> What that study failed to show, however, is causality. ... Peterson used to say during his
> 2018 heyday that many of his fans came from the other direction. They’d start out as
> alt-right 4chan trolls...
I think this goes both ways. Personally, I follow Slate Star Codex, whose discussions of politics caused me to go from "typical Obama-era liberal progressive" to "conservatives and reactionaries make some good points but are still generally wrong" to seeing the pandemic, the abysmal response to it, the escalating culture war, the media's response to these events, &c., as signs that American government and society are fundamentally dysfunctional and that the neoreactionaries were basically right about the Cathedral. On the other hand, I've heard other readers say that they started out in the far right (as MRAs or neoreactionaries) and were inspired by SSC to adopt a less extreme and more carefully considered ideology: cf. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lixeor/why_slate_star_codex_is_silicon_valleys_safe_space/gn6c1zs/
On the comparison of ideology to fashion, you might find https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ interesting; it makes a similar comparison in an effort to describe both the progressives and the anti-woke, although its specific predictions were wrong because the author based them on the ideas of his friends, which turned out to be unrepresentative.
A yes, a Scott classic. I found myself moving through Section II in 2019 and 2020 for sure.
It's curious that that piece was written in 2014 and includes this snippet:
***
The explanation I like least is that it comes from reading too much neoreaction. I originally rejected this hypothesis because I don’t believe most what I read. But I’m starting to worry that there are memes that, like Bohr’s horseshoe, affect you whether you believe them or not: memes that crystallize the wrong pattern, or close the wrong feedback loop. I have long suspected social justice contains some of these. Now I worry neoreaction contains others.
In particular I worry about the neoreactionary assumption that leftism always increases with time, and that today’s leftism confined to a few fringe idiots whom nobody really supports today becomes tomorrow’s mainstream left and the day after tomorrow’s “you will be fired if you disagree with them”. Without me ever really evaluating its truth-value it has wormed its way into my brain and started haunting my nightmares.
***
It would be interesting to press Scott on whether he's reevaluated his priors on neoreaction in light of the past year and half of culture war battle.
To be clear, I'm not a neoreactionary, but not because I don't think their case is necessarily wrong. I think their conclusions based on their observations are off base. Neoreactionaries identify "democracy is fucked" quite well, but then they jump to the conclusion that we should get rid of it or overhaul it without looking at the efficacy of the current fuckedness. This spilled across my facebook feed the other day, and I don't claim to have written it, but it lines up very well with a lot of my thinking the past few years:
***
Today's United States: Participatory fascism
Robert Higgs uses the term “participatory fascism” (which he borrowed from an old friend and former Ph.D. student, Charlotte Twight). This is a descriptively precise term in that it recognizes the fascistic organization of resource ownership and control in our system, despite the preservation of nominal private ownership, and the variety of ways in which the state employs political ceremonies, proceedings, and engagements—most important, voting—in which the general public participates. Such participation engenders the sense that somehow the people control the government. Even though this sense of control is for the most part an illusion, rather than a perception well founded in reality, it is important because it causes people to accept government regulations, taxes, and other insults against which they might rebel if they believed that such impositions had simply been forced on them by dictators or other leaders wholly beyond their influence.
For the rulers, participatory fascism is the perfect solution toward which they have been groping for generations, and virtually all of the world’s politico-economic orders are now gravitating toward this system. Outright socialism is a recipe for widespread poverty and for the ultimate dissolution of the economy and the disavowal of its political leadership. Socialism is the wave of the past; everywhere it has been tried seriously, it has failed miserably. Participatory fascism, in contrast, has two decisive advantages over socialism.
The first is that it allows the nominal private owners of resources and firms enough room for maneuver that they can still innovate, prosper, and hence propel the system toward higher levels of living for the masses. If the government’s intervention is pushed too far, this progress slows, and it may eventually cease or even turn into economic regress. However, when such untoward conditions occur, the rulers tend to rein in their plunder and intervention enough to allow a revitalization of the economy. Of course, such fettered economies cannot grow as fast as completely free economies can grow, but the latter system would preclude the plunder and control that the political leaders now enjoy in the fettered system, and hence they greatly prefer the slower-growing, great-plunder system to the faster-growing, no-plunder one.
***
The real question, I think, is whether this system of "participatory fascism" with the illusion of choice at the ballot box is bad or not. It seems to me to produce pretty good outcomes, by comparison to other systems, seeing how the evolution of government is trending towards it. The rub is that it's built on the illusion that voting matters, because that illusion suppresses revolt. If that illusion is dashed then the system goes tits up.
Yes, I know I'm responding to a two year old comment.
I am also not neoreactionary, but the thing they really get right is that the left always trends more insane, and needs to constantly be recontained and, in essence, trimmed back every once in a while. It's like intellectual kudzu.
Not talking about the people, but the ideas definitely need to be mowed every so often, or it gets bad enough that you have to start using controlled burns to get your lawn back.
> Among them you find immigrants, atheists, second wave feminists, rationalists, Christians, conservatives, Muslims, libertarians, older liberals, Blacks, Latinos, racists, Asians, white nationalists, Jews, neoreactionary alt-right thinkers, female athletes, and whatever counts as a Nazi these days.
It's because the original study uses the old straight line ideological axis instead of the horseshoe one. "Free thinkers" are not anti-Woke, they're anti-ideological-rigidity, which is the defining characteristic of both the extreme right and the extreme left. But (I suspect) the study's authors betray their wokeness-bias by limiting the categories in such a way that IDW leftists get lumped with alt-right - such that their categories are actually "those that think like us" and "everybody else".
I think if you read their study they didn't intentionally put the IDW there. They were slotted there with an unsupervised clustering algorithm. Math put them there.
I think they went back and said they could tweak it to pull Sam and friends out of the seed for the unsupervised sorting algorithm bits, but even if they did, it's going to be hard to beat the cohesion they got with the first trial.
I like your interpretation of the pattern. Some IDW fans and David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom are in some of the facebook groups I'm in such as GameB that are transpartisan and post-postmodern in origin, so there was a lot of interest a few months ago.
Oops, almost forgot to mention: the GameB community has had several major culture wars incidents, but Jim Rutt and the GameB leadership are as unimpressed with the "woke" bs as you are, so the "woke" zombies never got a foothold. But is is an ongoing, never ending struggle.
> What that study failed to show, however, is causality. ... Peterson used to say during his
> 2018 heyday that many of his fans came from the other direction. They’d start out as
> alt-right 4chan trolls...
I think this goes both ways. Personally, I follow Slate Star Codex, whose discussions of politics caused me to go from "typical Obama-era liberal progressive" to "conservatives and reactionaries make some good points but are still generally wrong" to seeing the pandemic, the abysmal response to it, the escalating culture war, the media's response to these events, &c., as signs that American government and society are fundamentally dysfunctional and that the neoreactionaries were basically right about the Cathedral. On the other hand, I've heard other readers say that they started out in the far right (as MRAs or neoreactionaries) and were inspired by SSC to adopt a less extreme and more carefully considered ideology: cf. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lixeor/why_slate_star_codex_is_silicon_valleys_safe_space/gn6c1zs/
On the comparison of ideology to fashion, you might find https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ interesting; it makes a similar comparison in an effort to describe both the progressives and the anti-woke, although its specific predictions were wrong because the author based them on the ideas of his friends, which turned out to be unrepresentative.
A yes, a Scott classic. I found myself moving through Section II in 2019 and 2020 for sure.
It's curious that that piece was written in 2014 and includes this snippet:
***
The explanation I like least is that it comes from reading too much neoreaction. I originally rejected this hypothesis because I don’t believe most what I read. But I’m starting to worry that there are memes that, like Bohr’s horseshoe, affect you whether you believe them or not: memes that crystallize the wrong pattern, or close the wrong feedback loop. I have long suspected social justice contains some of these. Now I worry neoreaction contains others.
In particular I worry about the neoreactionary assumption that leftism always increases with time, and that today’s leftism confined to a few fringe idiots whom nobody really supports today becomes tomorrow’s mainstream left and the day after tomorrow’s “you will be fired if you disagree with them”. Without me ever really evaluating its truth-value it has wormed its way into my brain and started haunting my nightmares.
***
It would be interesting to press Scott on whether he's reevaluated his priors on neoreaction in light of the past year and half of culture war battle.
To be clear, I'm not a neoreactionary, but not because I don't think their case is necessarily wrong. I think their conclusions based on their observations are off base. Neoreactionaries identify "democracy is fucked" quite well, but then they jump to the conclusion that we should get rid of it or overhaul it without looking at the efficacy of the current fuckedness. This spilled across my facebook feed the other day, and I don't claim to have written it, but it lines up very well with a lot of my thinking the past few years:
***
Today's United States: Participatory fascism
Robert Higgs uses the term “participatory fascism” (which he borrowed from an old friend and former Ph.D. student, Charlotte Twight). This is a descriptively precise term in that it recognizes the fascistic organization of resource ownership and control in our system, despite the preservation of nominal private ownership, and the variety of ways in which the state employs political ceremonies, proceedings, and engagements—most important, voting—in which the general public participates. Such participation engenders the sense that somehow the people control the government. Even though this sense of control is for the most part an illusion, rather than a perception well founded in reality, it is important because it causes people to accept government regulations, taxes, and other insults against which they might rebel if they believed that such impositions had simply been forced on them by dictators or other leaders wholly beyond their influence.
For the rulers, participatory fascism is the perfect solution toward which they have been groping for generations, and virtually all of the world’s politico-economic orders are now gravitating toward this system. Outright socialism is a recipe for widespread poverty and for the ultimate dissolution of the economy and the disavowal of its political leadership. Socialism is the wave of the past; everywhere it has been tried seriously, it has failed miserably. Participatory fascism, in contrast, has two decisive advantages over socialism.
The first is that it allows the nominal private owners of resources and firms enough room for maneuver that they can still innovate, prosper, and hence propel the system toward higher levels of living for the masses. If the government’s intervention is pushed too far, this progress slows, and it may eventually cease or even turn into economic regress. However, when such untoward conditions occur, the rulers tend to rein in their plunder and intervention enough to allow a revitalization of the economy. Of course, such fettered economies cannot grow as fast as completely free economies can grow, but the latter system would preclude the plunder and control that the political leaders now enjoy in the fettered system, and hence they greatly prefer the slower-growing, great-plunder system to the faster-growing, no-plunder one.
***
The real question, I think, is whether this system of "participatory fascism" with the illusion of choice at the ballot box is bad or not. It seems to me to produce pretty good outcomes, by comparison to other systems, seeing how the evolution of government is trending towards it. The rub is that it's built on the illusion that voting matters, because that illusion suppresses revolt. If that illusion is dashed then the system goes tits up.
Yes, I know I'm responding to a two year old comment.
I am also not neoreactionary, but the thing they really get right is that the left always trends more insane, and needs to constantly be recontained and, in essence, trimmed back every once in a while. It's like intellectual kudzu.
Not talking about the people, but the ideas definitely need to be mowed every so often, or it gets bad enough that you have to start using controlled burns to get your lawn back.
> Among them you find immigrants, atheists, second wave feminists, rationalists, Christians, conservatives, Muslims, libertarians, older liberals, Blacks, Latinos, racists, Asians, white nationalists, Jews, neoreactionary alt-right thinkers, female athletes, and whatever counts as a Nazi these days.
But... those are *all* Nazis...
Here for deicide.
(Great article.)
It's because the original study uses the old straight line ideological axis instead of the horseshoe one. "Free thinkers" are not anti-Woke, they're anti-ideological-rigidity, which is the defining characteristic of both the extreme right and the extreme left. But (I suspect) the study's authors betray their wokeness-bias by limiting the categories in such a way that IDW leftists get lumped with alt-right - such that their categories are actually "those that think like us" and "everybody else".
I think if you read their study they didn't intentionally put the IDW there. They were slotted there with an unsupervised clustering algorithm. Math put them there.
re: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.12843v1.pdf
Didn't they admit the data was party in error?
I think they went back and said they could tweak it to pull Sam and friends out of the seed for the unsupervised sorting algorithm bits, but even if they did, it's going to be hard to beat the cohesion they got with the first trial.
I like your interpretation of the pattern. Some IDW fans and David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom are in some of the facebook groups I'm in such as GameB that are transpartisan and post-postmodern in origin, so there was a lot of interest a few months ago.
I ramble around GameB as well sometimes. It's interesting, if a bit spacey at times.
Oops, almost forgot to mention: the GameB community has had several major culture wars incidents, but Jim Rutt and the GameB leadership are as unimpressed with the "woke" bs as you are, so the "woke" zombies never got a foothold. But is is an ongoing, never ending struggle.
Looking at all the atomized sub-countercultures within the "futurist" community is like looking through a kaleidoscope on mushrooms. :)
I mostly ignore the new age type stuff (which is mostly neolib branding crap anyway) and focus on people like John Vervaeke (cognitive scientist).
HAhaha yeah. Futurists land weird places.
Like Epstein Island.