and flying the banners demonstrates loyalty. Always and everywhere, the ambitious kneel to the powerful, and affirm their symbols and ideologies.

Of course, by 1945, Berlin had a new set of symbols:

Under Communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1978, Vaclav Havel made some observations, did some thinking, and wrote "The Power of the Powerless", of which this excerpt is particularly choice:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer . . . does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. . . .

In summary, his thesis on the relationship between these supposedly ideological symbols and the power dynamic is that displaying the symbols of power communicates loyal obedience to the powerful, and subtly shifts the implicit social landscape of what's acceptable for everyone else, and it does so in a plausibly deniable way. And when things get to an advanced enough state, failing to do so communicates punishable dissent.

Normally, the policy at this blog is one of strict non-engagement with the present; we try to maintain a position outside of history so as to avoid embroiling ourselves in active political conflicts or getting blindered into too-narrow a historical perspective. But in contradiction of our usual preference, "today" is a word that we very reluctantly dust off to document some important news:

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States of America has ruled that all states are compelled to legalize same sex marriage. As usual, Massachusetts (in other words, Harvard, et al) led the charge:

Relatedly, about a week previous to this article, we finally got a good example of a racist white man attacking innocent black churchgoers, leading to a national outcry and calls to ban confederate (the loser of the last civil war) imagery in the United States. Someone has produced a graphic to help us understand the connection:

And indeed, today America flies a new flag:

For those of you joining us from the post-American future, note that the "White House" there in the lower right is the official seat of power in the United States; currently the most officially powerful throne in the world. The rainbow flag represents the interests and pride of the homosexual community and fellow travellers, and is one of the core symbols of contemporary American Liberalism, which is officially at the time of writing still an optional ideology in what is at least supposed to be an intellectually tolerant political landscape.

Being ever conscious of power dynamics, we are of course eager to join everybody else in the fashionable and ambitious crowd today in celebrating this new milestone in the ascension of American Liberalism to the status of an official and compulsory ideology. The Future Primaeval proudly supports our new(?) overlords, as best as we can figure out who they are:

Being not entirely in the present, and not quite as in touch with the rapidly changing social realities of the day, we hope you'll excuse us if we have missed any subtleties or gotten any details wrong.

We eagerly await future developments in the history of power and its symbols. Who knows, perhaps some day we will be singing the praises of His Imperial Highness, Last and Greatest Defender of Christian Civilization, Tsar Vladimir Putin:

But for now, the tyrant is only at Crimea. Fear and terror seized all at his appearance, of course.

For context, the LWians tend to cast off these specific traditional social technologies:

• Monogamy. LWians are disproportionately likely to engage in a behaviour called "Polyamory", which is the practice of openly having concurrent sexual relationships with multiple partners, sometimes within the context of a "primary" marriage or long term relationship. Some of them also engage in promiscuous sexual behaviour.

• Traditional Gender Roles and Separations. LWians believe the life script for men and women ought to be roughly the same, with the only major difference being tendency of sexual preference and reproductive hardware. They mix men and women in spaces that are traditionally not mixed, consciously try to deprogram or flout gender-associated behaviours like masculinity and femininity, and even reject the characterization as men or women altogether.

• Social and Communication Norms. LWians discuss and practice nonstandard modes of communication like nonviolent communication, ask, guess, and tell culture, and probably some other stuff I'm not aware of.

• Assorted Taboos. LWians tend to engage in behaviours that are traditionally taboo, like mixing work and sexual relationships, cuddling outside of romance, etc.

These are some the deviations that they seem to have attempts at specific philosophical justification for. There are further subtler deviations from traditional behaviours which I have not heard argued for but which also seem to stem from a lack of respect for tradition. I have specific harsh criticisms for most of these deviations, and further meta-level criticisms of the state of mind that produces them, but that's not for today.

On the other hand, I do respect what the LWians are doing. Taking ideas seriously and striving to have a strong philosophical foundation for our beliefs and actions is something we try to do around here as well. I just disagree with them about the proper methods and results of such a strategy. We'll stay out of specifics for now and just use the above as context for the meta-level claims Galef makes in her video:

The video is in two parts. In the first part, she briefly introduces the topic and outlines the epistemic argument for tradition:

• Traditions are ideas that have faced significant selection pressure over time for being beneficial to their hosts. Further, they are known solutions to a very complex social organization problem which one can't approach naively and expect good results. Therefore a tradition is decent evidence that that way of doing things is a good one.

This is roughly the argument I described in more detail in my post about a structured argument for tradition. Galef expresses some sympathy for it, but goes on, in the second part, to explain why she thinks this argument isn't very strong after all. Here are my best renditions of her arguments, and my comments on them.

1. Bad social customs are "really sticky", and people don't get rid of them. That is, my premise #5 is wrong: "Given experience with a specific bad cultural practice, humans are generally able to critique it and improve upon it."

   In my experience, which accords with what we would expect from common sense, when people encounter strong evidence that their cultural practices are flawed, or have unusual amounts of skin in the game, they do some soul searching and figure out how to fix them. I myself have done this multiple times, as have many of the normal non-rationalist people I know. Galef may be seeing a perspective effect, where what looks to her like irrational adherence to stupid ideas is in fact rational adherence to good ideas with which she currently disagrees. To say more, we would have to hear what evidence leads the LWians to believe that cultural practice is sticky for most people.

2. Traditions don't undergo mutation as much as genes, so the search space is not adequately covered.

   In my original argument, I failed to address this, but the error rate in genomes gets the job done at only 10^-8 per base pair per generation. The error in cultural transmission is purposefully directed, and considerably larger. Our intellectual ancestors played with all kinds of funny ideas, and culture today is noticeably mutated from 50 or 200 years ago. We can be sure that most things have been tried. Even the LWians' "nontraditional" ideas themselves have a rather long historical tradition, coming up multiple times in history but never quite managing to achieve sustainability.

3. We are working from a prior of "status quo bias", and LWians specifically correct for this to achieve balanced rationality.

   In some ways, the validity of the status quo bias is exactly what is under examination here. The status quo bias, which is a preference for the current practice one is familiar with over a new practice, must be rational in some common circumstance or it would not have evolved. The common circumstance in which it is rational probably being exactly the big common sense questions like which life cultural practices to use. Further, the demonstrations of irrationality shown by the heuristics and biases people tend to be pretty weak when we've examined them critically; its as often the researcher oversimplifying an actually complex situation as it is the brain getting it wrong on some corner case.

   But this is besides the point. Most of us loud traditionalists didn't grow up this way, we specifically overcame the status quo bias to get here. The status quo bias is not that strong in practice; people are cautious, but they change what they are doing all the time. Irrationality is not an adequate explanation for why literally almost every civilized person ever disagrees with the LWians about proper cultural practice.

4. The traditions may be optimized for conditions that no longer hold.

   I missed this one in my original argument as well, and it would be fatal. However, people have not changed, nor have the fundamental problems we face in life, besides an easing up of material conditions. Our traditions should probably change a bit as conditions change, but the sane approach is to salvage our traditional culture as much as possible, not throw it out and rewrite the whole codebase every time we hit a bump in history.

5. Social experimentation is a public good, so we should appreciate other people taking risks on weird social ideas, so that we may all benefit when they turn out to be good, and not have to learn the hard way when they turn out to be bad.

   Indeed, we are watching closely and documenting the failures of the LWians' attempts at cultural reengineering for our own social technology research, but we also note the high costs we pay as a society when a generation of our brightest intellectuals decide to engage everybody in cultural experiments.

6. Through all of this, questioning the value of tradition contains an implicit claim that you can do better, in contradiction of my lemma #4 that "cultural practices constructed ex nihilo are not likely to be good".

   I reaffirm that premise. Culture is very complex. It is probably possible to understand and even design in some cases, but a naive approach that does not borrow heavily from past empirical testing is unlikely to get much right.

7. There is a difference between what is beneficial to your genetic potential, culture, and social group, and what is beneficial to a flourishing life for you as a human.

   This objection is the most substantial and hardest to address, resting on a values difference. Can a practice be good or bad for the individual while being the opposite for the long term interests of the social and genetic system? If the individual's goals do not align with the long term flourishing of the cultural and genetic system of which they are a part, then yes, traditions proven to serve the latter do not serve that individual. If the LWians choose to divorce themselves from their context in this way, there is no simple way in which they are objectively wrong. However, the position of this blog right from the beginning has been that we want to live in a way that is sustainable on that whole-system basis, so we unify the "individual" human desires, which contain much flexibility and room for interpretation, with that whole-system sustainable flourishing. We don't have room here for a proper treatment of this subject, so we'll leave it at that and address the details in later posts.

I think that sums up my responses to Galef on the a-priori argument for tradition in general. However, we agree with Galef that the epistemic argument for traditions is not very strong, and is soundly overwhelmed by the object-level evidence in specific cases, so further discussion at this level is pointless. We ought to take traditions somewhat seriously in general, but actual case studies and analysis of specific cultural practices is the more powerful source of evidence which really closes the case, so our future discussions of tradition will be on the object level.

The only problem with this plan, as we shall see, is that it is not ambitious enough.

Mencius Moldbug once wrote up a thought experiment. Imagine that someone found a magic ring that gave him the power of life and death over anyone in a Pacific island. For all intents and purposes, he has become the absolute monarch over that territory. What would that regime look like? Well, things would actually work surprisingly well. Suppose our new King were a greedy man. He would rationally institute sound economic policies to turn it into a first-world country, and tax at the Laffer limit. He has no interest groups to pay off. His rule is absolutely secure. So he has no need for secret police or limits on free speech. Let the people say what they like, as long as the gold keeps flowing. And if their cause were truly and obviously hopeless, there will be very few outright rebels.

Well, Yagami Light had that magic ring. And instead of using it to seize political power for himself – with a tough-on-crime platform that would be pretty popular and the threat of the notebook itself to keep challengers at bay – Light instead tries to wield his influence anonymously from the shadows. And so a story that could have ended with Yagami Light on the Chrysanthemum Throne instead has him hunted like a dog.

This is fun as far as fan-theorizing goes, but Light’s failure also points to a more general nerd failure mode. Nerds, who understand better than anyone the power and value of technology, often act as though understanding technology alone is enough to bring influence. They systematically underestimate the importance of actively seeking power, whether on a small scale in office politics, or on a grand scale as powerful, active investors or CEOs. Light’s instinct was to rely heavily on the power that’s the Death Note gave him, paying no attention to gaining conventional political power or even creating a pseudonymous public persona, even when both of these tactics would have greatly helped him to realize his goals. [1] [2]

Peter Thiel has pointed out the remarkable fact that aside for some very brief, very contingent points in history, inventors of new technologies have captured almost none of the value that they created through those technologies. Even though science itself is a powerful force, and innovation extraordinarily valuable, it’s a mistake to assume that individual scientists and innovators are themselves powerful. Mostly, they’re withdrawing from overt contests for power and influence, whether at the corporate or political level, and dreaming that they will quietly change the world through their inventions, publications, and anonymous blog posts. The tragedy of Light shows how much they’re leaving on the table.

[1] (At least he avoided an even more extreme nerd failure mode: he at least targeted high profile criminals to create a media sensation, rather than mechanically killing anonymous criminals in the abstract sense that it would change people’s incentives on the margin.)

[2] It’s not surprising that Death Note functions as such a good allegory for this nerd failure mode. It was written, in part, as a way to appeal to teenage power fantasies, and a lot of the fun in watching the series is thinking through what kind of strategies you yourself would use if you were in his situation. That his instincts are those of his typical teenage fans is no surprise.

Lest you think this is only for the 1%, they’re happy to give examples: the Portland office worker making $70k, the CPA who pulled it off after just a few years. The math is simple: cut your spending so they can afford to save a lot, and once your savings reach 25x your annual spending, you’re good to go (assuming a conservative 4% safe withdrawal rate).

Now, this approach is not for everyone – for one thing, many people really enjoy their jobs and rely on work as their major social outlet, and given the “freedom” to retire would want to go right back doing what they’re doing. But I bring it up to demonstrate that most bright people in rich countries – that probably includes you – could easily support an aristocratic lifestyle. If that’s something that we wanted, all we need to do is get a reasonable paying job, grind for a decade, and we’d be there.

Some people are coming to similar conclusions, but they’d prefer the process to be mediated by the government. There’s been a lot of talk lately, from many ideological corners, about a universal basic income – scrapping all our complex welfare programs and replacing it with a guaranteed income. From first principles, this seems doable. Our modern transfer programs cost a lot of money, and if you do the math, it works out to roughly enough to let everyone live at the level of a grad student. Based on the lives of my grad student friends, that seems pretty awesome.

There are serious criticisms of the proposal as well. Many of the proponents seem to be relatively isolated from the actual struggles of the poor, and how much of it is about being immersed in a bad culture rather than (in the US) actual material deprivation. And they tend to assume that we’d have enough unified political will to prevent it from quickly drifting back into the mess we have today, when confronted, say, by cute pictures of starving kids whose parents gambled away their dole for the year.

But I’d like to address a different point here: regardless of the merits of the proposal, there’s a lot to learn from the fact that it’s becoming popular today. Let’s leave the quibbles over the bean counting and view the proposal as poetry, as aspiration. What do its proponents think people will do with all their free money? Let’s look at the best written scenario I’ve read on the subject, from Scott Alexander:

Consider your life on a $20,000 a year income guarantee. No longer tied down to a job, you can live wherever you want. I love the mountains. Let’s live in a cabin in Colorado, way up in the Rockies. You can find stunningly beautiful ones for $500 a month – freed from the mad rush to get into scarce urban or suburban areas with good school districts, housing is actually really cheap. So there you are in the Rockies, maybe with a used car to take you to Denver when you want to see people or go to a show, but otherwise all on your own except for the deer and squirrels. You wake up at nine, cook yourself a healthy breakfast, then take a long jog out in the forest. By the time you come back, you’ve got a lot of interesting thoughts, and you talk about them with the dozens of online friends you cultivate close relationships with and whom you can take a road trip and visit any time you feel like. Eventually you’re talked out, and you curl up with a good book – this week you’re trying to make it through Aristotle on aesthetics. The topic interests you since you’re learning to paint – you’ve always wanted to be an artist, and with all the time in the world and stunning views to inspire you, you’re making good progress. Freed from the need to appeal to customers or critics, you are able to develop your own original style, and you take heart in the words of the old Kipling poem:

And none but the Master will praise them
And none but the Master will blame
And no one will work for money
And no one will work for fame
But each for the joy of the working
Each on his separate star
To draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are'

One of the fans of your work is a cute girl – this time I’m assuming you’re a man, I’m sure over the past four years you’ve learned some choice words for people who do that. You date and get married. She comes to live with you – she’s also getting $20,000 a year from the government in place of an education, so now you’re up to $40,000, which is actually very close to the US median household income. You have two point four kids. With both of you at home full time, you see their first steps, hear their first words, get to see them as they begin to develop their own personalities. They start seeming a little lonely for other kids their own age, so with a sad good-bye to your mountain, you move to a bigger house in a little town on the shores of a lake in Montana. There’s no schooling for them, but you teach them to read, first out of children’s books, later out of something a little harder like Harry Potter, and then finally you turn them loose in your library. Your oldest devours your collection of Aristotle and tells you she wants to be a philosopher when she grows up. Evenings they go swimming, or play stickball with the other kids in town.

When they reach college age, your daughter is so thrilled at the opportunity to learn from her intellectual heroes that she goes to Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV and asks for a loan. They’re happy to give her fifteen thousand, which is all college costs nowadays – only the people who are really interested in learning feel the need to go nowadays, and supply so outpaces demand that prices are driven down. She makes it into Yale (unsurprising given how much better home-schooled students do) studies philosophy, but finds she likes technology better. She decides to become an engineer, and becomes part of the base of wealthy professionals helping fund the income guarantee for everyone else. She marries a nice man after making sure he’s willing to stay home and take care of the children – she’s not crazy, she doesn’t want to send them to some kind of institution.

Your younger son, on the other hand, is a little intellectually disabled and can’t read above a third-grade level. That’s not a big problem for you or for him. When he grows older, he moves to Hawaii where he spends most of his time swimming in the ocean and by all accounts enjoys himself very much.

You’re happy your son will be financially secure for the rest of his life, but on a broader scale, you’re happy that no one around you has to live in fear of getting fired, or is struggling to make ends meet, or is stuck in the Rust Belt with a useless skill set. Every so often, you call your daughter and thank her for helping design the robots that do most of the hard work.

Note how different it is from the lives of the Aristotle-reading, Kipling-quoting class today. If I had to sum it up in one word, I’d say it’s independent. Not only are you socially independent, living in a remote mountain cabin with a small group of close friends, you’re intellectually independent too. Freed of the anxieties of citation-mongering or trying to land the big sales account, our protagonist embarks on an isolated intellectual quest answerable only to himself for his progress. His life – as full of intellectual ferment as it may be – looks, and feels, leisurely. [1]

This rigorous yet free life of the mind sounds extremely appealing to the intellectual 1%, and living in this utopia would be reason enough to favor a universal basic income, even leaving out all the selfless stuff about fixing the culture of poverty. Yet upon reflection this is not a dreamy utopia of the far future, but an attempt to recreate an aristocratic lifestyle of the past. In exchange for giving up some worldly status-climbing and wealth, you get a position of moderate freedom – and a moderate amount of guaranteed prestige.

That bit about guaranteed prestige might sound trivial, but it’s the one thing that makes all the rest of the setup possible. Having a floor of status you can’t fall below seems somehow necessary to allow intellectual freedom. But as we’ve demonstrated, the Colorado retreat is perfectly feasible now. Certainly Scott himself, set up to make a physician’s salary, can easily retire after a decade, even including the low-paid years of his residency. But there’s no narrative in our head that painting landscapes and reading Aristotle all day is okay, let alone admirable. Someone trying to live that life would be much less respected than a practicing physician – if they’re not just regarded with frank incomprehension and skepticism. And so, the idyllic retreat slowly gets worn down among constant questions from parents when you’re going to get on with your life, the lack of nearby parents who understand and approve of how you’re raising your kids, and the gnawing worry that even your intellectual work will never be as cool as what those kids at Harvard or Berkeley are working on. And so smart people march on to officially approved lifestyles and become doctors and coders and accountants and postdocs, and yearn for that rustic mountain cabin in the Rockies.

But until very recently, they had another option. Even after the death of the old aristocracy, there was a pretty guaranteed way to live a low-key life of the mind; you could join academia. Now academia today is a rat race like any other prestigious career track, and if you want to make it you have to apply your nose firmly to the grindstone and not spend too much time fooling around. But it’s really only quite recently that academia was so difficult and Darwinian to try to break into. James Watson, as recently as the 1950s, was a mediocre college student until he read What is Life, got excited, and decided to go to grad school in Indiana to work on it. Today he wouldn’t stand a chance against students who had spent undergrad getting good grades, working with the right mentors, and generally jumping through the right hoops.

I think the basic income folks are fundamentally reacting to this shift, this closing of the last sanctuary of aristocratic intellectual freedom. That’s why they have a low-resolution view of the poor but portray an incredibly compelling portrait of what an aristocratic intellectual life could look like. The proposal isn’t about economics, it’s a cry for help, a semiconscious cry of pain at the possibilities that were lost as the last academies closed their gates. And whatever one may think of the policy proposal itself, I think this pain is perfectly real, not only for individuals but for a society’s intellectual health, and whatever else they do, the proponents have done a great service by articulating it.

But their limitation is a belief that money is the key problem that needs to be solved. That’s clearly not the case – if there was that much demand for an aristocratic lifestyle, we’d at least see the richest 10% of Americans pursuing the early retirement path – it would be a full fledged subculture rather than a couple crackpot bloggers. Instead, the wealthy and well-educated work harder at their careers than anyone else.

And so the universal basic income is a red herring – the limiting factor is cultural, not economic. We already have all the wealth we need to take a real stab at mass aristocracy. All America could be an Athens, if we had the culture to support it.

[1] The only dissonant note is the notion that our protagonist wins a wife with his art, which hints that status is still the ultimate scarce commodity, and that the drive for status could ultimately become as all-consuming as at Versailles.

This piece was reposted from our previous blog.

When people talk about politics, they generally fall into one of three groups.

The first and by far the largest group basically argues “more good stuff, less bad stuff!” They may use clever rhetoric, but they fundamentally ignore the idea of tradeoffs. They view policy debates as a parade of applause lights or boo lights, and cheer for anything that sounds vaguely nice. They can be persuaded to support or oppose any policy just by changing the wording from “provide more government services” to “raise taxes to make big government bigger.” All Moldbuggian arguments aside, this group of people is the best possible argument against democracy.

The second group takes a more sophisticated route. They understand that most policy decisions involve trade-offs, and argue accordingly. They may claim that yes, government welfare does distort incentives somewhat, but at the margin we should be doing a little bit more to help the poorest people in society. Or perhaps aggressive policing does represent an encroachment on civil liberties, but that public safety is important enough that we should empower the police a little bit more. These sorts of debates can get just as heated as the first sort, but they’re noticeably saner. Although these people may disagree on values, everyone is aware that they’re working off a reasonable and sane description of how the world actually works.

The third group takes things to an even higher level of nuance and sophistication. They basically argue “more good stuff, less bad stuff!”

2.

I had a hard time really understanding the neoreactionary term “anarcho-tyranny.” Wikipedia credits it to Samuel T Francis, who had this to say about it:

What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny – the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

The problem was that it seemed like an empty piece of rhetoric. You could point out any bit of degeneracy and call it anarchy, then turn around and point to any policy you dislike as tyranny. So all “anarcho-tyranny” boils down to is “hey, the world doesn’t totally conform to my standards!” – which for anyone of any ideological stripe is always a pretty good bet.

But I’ve come to understand that anarcho-tyranny, properly used, is a much more specific diagnosis. It is describing a particular set of adaptations that societies are forced to use when they’re living in the aftermath of a collapse in what I’ll call social technology.

Group 2, the one that argues politics in terms of tradeoffs, is basically correct about how policy works. Governments decide how much tax money to raise and give to the poor, and how strong their police forces need to be to control crime – keeping in mind that both taxes and police have downsides and it’s quite possible to have too much of either. You could view this as a production possibilities frontier, with a standard exchange rate between taxes raised and poor people helped, or between police power and deterred crime. And you can ponder this curve, look at where we’re standing at a society, and argue about whether we should be sliding a little bit up or a little bit down this curve.

What this tug-of-war game misses is that it’s sometimes possible to get better at both sides of the bargain. When medieval charities organized early hospitals in Europe, the economies of scale meant that you could actually help more poor sick people per dollar raised. When the police are able to work effectively with a law-abiding citizenry, they can be more effective at stopping crime while still being Officer Friendly.

We use the term “technology” when we discover a process that lets you get more output for less investment, whether you’re trying to produce gallons of oil or terabytes of storage. We need a term for this kind of institutional metis – a way to get more social good for every social sacrifice you have to make – and “social technology” fits the bill. Along with the more conventional sort of technology, it has led to most of the good things that we enjoy today. [1]

The flip side, of course, is that when you lose social technology, both sides of the bargain get worse. You keep raising taxes yet the lot of the poor still deteriorates. You spend tons of money on prisons and have a militarized police force, yet they seem unable to stop muggings and murder. And this is the double bind that “anarcho-tyranny” addresses. Once you start losing social technology, you’re forced into really unpleasant tradeoffs, where you have sacrifice along two axes of things you really value. [2]

3.

Start with a pleasant town, with a trusting, cooperative, watched over by professional, friendly policemen who knows the streets, and the townsfolk, like the back of their hands. Crime is rare, but when it happens, it’s news, and the people, from the concerned neighbor to the kid who reads way too many detective novels, eagerly overwhelm the police with their offers of help. With that information and cooperation, what crimes there are usually are solved without so much as a baton broken out, and the community is grateful for being protected.

Then, almost imperceptibly, things begin to change. There begins to grow an idea that authority figures are not to be trusted. At first it’s just a few kids at the local college with some odd political ideas, but pretty soon the town’s poor pick up on it too, with the notion that their loyalty is to their fellow poor rather than to the town’s government and police force. And before long, even otherwise law-abiding people are refusing to cooperate with any police investigations. At the same time, riding on a wave of new complaints about police oppression, the state starts passing laws that make it a harder and longer process to hand down long prison sentences. The police is backed into a corner, both less capable of gathering information to investigate crimes, and facing an uphill legal battle to prosecute alleged criminals. Crime starts creeping up, despite the promises of increasingly desperate mayors and commissioners. Being a beat cop looks like a terrible career choice, the smart kids stay away and so the ranks start getting filled with less qualified candidates, who care less about their work and more about their pensions. The force becomes increasingly alienated from the town, seeing the poor districts as enemy territory, and it starts seeming less bad to use a little enhanced interrogation to crack a tough case.

You graduated from the local college and settled down for the long haul. It’s election season, and you flip to the mayoral debate. Police reform is the hot button issue, and it’s something that’s been on your mind a lot lately. One of your friends had his car broken into a month ago. Just a few weeks ago you heard that one of your coworkers got mugged and you do a double take – that’s a street that you used to play on as a kid. Naturally, you resent the spike in crime. But at the same time, you’re disgusted at the increasingly boorish behavior of the police – it seems like there’s always a police brutality scandal in the news, and you know that’s only the ones you hear about. The moderator finishes his question and one candidate responds, saying that the only way to get a handle on crime is to give more and more powers to the police forces – which, a little voice whispers, you know they’ll just end up abusing. His opponent responds, saying that the real problem is the growing militarization of the police, leading to the citizenry understandably unwilling to work with them. The only way forward is to assuage fear of police brutality by giving more protections to those accused of a crime – many of which, the little voice whispers, are in fact guilty. No matter what you do, all that either candidate can offer is with higher crime and a more unpleasant justice system than you remember from your childhood. You turn off the television in disgust, and decide that this November you’re going to do the one thing that will really make a difference. You’re going to write a strongly worded letter to the editor. [3]

4.

The fascinating thing about this notion of social technology is that once you start looking at politics through this lens, you start seeing its influence everywhere. A lot of our thorniest political battles involve two sides desperately trying not to lose too much ground in the aftermath of a loss of social technology. Civil libertarians bemoaned the growth of the police state while law and order types bewail soaring crime statistics. Left-wingers bemoan the lack of progress on poverty, while right-wingers point out that the ratchet of federal funding is clicking upwards with no end in sight. And because of human loss aversion, these fights are often some of the most bitter debates in politics. Both sides remember a time when they were much closer to achieving their values, and neither wants to backslide further now.

So that is the value of the term anarcho-tyranny. It points out these situations where we as a society are getting less for more – where we’re losing social technology. Of course, just because we can diagnose a loss of social technology doesn’t mean it’s straightforward to figure out exactly what delicate institutions were giving us the bounty to begin with. And it’s even trickier to figure out what we need to do so that our institutions have incentives to be more and more functional – to sustain the same kind of progress in social technology that we have experienced in material technology. Politics is hard, and the idea of social technology doesn’t suddenly make everything easier. But it points us in the right direction, and starts us asking more interesting questions.

The third level of political discussion is “what happened to our social technology, and how do we get it back?”

[1] In fact, this is more or less explicitly the argument that Palantir made as to why they were not evil, despite running essentially a huge intelligence bureau. They argued that the government was going to do whatever it took to prevent another terrorist attack, no matter how intrusive it would have to become. So the only way that directive wouldn’t result in Orwellian levels of domestic spying is if they had access to software that let them more efficiently target the bad guys without needing as much invasive snooping on ordinary citizens – if they got better technology. Now, given recent revelations about the extent of NSA snooping, we may well laugh at that argument, but the Palantir folks would likely argue, and with some justification, that without their tools, domestic surveillance today would be even worse.

[2] I am aware that there is a second, distinct use of the term “anarcho-tyranny” – that when the government deliberately tilts the playing field of a tribal conflict by letting Group A terrorize Group B, while cracking down tyrannically when Group B attempts to defend itself or retaliate. This is a real phenomenon – whether in Nazi-Communist street fights in Weimar Germany or in the coverup in Rotherham. But having one name for two concepts does justice to neither, so I will use anarcho-tyranny only in the context of losing social technology, and leave others to come up with a suitable term for the second concept.

[3] This, in macrocosm, is basically the story of crime in the 20th century. Crime and policing both started out at a relatively benign level. A decline in social technology – involving some of the factors in the story – led to a spike in crime that peaked in 1970. Since then, politicians and police forces have been painstakingly fighting back by massively increasing the budgets and powers of the justice system.

Some people have argued against the idea that crime has gotten much much worse over this time period, on the basis that crime stats have mostly stabilized and even improved since the 1970s. What this argument misses is the enormous investments that have made this relative improvement possible. The police have gotten more expansive powers and more sophisticated technology, the level of incarceration in the US has reached staggering levels, and any private citizen who can afford it spend huge amounts of money cocooning themselves. They pay exorbitant rents to live in safe neighborhoods within cities (where large areas are effectively uninhabitable), move out to the exurbs, or, most dramatically, move into gated communities and apartment buildings that provide a private security force. It’s only with these enormously expensive sacrifices that we’ve eked out a slight downtick in the prevalence of crime; had we not done that, the problem would be much worse.

But at the same time, it’s a sobering fact that these countries, while they’re doing well, are not obviously taking over the world. Having a functional lower-class does buy you a great deal of quality of life. It opens up huge tracts of the city which in the US would be no go zones after dark. Rents are therefore slightly more affordable (although as world-class cities they’re still not exactly cheap) and the availability of low skilled but reliable workers means you can have things like convenience stores in every corner and restaurants that are cheaper than cooking at home. But it doesn’t give the kind of boost to the economy that you’d naïvely expect. Your companies don’t become world-beaters, your GDP doesn’t grow by leaps and bounds. Getting a proper handle on crime is still worth doing, of course, but it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that would take our civilization into a golden age.

There has recently been a great deal of news about riots in Baltimore, with frightening footage and some striking photos of an Orioles game played before an empty stadium. And this, of course, only means that the dysfunction is a little more organized and concentrated than usual; all the statistics and testimony from my friends from there has been to the effect that The Wire is essentially a documentary. But it’s a striking fact that despite all this, Baltimore still has tall buildings. It still has corporate offices providing well-paying jobs. Several of my friends go to graduate and medical schools in Baltimore. Despite deep, deep dysfunction verging on farce, the city still stands, and this is a mystery that needs explaining.

In an earlier post I touched on what I call the Weak Galt Hypothesis to explain why adding women to the workforce didn’t double GDP. The hypothesis is that only a relatively small proportion of the population is actually causally responsible for economic growth. Unlike the original John Galt, I don’t think these people are so few in number they could hide a tiny village in Colorado. In fact I’m probably a little less extreme than Michael Vassar, who claims that about 1% of the population could run the entire economy. But it certainly seems that income inequality understates how much people vary in the ability to create value. Conservatively, one might estimate that a third of the population is necessary to run the economy.

Now, on one hand, the Weak Galt Hypothesis favors a sort of throne and altar conservatism. It reinforces the notion of a natural aristocracy, throws some weight behind the Great Man theory of history, and is joyously anti-democratic as it lauds the virtues of the productive classes. But there’s a dark side to this hypothesis too. The very fact that not all working age people contribute to the economy also means that there is much less pressure to make sure that that bottom two thirds remains productive and civilized.

If the world were still at the level of an agricultural economy, then a state that lost control of its peasants as badly as Baltimore has would be an economic basket case. This level of persistent disorder, unemployment rates, and criminality can only be compared to catastrophes like the Thirty Years’ War or the Black Plague. The news would be showing not an empty Orioles game, but footage of the landing of a Canadian invasion fleet.

But in fact, it seems that having a functional city is pretty much optional if you just want a first world economy. Small private police forces are good enough to give colleges like Johns Hopkins a veneer of normalcy. Office workers will tolerate living in the city, despite all the inconveniences, if it continues to be a Schelling point and the best place for their careers. Critical infrastructure and manufacturing hubs are mostly outside the cities anyway, and can be protected by private security for a reasonable cost. Civilization can route around the dysfunctional peasants with barely a hiccup. A few beacons of civilization are enough to sustain a nation.

The increase in crime in the latter half of the 20th century didn’t happen without cause, it happened because of a set of beliefs that happened to become fashionable – beliefs like leaning hard towards the rights of the accused, having greater sympathy for groups that can claim to be victimized minorities, and distrust of authority. If we were in an agricultural civilization, this could only go so far before the economic strain became intolerable, and policy shifted back to a stable equilibrium. But in a Weak Galt world, the feedback is much weaker. Crime in Baltimore imposes a huge cost, not least on poor Baltimore residents themselves, but it’s not the kind of catastrophic cost that would force our leaders to reconsider their cherished values. The kind of slow burn that Baltimore is going through is considered tolerable and indeed normal.

It’s a sobering thought. The flip side of a Weak Galt economy is that things are allowed to get much, much worse without triggering much of a backlash. The trends that have helped to create such an economy in the first place – mechanization and automation chief among them – show no signs of slowing down. And so it’s entirely possible that this political dysfunction will be allowed to continue, until every city is slouching towards Baltimore.

After all, keep in mind: there are nice suburbs in Baltimore. There are white-collar professionals and fancy academic, some nice restaurants and a nice tourist district in the Inner Harbor, which is usually, though not always, riot free. An America that looks like Baltimore is not going to be unlivable. It would just be a much less pleasant place to live, particularly for those who fall out of the middle class. There are certainly some limits to how far this can go – Zimbabwe demonstrated that having white-owned farms being your only beacons of civilization is not quite enough to sustain an economy. But you will note that Brazil seems to be doing fine.

Ayn Rand’s fantasy of Galt’s Gulch imagined a small number of natural aristocrats noticing that they kept the ungrateful world alive. Feeling their strength, they said “screw the peasants,” seceded from civilization, and the country began to collapse. The reality of the Weak Galt Hypothesis is that the peasants say “screw the aristocrats,” secede from civilization, and the country does not collapse.

I’m using “subculture” to mean a group of people who come together to share their thoughts and culture and time in the context of some shared interest. A group composed of multiple individuals that share ideas and that thus becomes something of a Thing itself. The shared interest isn’t really necessary except as a barrier against dissolution into the ambient cultural soup. Let’s look at how those shared interests can or cannot protect the subculture from dissolution:

If a subculture accepts people from outside who have other affiliations, those people can distort and change the social dynamic, deliberately in a planned way or just because that’s what happens. Especially if there are a lot of people interested in joining from a similar direction.

Imagine a group of people who are interested in X, Y, and Z. Their first boundary is obscurity. While they are relatively unknown, they can explore what can be done with X, Y, and Z, and pick up the occasional fresh mind who is also interested in that. As they begin to develop their theories and start creating interesting ideas and cultural content, and start to become cool, they start to lose their obscurity boundary.

Once they are cool, they have to start worrying about people coming in because they are cool, or because they are something that is happening that can be captured and redirected for other purposes. For example, you might have another group of people who are interested in A, B, and C, which cash out to taking over things and making them about A, B, and C as well as their original topics. You would expect such a predator subculture to be successful if there were a lot of prey subcultures vulnerable to that kind of entry.

If XYZ, and ABC conflict, then counterintuitively, predatory entry is less of a concern, because the conflict prevents the ABC people from being drawn to the XYZ subculture at all. They are in fact repelled by it. But if XYZ and ABC are compatible or orthogonal, then the ABC people will be interested in bringing ABC to XYZ to create XYZ+, and they will be able to, because XYZ wont know to react against it. This usually disrupts the original XYZ subculture and makes it less interesting to the kind of people who were into it in the first place.

So it is important for any growing subculture that values its own existence and cultural continuity to get serious about defending against "hostile" entry by erecting new barriers that repel most plausible entryists. Lets look at some real world examples:

#Gamergate is a great example. The gaming community came together of mostly young mostly men interested in playing video games. As they grew in popularity, cultural richness, and coolness, they became something of a target for "Social Justice Warriors". The "SJWs" are interested in fixing "toxic" cultures by making them more inclusive to women and minorities, and less prone to nasty things like racism and sexism. Gamers are notorious for calling each other "faggots", and using language like “rape” to describe victories. Since such things are not necessarily integral to gaming, the SJW subculture had an in. Anita Sarkeesian, some developers and conference organizers, and a bunch of sympathetic journalists showed up and started peddling Social Justice in Gaming.

Unfortunately, the gaming community had just enough overlap and good relations with the even more toxic imageboard community and other anti-SJW subcultures to offer some resistance. Gamers discovered some seedy behaviour by the SJW types and started harassing them, which was quickly matched from the SJW/Journalist side. At that point it escalated out of the realm of merely verbal scuffles and into campaigns to shut each other down, remove sponsors, and so on.

Another good example of personal significance is Lesswrong. Originally a very interesting community around the art of human rationality, i.e. how to think real good, it left its political back door open to increasing levels of Social Justice entry: polyamory, cuddle piles, anti-racism, anti-sexism, identity politics, feminism, socialism, open borders, sex work, etc. As far as I can tell, for a large number of LWers, the community is more or less continuous with standard Tumblr Social Justice. This happened because Lesswrong’s nominal subject does not directly contradict Social Justice. If Lesswrong had instead been repellent to SJWs, instead of attractive, I think this may not have happened.

There are of course hundreds of other examples of communities transformed by such dynamics, but what I’m getting at here is the general structure of entry and subversion between subcultures.

This piece by a fellow writer was reposted from our previous blog.

I won’t touch on the issue of determinants of fertility here, except to link to several able expositions on the problem by Sarah (required reading) and Hurlock. I’ll also note that this is an area where rigorous (ie scholarly and lightly quantitative) reactionary analysis could be not only novel and valuable but also, if framed appropriately, a venue to some mainstream influence in the small number of governments that have been grappling with this question.

I wanted to push back on the notion of female labor force participation being a strong determinant of long-term economic growth. Certainly in a scenario of short-term existential risk, such as a world war, it makes sense to conscript women as well as men into rote production roles. In the long run, though, the case is much less clear. A while back Scott wrote a good post on how the influx of women into the American workforce mysteriously did not double GDP over that time period. I’d commented with a couple other thoughts on the matter:

1. Japan and Germany have a much lower fraction of working women, but they have neither fallen further behind the US, *nor*, crucially, have they taken over the world. Naive economic theory would predict that they’d be further behind the US as the US adds more, equally talented people to its workforce. A strong hypothesis that adapting the workplace to women imposes big costs that eat up more than their productivity would predict that lean Japanese and German corporations would gobble up market share from creaky old American ones that have waste Friday afternoons on diversity seminars. Neither seems to be happening.

2. East Asia, by and large, has a productive class of poor people instead of a ghetto class. (This itself is a noteworthy fact that shatters certain assumptions about how inevitable the Western problems of poverty really are, but that’s a separate post.) But, this amazing advance in social technology doesn’t lead to taking over the world. Instead, what you get is lots of cheap restaurants and convenience stores manned with reliable, polite, inexpensive workers – the fulfillment of urban-boosters’ dream of affordable, walkable neighborhoods. This represents a pleasant quality of life increase, but it’s not really something that you can use to scale.

One hypothesis that falls out of these observations is that maybe only a relatively small fraction of people are causally responsible for economically growth/progress. This group doesn’t have to be Galt’s Gulch small – it could be perhaps a third of the population – the point is that at some margin adding additional functional workers doesn’t do anything for growth.

Patriarchy was already quite good at reaping the (relatively small) pool of female geniuses. We had female virtuoso mathematicians and Nobel-quality hard scientists at almost the same rates as we do today. The contributions of these women were valuable, but after you’ve already got the geniuses, adding average women does practically nothing (positive or negative). The most you can get from adding non-genius female labor is quality of life upgrades that don’t scale.

3. Another hypothesis of course is that women did help, but were exactly masked by The Great Stagnation, a decrease in social technology, or your favorite declinist hypothesis. We’re doing less with more – the very definition of losing technology. We really *would* be up to 50% poorer today if we hadn’t suddenly discovered that women could supply valuable labor to help keep the whole thing running.

Emphasis mine, as I’ve increasingly come to believe that the Weak Galt Hypothesis is consistent with observed facts, including the irrelevance of mass female labor force participation.

Michael Vassar, from a very different perspective, holds forth a similar (and much stronger) version of the hypothesis in this talk where he proposes that the current economy could be sustained on the backs of the top 1% alone.

This piece was reposted from our previous blog.

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who suffered a crisis of faith of sorts. His startup, which initially had an extremely ambitious, world-altering business plan, had to retrench and start to find a more modest product-market fit. He was upset, not so much because of decreased prospects for a big dollar exit, but because, as he put it, “if I’m not trying to save the world, what’s the point of all this?”

It’s a standard narrative in the startup world: “the world is broken; I have a really ambitious plan to fix it.” But what I told him was that this is a totally crazy way of measuring both impact and a meaningful life. Most of the people who make a big impact in the world are doing paperwork, publishing research, working with the constraints of the system. They’re closer to a paper-pushing bureaucrat than a bold maverick. Sometimes the papers you’re pushing are exit visas for Jews.

The nerd’s sense of measuring everything here is a big handicap when it comes to assessing life meaningfulness. Our instincts for impact evolved in a world where only a few dozen people had real agency in your world; you were part of what we’d perceive as a small ingroup by default, and it wouldn’t be too crazy to think you could be one of the most respected and influential people in the known world. Today, it’s more difficult but still possible to achieve that feeling – but crucially, you have to carefully cultivate insensitivity to scope. You could become the manager of a small business, or a local leader in the Mormon church. Despite all the social disruptions of mobility and super-Dunbar living, that could probably still feel pretty similar from the inside to being a tribal elder.

But then nerds have to come in and ruin everything by measuring in terms of real world impact. And by that metric, nobody measures up to our brain’s expectation of impactfulness. Measured in terms of a civilization of billions, even the most successful career is going to feel like a drop in the bucket, and narrative-based dreams of world-changing are cartoonish. In theory, this quantitative thinking should also provide compensating solace, by saying “Yeah, well at least you did 10x what the average person is able to accomplish,” yet in practice I haven’t seen that many people deeply satisfied by that. It’s “save the world” or bust, without a sense of moderation.

It’s also not at all clear that saving the world is the best way to measure your life. Almost all societies in the past had a complex bucket of metrics involving personal virtue, material success, and success of the family – with “impact on the state of the world” being an also-ran at best. I suspect something in that vein is the most sustainable thing for humans, and that the startup bluster is maybe economically adaptive (as a way to overcome risk aversion and to project confidence) but also deeply insane given how human brains work. And the undermining of traditional notions of life success proportionally increases the importance of saving the world.

2.

One of the odd things I’ve noticed in our depictions of great leaders is that a big part of their influence comes from being able to get people to buy into a vision, and thereby get people to do things that they would otherwise never do. An ordinary leader can assemble a bunch of people doing their normal jobs at market wages, but if you can extract an effort or flexibility surplus in service of your vision, that makes it possible to attack a whole different class of coordination problems. Messianic leaders have been a staple throughout history, of course, but it seems that both the supply and the demand for such leaders is at an all-time high. Reading a self-improvement book published in the 1800s, it struck me how much of the leadership advice was personal, almost feudal: to make people follow you, be a publicly virtuous, reliable guy, someone people would be proud to work for. By contrast, for the vision-based leader, the pathos of the vision precedes the ethos of his claim to leadership ability.

I think this demand is related to our dysfunctional sense of meaningfulness. An undermining of traditional sources of meaningfulness leads people to seek meaning in their work, and this produces both a demand and an incentive for narrative-supplying entrepreneurs to fill that gap in exchange for super-market loyalty and dedication. This is potentially a fair bargain – the question, of course, is whether the entrepreneurs end up delivering, or whether they’re just providing the leverage to inflate a meaningfulness bubble that never gets paid off.

3.

There’s a phenomenon in psychiatry where people with two different psychiatric disorders – narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder – are frequently found in pairs. Commonly, you’d have a narcissist and borderline as close friends, or a (usually) male narcissist in a relationship with a (usually) female borderline. Narcissism is exactly what it sounds like: someone who for whatever reason has a deeply held need to be admired and considers his life story the most important thing in the world. Borderline personality disorder is best defined as a lack of a sense of identity; they tend to have huge emotional swings and identify themselves with a rapid succession of people in their lives. The narcissist needs others to validate his self-narrative; the borderline needs someone to give her a narrative to live. And so, it may not be surprising that relationships between a narcissist and borderline are pretty frequent, and, if not exactly stable, at least as stable as can be expected for people with personality disorders.

You can see where this is going. The need for, and premium on, vision-based leadership sort of looks like a widespread, subclinical version of borderline personality disorder – maybe we could rebrand it as “chronic questlessness.” Of course I’m not suggesting that people are crazy in the Beautiful Mind sense. Psychiatric disorders in general and personality disorders in particular are more a gradient than a Boolean diagnosis; they’re almost always exaggerations of heuristics that normal people use all the time. The threshold for diagnosis is nothing more than “okay, you’ve got some weird stuff going on; does it interfere with your functioning?” So what I’m suggesting can be translated to saying that there’s a broad-based, subtle shift in heuristics resulting in a lot of people seeking outside opinion on what they should value.

4.

For a long time I regarded the save-the-world thing as a basically harmless motivating delusion, the nerd equivalent of the coach’s pre-game pep talk where he tells your team that, against all odds and in the face of all objective evidence to the contrary, you are a bunch of winners and are going to take home the division trophy. But seeing my friend having his motivational system semi-permanently warped was something of a wake-up call, and got me thinking about how to avoid being sucked into that attractor. It’s tough because the tools of quantitative analysis that underpin this change-the-world heuristic are valid and indeed valuable. But these observations suggest that we should be wary of how easy it is to smuggle in the assumption that our benchmark should be a totally unrealistic amount of efficacy. And at the same times they argue for keeping a diversified life-meaning portfolio – you should include things like family success, physical and emotional quality of life, human relationships, and even relative social status as part of how you measure your life.

This piece was reposted from our previous blog.

Any productive entropy resistant dynamic has an internal economy of connected mechanisms that need to make certain assumptions. The assumptions are often of the form that things deliberately excluded will stay gone, and that things produced will stay available for your use. That is, that investments are protected from destruction by the outside environment. This is accomplished by setting up barriers that insulate some part of the world from leakage or interference. Here are some examples:

• A clean room has a barrier that prevents circulation of air except through controlled processes, this allows you to invest in the creation of specially conditioned and dust-free air and be sure that your industrial processes will take place in that clean and controlled air.
• Legal property rights allow economic actors to make investments in things they will need in the future without much having to worry about losing them to theft.
• Process and interface boundaries in computer science allow you to invest in carefully constructed and fragile data structures that you can be sure will not be damaged by wayward programmers or segfaults in other processes.
• A living cell creates certain chemicals and proteins with it’s internal mechanisms that it expects to be able to use in the future. It also excludes certain chemicals so that its processes can assume they won’t mess with them. The cell wall contains and protects these investments.

If you dissolve the cell wall, the cell dies because it is no longer able to capture the gains of its own labor and profit from its own investments. Barriers and investment protection of some kind are necessary for life or any other form of productivity. Lack of barriers is death.

A nation-state or community is itself a living thing: investing in good people, getting rid of bad people, and organizing them into social structures. Barriers to entry, exit, and interference allow these investments to be made and guaranteed, which allows super-individual social structures like civilization to live. The first civilizations were farming communities that built walls and armies against raiders.

A proposal to dissolve all controls on entry and exit from communities and nations is similar to the proposal to dump Penicillin in a bacterial colony. Soup composed of homogenized life-bits is not alive, despite being constitutionally indistinguishable from life (for a while). Mind you in the case of civilizations, removing one set of walls does not kill it, because civilizations are quite robust, and will find other ways to discriminate, but it does make it harder to live. For example, if we require companies to hire representative samples of the population by race and gender, and they will do things like put all the people they would not have hired in one of the less critical departments, to keep the effect of segregation in the critical departments, but they still have to pay for it, and it is less stable.

Things without boundaries rapidly become unthings.

This piece by a fellow writer was reposted from our previous blog.

Why do backpackers feel safe sleeping outside in public at 10,000 feet but not in their own city parks? It is the steep barrier to entry that creates this microcosm of community that so naturally emerges: anyone who has made it here has the physical, material, social, and informational resources to pass this natural test of good character.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Burning Man – the travel and resource outlay required to get to the desert festival forms a barrier high enough to allow for the formation of a temporary community, one in which participants feel safer interacting with strangers than they might in their own hometowns.

Natural human intuition about character has served people well in forming and pruning communities for thousands of years. Specific legal interventions in the United States, however, have limited the ability of individuals to act on their local social intuition and traditions, substituting a legal notion of radical inclusion. Legislation removed barriers to entry that people had erected for their communities, acting in turn on four core areas of social cohesion. While communities at first adapted to the new restrictions and evolved around them, eventually they became so warped that they began to fail to perform their most basic functions: providing members with social belonging, usefulness to others, a sense of meaning, and safety.

The Publican

The first of the big four areas of life to be threatened by legislation was business – especially the kind of business that might have been called an inn or public house in another time, that is, public accommodations and restaurants. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin illegal for businesses of this kind. Federal and state laws have since expanded this anti-discrimination provision significantly; almost half of all states also prohibit discrimination against gay people by businesses, and Colorado recently forced a religious baker to either bake cakes for gay weddings, against his religious principles, or go out of business.

No longer does the restaurateur, publican, or even baker have the privilege to exclude anyone he chooses from his premises and service, for any reason or no reason. Some argue that the publican is better off; with more potential customers, his market is larger now. But is money the only imaginable motivation for owning a small business of this sort, the kind that underpins communities? A barrier to entry for customers at the pub has been removed. The only barrier that is still legal – as we will see in later sections – is money. Rather than having an exclusive pub with its clientele weeded by a kingly proprietor, the patrons must pay high prices as a substitute barrier to entry. Another solution is to arrange businesses so that customers need not interact with strangers, a small-scale version of modern city planning.

This is not a defense of the practice of racial discrimination. But outlawing bad discrimination has chilled the expression of good discrimination – of intuitive, personal discrimination, which sometimes but not always takes things like race or sexual orientation into account. (The race of neighbors at Upper Monarch Lake would scarcely make a difference.) Discrimination – the selection of some and exclusion of others for social interaction – had acquired the characteristic of a slur, but it is a necessary faculty for humans and groups. Peaceful people can hardly remain so if they can’t exclude destructive people. Discrimination, like speech, needs to be free from the chilling effects of lawsuits.

The right of a business proprietor to kick out anyone he likes seems a minuscule freedom in comparison to decades of legal oppression of a race of people descended from legal slaves. But black communities have served as a mascot for legislation rather than actually benefitting from it. Black communities in particular have been deprived through well-intended legislation of their community engines, black-owned small businesses. Black-owned small businesses not only employ more black people than equivalent white-owned small businesses, they employ more labor overall per dollar earned. Their value to the community is not just reflected in employment, however; they serve as meeting places, their proprietors as near, demonstrably successful role models. Unfortunately, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up white businesses to black customers, drawing black customers away from black-owned businesses, it did not also cause white customers to patronize black-owned businesses. Today, only a nickel of every black dollar goes to a black-owned business; self-employment participation among black people has been significantly below white participation, and quite flat, for decades. The black-owned small businesses visible in street shots of downtown Oakland in the 1960s are nowhere to be found today.

The Schools

Schools were the second core area affected by legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 paved the way for integration of public schools, but it did not truly tear apart communities until the legal decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education six years later. This decision authorized the busing across cities of white children to black schools, and black children to white schools.

The decision imposed a significant change in the relationship of a school to a community, and a child to his schoolmates. Communities in which busing was implemented experienced white flight and degraded race relations. Worst of all, the academic achievement of minority students failed to improve. This unfortunate result is consistent with modern longitudinal research to the effect that equalizing educational spending does not increase educational achievement.

The government’s substitution of the neighborhood school model with an all-city model again removed a barrier to entry, one that, parents found, could only be recreated legally with lots of money – by moving to the suburbs or sending children to private schools.

Housing

The Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act, outlawed discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, or national origin; disability and family status (e.g. being unmarried or having children) were later added to the protected categories. Many states have broadened this protection as well. The decision to sell a house or rent a living space, with all its potential externalities falling on the neighbors, became the government’s business. The local judgment of individuals in the community was replaced with the government’s judgment that any buyer or renter who could pay the price was as good as any other as a neighbor. This removed any barrier to entry besides price for choice of neighbors.

Suburbs look nothing like any functioning society that has ever existed. It may take more than houses and strip malls and schools for a healthy community to satisfy its citizens’ needs; the new markets have proven themselves better at supplying an idea (“gated community”) or temporary feeling (national chain bars) of social belonging than the real thing.

It is not necessary that actual discrimination occur for a landlord or seller of property to be sued; it is easy to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, which is to say, enough of a case to oblige the landlord to spend thousands of dollars responding to the claim, even if it ultimately loses in court. Here as elsewhere, expression of even good discrimination is chilled by the threat of a lawsuit for bad discrimination. The economic need to avoid lawsuits deprives the landlord of the ability to rent only to those of good reputation and morals, or whatever criteria, other than money, that he chooses. Depriving a landlord or seller of this right deprives the neighbors, by proxy, of the right to use their influence to choose whom they live near – again, except as may be measured in money. However, a geographical means of exclusion, measured in commute times, has also soared, despite the persistent, negative effects that long commutes have on subjective well-being.

Crime

Finally, many civil rights decisions – here generally court cases rather than legislation – severely hampered police in their ability to catch and punish criminals who violate community standards. At the same time, the ever-escalating drug war has made police less interested in solving crimes that directly harm individuals, such as burglary, robbery, and rape. Drug crimes, like traffic crimes, are plentiful and easy to prove, even in light of the new legal limitations; they have been given the additional incentive of asset forfeiture, wherein property used in the commission of drug crimes may be seized by police. Violent crimes and property crimes have become less attractive to police departments, and more difficult to solve anyway.

The rights of criminal defendants were significantly expanded during the 1960s. Miranda v. Arizona required police to formally warn a suspect of his right to remain silent and to legal counsel before attempting to obtain a confession; the rate at which suspects confessed declined significantly, as did the rate at which violent and property crimes were solved. Also in the 1960s, defendants in all felony cases, in state and federal court, were given the right to a state-provided lawyer if they could not afford one (many are not aware that this is a relatively newly-discovered Constitutional protection). The expansion of the rights of criminal defendants continued into the 1980s; the few reductions in the rights of defendants have been most relevant to drug crimes, such as the holding that a dog sniff of an automobile does not count as a search. These new rights were not given to accused criminals by their communities; they were imposed on communities by federal courts.

In part because of all the new protections, and in part because of the skyrocketing crime rates due to the drug war and the destruction of the cities, criminal trials have become very rare, declining, in federal courts, from trials occurring in 16% of cases in 1962 to less than 3% of cases in 2010. Plea bargaining or the dismissal of charges is substituted in the vast majority of cases. Despite courts and prisons crowded with bodies, clearance rates for serious crimes declined precipitously. The prisons and court system used to form a fairly reliable barrier protecting communities from harmful people; courts and drug legislation degraded this barrier, so that once again, housing prices, long commutes, and investment in private security became the only legal means to escape proximity to criminals.

No Barriers, No Community

By legally removing community-enforced barriers to entry to important institutions such as neighborhoods, schools, and businesses, and by undermining the tools available to protect communities from predators, legislation and court decisions have dismantled existing communities and forced the formation of inferior communities whose power of exclusion is limited to wealth. With money as the only legal community barrier for housing and schools, family formation has become much less affordable for people with high standards, which is to say responsible people.

Why were people willing to let go of their community boundaries? It wasn’t always voluntary. In some cases, such as busing to integrate schools and expanding rights for accused criminals, courts created new law that would never have passed the legislative process. However, elected officials passed many of the laws that undermined community barriers.

A new morality, originating among the intellectual elite, paved the way for the coming changes and hastened them once underway. This morality, emphasizing racial and sexual equality as its sacred values, gradually replaced its traditional moral counterparts. Good discrimination was certainly not recognized as a sacred value; bad discrimination acquired the status of almost a religious violation. According to the new morality, people are not only equal, they are actually fungible.

Even when faced with terrible consequences, people are reluctant to even think about trading off their sacred values against non-sacred values, and community barriers and good discrimination are definitely non-sacred, even actively tabooed. The people who were most enthusiastic about removing the boundaries were those with the most ability to avoid the direct effects of the subsequent community failures, either geographically or economically. The sacred value of equality proved an excellent banner under which to increase federal power, necessarily decreasing the power of individuals, states, and towns.

Small businesses provide a “third space” for adults to interact with each other outside of work and home. Schools are the first major social institution children experience; in the years they are stuck in school, they form their beliefs about social belonging and their social behaviors. Residential neighborhoods used to provide the opportunity for social interaction and helpfulness, but today only a small proportion of Americans even know their neighbors’ names (and the proportion is lowest for younger Americans). Deprived of face-to-face proximity, the possibility for repeated, unplanned meetings, and environments encouraging intimacy, today’s adults report difficulty making friends. And crime without justice makes the trusting behaviors that build community seem foolhardy.

Social belonging is a foundational human need, on par with food and water, and it is something a person cannot provide for himself. Isolation and loneliness make people miserable. We need not only the company of others, but a sense that we are useful to them, helpful and not a burden. There are few opportunities for helpfulness in the absence of community, and it hurts the would-be Samaritan as much as those in need of help. Participating in a community also provides a sense of meaning; suffering is inevitable in human life, but sharing it within a framework of meaning bolstered by a group makes it easier to bear. It is a very modern and untested notion that a single person can give himself a sense of meaning. And without community, we are not safe – from crime or other misfortunes. We are assured that diversity is strength (cf. a more controversial analysis), but the doors are locked, the alarm systems are on, and everyone drives everywhere.

In a modern American town, there are no children wandering in the woods or playing on sidewalks; as in the UK, they have lost the right to roam. Strip malls and big-box retail dominate the built landscape. Both the car itself and the distance it must travel provide protective barriers where the community has failed to do so. In sufficiently diverse neighborhoods, healthy, dense social networks do not form; people trust each other less, even others who look like them. The doors are all locked, and the people are inside. Each space is open to everyone, according to his willingness to pay – but not particularly well-suited to anyone. There are houses and schools and restaurants there, but hardly any community. You’ll have to climb a very high mountain for that.

1. There can be no royal authority without the military.
2. There can be no military without wealth.
3. The reaya produce the wealth.
4. The sultan keeps the reaya by making justice reign.
5. Justice requires harmony in the world.
6. The world is a garden, its walls are the state.
7. The state’s prop is the religious law.
8. There is no support for the religious law without royal authority.

These statements were usually written around the circumference of a circle, as the last statement leads to the first, the numbering is arbitrary. A government unable to contain or initiate violence is well on its way to governing a failed or subjugated state. Suppressing organized crime, quelling a revolt and repelling a foreign army are much the same activity just on different scales. Royal authority is sovereignty. In the historic context of the Empire we see echoes here of the steppe traditions of Central Asia where sovereignty was the prerogative of a single family chosen by God, a family possession rather than elective leadership.

A military is needed then; the ability to inflict organized and controlled violence on a large scale. Gangs are essentially small tribes of men who have to be disciplined, yet retain Asabiyyah, that is a bond to each other, lest risk ineffectiveness. The values and traits Ottoman authors attribute to this class rises from the culture of the Ghazi’s raiders that flourished from the 13th century onwards, pushing out Byzantine and even rival Islamic influence out of a chaotic Anatolia. Besides the social technology to organize the military, one needs significant material resources.

The reaya is the class of subjects that pay taxes providing these resources. In the empire the reaya where peasants, urban dwellers and nomads. Originally Muslim and non-Muslim, they were mostly non-Muslim after the peak of Suleiman’s reign. Limited in important ways, such as being barred from joining the military or their dress being regulated, they are the flock sheared for the rent needed to support the ruling and military class of the askeri, that form the backbone of the king’s authority.

The distinction between the rulers and the ruled made clear, this was further reinforced by Muslim theoreticians who in the 13th century had already developed a view of society that postulated the existence of four social classes and equated each with a natural element. This burying and containment of early Islamic equalitarianism, is striking in its similarity to the evolution of Christianity in Late Antiquity.

Justice, that is law and order, the reliable expectation of a stable future is required for both the prosperity and docility of the reaya. Places that primarily rely on police forces for security are usually very unsafe places. The bulk of order emerges from the communities of people policing each other through local punishment for norm violations. The norms themselves are hopefully not dysfunctional. Organized violence is used to disrupt and suppress those who would invade such gardens.

Gardening requires pulling weeds as well, the task of an official belief system. In the long run such a system can not hope to stand without the support of the sovereign. It will be continuously assaulted by more adaptive mostly malign ideologies and associated cults spontaneous generated by the people or worse defecting clergy. Religion provides innumerable social services, when tamed it is a strong pro-civilizational force, providing much needed social technology that alleviates many problems. For example it can lower time preferences in a population by promising an afterlife of punishment or rewards. When there is formally an absence of an official belief system the wild retakes the garden. Religion becomes worthless as a possible repository of values, as Methodists don’t go to heaven. Worse as heresy flourishes, being allowed to grow and mutate without restrictions by those with good incentives, it can create dangerous beasts such as Millenarianism.

The Ottoman State under Sultan Mehmed IV gives an example of the containment of the latter. The Sultan politely insisted that if Sabbatai Zevi was the Messiah this is an extremely important matter, and he suggested the claims should be empirically tested as soon as possible. With arrows. Zevi suddenly realizing the state religion was correct, proceeded to help disarm the beliefs of his cult. Jim’s Algorithm for containing holier-than-thou spirals works. Mehmed is also interesting for his encounter with an English carrier of destabilizing heresy, the Quaker Mary Fisher. The latter’s account is interesting but hard to trust, what did the Sultan really make of her? An armed escort can mean many things.

This synthesis of steppe traditions, high Islamic theories of late Persia and the wild frontier Ghazi ideal, rises as a coherent model possessing much embedded wisdom, meshing well with our own discoveries on the subject. I for now leave it as an exercise the reader to draw out the Circle of Equity as a graph and then consider what the external factors that impact each node are. What are the signs one node is failing or growing stronger?

If you look carefully you can see it playing out as a virtuous circle or vicious cycle in the modern world. In my next piece I will elaborate on how it relates to and I think even explains anarcho-tyranny, a concept with good predictive power we often use, but that unfortunately remains under-explored.

This piece was reposted from our previous blog.

Our friend Karl F. Boetel made this: