I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago.
There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) tend to make them float up to positions of power. Others questioned the idea that the aim of a well-functioning society’s “truth market” should be expected to generate actual truths rather than useful beliefs that may or may not be true. I think both of these are excellent criticisms, and I wonder what Mr. Yarvin would say about them. (Perhaps he would not quibble over true-versus-useful, but would say that in general beliefs are most useful when they do in fact correspond to reality. But of course there are many, many counterexamples. As Mencken noted, the average man believes “that his wife is pretty, and his children smart”.)
Here’s something else that left me dissatisfied with the essay: it purported at the outset to present a model that would explain not just the pervasiveness of error in distributed societies, but the system-wide coordination of that error, on puzzlingly short timescales. It didn’t, though.
Writing as Mencius Moldbug a decade or so ago, Mr. Yarvin used the term Gleichshaltung to describe this curious synchronization:
Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.
There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?
I’m afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep—perhaps even Cthulhu himself.
Certainly, the synchronization is not coordinated by any human hierarchical authority. (Yes, there are accreditation agencies, but a Harvard or a Stanford could easily fight them.) The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick. We of the Sith would certainly like to understand it.
The essay I refer to here — A Brief Introduction To Unqualified Reservations — is long (to put it mildly; it’s really a short book), but in brief, what it says about this is that it is the universities that tell the politicians and the press what to think, and the politicians and the press, in turn, tell us what to think. And the universities swim left. As Robert Conquest reminds us, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” (I’m not so sure that the press isn’t in the driver’s seat some of the time too, but let’s not quibble.)
Why is that? Well, that’s a story of its own. But the question here remains: if the universities synchronize everything else, what synchronizes the universities? How is it that Harvard and Stanford settle on exactly the same “beautiful lies” at exactly the same time? Everything flips over all at once — gay marriage, for example, was well beyond the pale always and everywhere throughout all of Western history, until suddenly enthusiasm for it became not just acceptable, but mandatory, in what seemed like no time at all. If you were away camping for a week, you missed it. How did that happen? It really was as if someone had flipped a switch. Who was it? Where’s the switch?
If the system really is distributed, and everything else we’ve talked about is true, then there must be some critical threshold at which it suddenly becomes apparent to everybody upstream of culture, all at once, that some New Thing is now a profitable object for the excitement and gratification of thumos — that is, a path, direct or indirect, to power and status. What distinguishes such a threshold — what makes one New Thing “go critical” while another doesn’t — would be worth understanding.
- Beautiful Lies
- Beautiful Lies, Cont’d
- Beautiful Lies, And A Vulnerability of Academia
5 Comments
Who flips the switch? An excellent question. My tentative answer is that the trend-setters do it themselves. Who are they? Academics, pundits, “entertainers”, and other denizens of the highly compensated but non-productive class. Not every one of of them, of course, but the vast majority of them, who are people of the left. Their guiding principle isn’t the conservation of civilizing norms, but the overthrow of those norms for the thrill of it — like Leopold and Loeb. They are, at least outwardly, as “normal” as it gets in their observance of traditional values. But inwardly they are sociopaths who want to see the applecart turned over and smashed to smithereens. Thus their verbal if not visceral allegiance to abortion, big government, same-sex marriage, gender dysphoria, and whatever else comes along that promises to upset the applecart. Because they are generally wealthy – or at least comfortably affluent — and perched high above the madding crowd, they can bask in the glory of being “socially aware” without suffering the consequences that their fads foist upon the hoi-polloi.
Firstly, let me tell you that the return of the great Moldbug has been a bit disappointing.
Secondly, besides the trend-setters (who are the early adopters of the latest fad), there is a conspiracy at the top flipping the switch, even if we don’t know how it operates. Read this:
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2019/04/easter-worshippers-proves-global.html
I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that human geography is a relatively low-status discipline, and so thought it would get more respect if it became a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism. When I was an assistant professor, I once lunched with two very young women professors in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Science, and they were on fire to make PRTS a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism.
Professors want status, just like everyone else, so low-class fields ape high-class fields, and low-class academics ape high-class academics. Of course there are a few cranks, some of whom practice a high-status crankiness, and few of whom practice a low-status crankiness, but academia greatly prefers conformists over cranks.
Not only do professors want status, they acquire status through the peer-review process. This may sometimes select for truth, but mostly selects for conformity. After all, peer-review is just peer-pressure for professors. I’d like to think there are some hard sciences where a maverick professor can have reality on his side, but through most of academia, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is other professors.
If I ran a restaurant and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of diners. If I were an actor and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of movie-goers. If I am a professor and the reviewers hate me, I am a failed tenure case because all my manuscripts were rejected and student evaluations don’t matter.
I realize that I haven’t explained how something like transgressive Foulcaldian poststructuralism becomes high-status, but I do think status envy and peer pressure go a long way towards explaining why the academic system falls into lockstep once it does.
I think ideas become high-staus as the result of a successful conspiracy to become the elite in a field. A small group that is capable, motivated and loyal can easily rise to the top of a field where the majority are trying to be fair and disinterested. This was clearly how the neo-Marxists infested human geography. Their exoteric doctrine was that they should be tolerated and judged on their merits. Their esoteric doctrine was to massively favor one another in admissions, hirings, publications, awards, elections, etc.
One should not neglect the more mundane effect of the growth of bureaucracy and administration, with universities posing more as corporations than as institutions of higher learning. In many towns the college is the biggest employer, and even in cities its patronage is not inconsiderable. This has led to the inflation of – allow this to be said – minorities and women especially in positions of power, not so much in actual teaching functions but in student organizations, specific sinecures in departments of the humanities and social sciences, and the like. Not always being terribly bright (although yes there certainly are exceptions of African-Americans and others doing good work here), they’re not involved in high level research. Yet they have to do something to justify their existence, so unsurprisingly they gravitate to promoting identity politics, which is both easy and lucrative. It’s this phenomenon, for instance, that explains that one Asian-American college librarian you wrote about Malcolm, who complained about science being racist because it in many ways consists of white males. Being I suspect an ambitious ABC, she not unnaturally decided on the necessity to board the gravy train.
Discussion continues in a new post.