Existentialism and Ethics

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Index to posts in this series. Please read this first; at least the section on de Beauvoir’s definition of ambiguity.

I’m on the road, and reading The Ethics of Ambiguity  by Simone de Beauvoir. She was an Existentialist, as one would expect from a person in a long-term relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. In Chapter 1 she gives an explanation of parts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the leading book on Existentialism. She distinguishes it from Stoicism and Marxism, but I won’t address that.

I think she opens with this because any systematic approach to ethics should begin with a statement of the writer’s understanding of human nature. De Beauvoir defines a specific ambiguity which I discussed in the introduction to this series. Her views are also informed by another ambiguity, the absurd. We want certainty. We want a foundation. But there isn’t one. We have to proceed, we have to live, without that certainty we want.

I read Being and Nothingness in College, but I didn’t, and don’t, care much for it. I agree with the Existentialists, including Sartre, that the universe is indifferent to its parts, from planets to mountains, flowers, insects, animals and human beings. I think there is no meaning to existence apart from our experience of it. Sartre explains that this lack of meaning gives us humans a radical degree of freedom, which we cannot avoid. Sartre’s explanation seemed to me to be wrapped up in silly little epigrams, like “Man’s being is not to be.” They did and do annoy me no end.

De Beauvoir gives a more sympathetic reading to Sartre’s tome, and for anyone interested, her explication in Chapter 1 of the wordy and needlessly obscure Sartre is worth reading. The point is to ground her discussion of ethics as a part of the human response to the meaninglessness of life and the freedom and responsibility it entails.

De Beauvoir discusses parts of Sartre’s book

Sartre’s statement that man is the being whose being is not to be begins with the notion of being. That seems to mean a fixed being, as an animal or a tree. People do not necessarily have a fixed nature. We might act like we do, we might aspire to have such a fixed being. But by nature, people live in a present filled with possibility, and want to participate in that possibility. We want to live in that wild freedom.

Freedom gives us the space in which we exist. We interact with others seeking to know them and in the process to know ourselves. We pursue our personal projects. We experience the savors and ugliness and all that come with existence. We want to be like gods in our existence, but this is an impossible and stupid goal.

I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides exactly with himself. P 12-3.

By appropriate, I think she means merge myself, take possession of in my being, as a god would do. I think the idea of “coinciding” here means that we become fully human, our full selves, all we can be or aspire to be. We can and should aspire to be fully human, but we cannot be gods.

De Beauvoir says that for Sartre, one implication of embracing this freedom is that a fully human person will not accept any outside justification for their actions. People want to justify themselves, and we have to choose standards for justification we learn from others or create ourselves. Our ethics, then, come from the collective or from ourselves. We cannot have standards that emanate from some non-human place. I think this means that we must reject the absolute authority claimed by some religions.

The second implication is that we bear responsibility for the results of our actions. We can’t claim that some external being is responsible for bad consequences. We act, we bear responsibility for the consequences. I think Fear and Trembling by the early Existentialist Sören Kierkegaard gives us a good example in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham believes that the Almighty wants a human sacrifice, namely his only son Isaac. He acts on that belief. Whether he was right or wrong, he bears the consequences: a lost precious child, or a child tortured by the awareness that his father would kill him.

De Beauvoir says that we cannot escape our freedom, and we cannot avoid our responsibility. But we can simply refuse to will ourselves to exercise that freedom, out of “laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, [or] impatience” P. 25.

De Beauvoir says that responsibility only exists in our minds, in contemplation of the consequences of our actions. Feeling that responsibility happens over time, as those consequences become clear. This is a recognition that only grown-ups have these concerns.

The fact that we do not accept a justification outside ourselves is not a bar to an ethics.

An ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all. P. 18.

I think this is the source of ethics for de Beauvoir. We cooperate with other people to decide for ourselves what constitutes a justification for actions and projects. We choose to work together because we are part of the collective and our actions affects the collective directly. We share some of the burden of responsibility with others.

Discussion

1. I hope it’s clear which parts of this are mine and which are de Beauvoir’s. But it seems less important with this book. This book asks us to participate in the process of creating ethics, and therefore to think about the foundation of her ethics.

I think this book is useful because de Beauvoir is writing after horrors of the Third Reich and to a lesser extent those of Stalin were known and seen up close. That leads me to think her ethics addresses people of her day. Perhaps she intended to interrogate the behavior of the German people who enthusiastically welcomed and followed the Nazis. Certainly that’s an issue Camus addressed directly in The Plague.

Whether or not this was her purpose, we should ask ourselves what this foundation means for our understanding of the MAGAts, the people who enthusiastically follow Trump and his enablers and the filthy rich bastards who put him back in power.

2. I think we are formed by the collective in a deep way. For more, see my posts on The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello, and other posts. It seems to me that this is the major contribution de Beauvoir makes to Existentialism. She describes Being and Nothingness as focused on the individual, who thrusts himself into the world. The foundation of her book is the ambiguity of being both an individual and being part of the collective.

I think we are formed by the people around us, parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, and institutions. I was raised Catholic, first in a traditional environment and then in a liberal environment. That has a profound influence on my sense of ethics,

I think we have to face our history directly and exercise our freedom to question what we were taught. We have to see ourselves clearly apart from the group in order to assess what we truly believe based on our own experience. Only then are we able to contribute something of our own to the ethics project.

3. I hate this translation: collective has an ugly Stalinist connotation.

4. De Beauvoir writes “… the ends toward which my transcendence thrusts itself …” on p. 14. The word thrust is used three times in Chapter 1, each time apparently quoting Sartre. In each case the connotation seems aggressively phallic. We don’t thrust ourselves into anything. I used the words “find” and “inject” above, trying to suggest that we will to act, but not in any aggressive sense.

I haven’t read The Second Sex, and I wonder if contemplation of this aspect of Being and Nothingness coupled with her sense of the importance of society had an influence on her thinking after writing this book.

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The Economic Myths Supporting The Existence Of Billionaires

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This post contains links to other posts in this series.

I started this series by identifying the major causes of the problems we face with the MAGA movement spawned by Trump and glommed onto like leeches by fascists, Christian Dominionists, White Supremacists, anti-vaxxers, the grifters behind the manosphere and so many other creeps and perverts. In this post I offer a thought on dealing with the filthy rich.

My suggestion is to unlearn the stupid ideas about capitalism that dominate our education system and our political discourse. Replace them with something approximating reality.

Background

Since the beginning of this country, the filthy rich have hated democracy, arguing that the masses would use the power of government to seize their wealth and reduce their power. The filthy rich of the day hated FDR, and worked to destroy his legacy.

As part of that campaign, they linked capitalism to democracy, so that if you didn’t support their views of capitalism, if you even asked questions about it, you were a commie, an enemy of democracy. They became vocal advocates of the simple-minded economics we were all taught in high school and/or college, and spent massive sums to eradicate all alternatives. My first econ course was taught out of Samuelson on Economics, editions of which are still standard in colleges.

I’ve written extensively about this here at Emptywheel. Some of those posts don’t hold up well, but all of them raise substantial questions about the economic theories underlying neoliberal capitalism. Search the site for Jevons, for example. The ideas that underlie marginal utility spring from the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. I hope we’ve all outgrown that.

Of course, there may be some value in the simple models of Econ 101. But all of it is open to question, and all of it requires more justification than “Mankiw said so in his textbook”.

Examples

1. Trickle-down. Surely there is no one left who seriously believes that trickle-down theory has any merit other than as a laugh line. But versions of it are everywhere. Here’s a Bluesky post by Mark Cuban, one of the filthy rich.

Want to use rich people like me to your advantage? Incent us to help those who need it the most. Lower corp taxes for comps that pay a min of $25 per hour. Lower corp taxes if employees get stock at the same pct as the CEO. Bottom up incentives work. Dems never innovate. They bitch

This is a form of trickle-down. Give the filthy rich a tax cut, and the benefits will trickle down to someone. Only, of course, that’s not how things work. Corporations won’t do that unless the benefits outweigh the costs. The tax cuts have to be at least equal to the cost of raising wages. Companies that already pay close to $25 per hour will get a tax cut greater than the cost of raising wages. Companies that pay substantially less won’t raise wages, meaning the worst-paying jobs in the worst industries won’t benefit.

The Chicago Bears don’t like Soldier Field, and want the city to build them a new stadium. They tell us we Chicagoans will benefit from having a new stadium so we should pay for it to encourage them to build it. Well, the Bears owners benefit from being in our city, which is a much greater value. What do they think the TV market looks like in Omaha? The owners are rich. If they were capitalists, they’d build it themselves.

Wages

I wrote a post on the justification for allocation of the profits from business activities. Please read it. It’s a good example of the kind of nonsense smuggled into economic analysis using simple-minded models. The argument from the standard economics text begins by assuming we live in a competitive capitalist system. We don’t. The model fails at the outset.

But worse, it hides the reality that everything in the real world is set up by people who already have power and wealth. Why would such a system benefit anyone other than the people who set it up, except by accident? Consider the enclosure laws which drove people into “dark Satanic Mills”, as William Blake called them in his short 1810 poem Jerusalem.

The Econ 101 model hides the fact that the allocation of income is a political issue, and that workers can and should fight for a bigger share than the mingey allocation authorized by John Bates Clark and his Natural Laws.

Land

Capitalism is built on ownership of private property. Much of English history is bound up in the struggle of aristocrats to hold onto their property against the power of the monarch. Here’s John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, Chapter V, § 32:

But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest; I think it is plain, that property in that too is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common. Nor will it invalidate his right, to say every body else has an equal title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners, all mankind.

Is it that plain? I can see why the usufructs of the land collected by this guy should be his, whether he raised them himself or merely found them. But what is the source of his claim to the earth itself? And why does it survive him and go to his heirs? And why is he allowed to sell it and keep all the money? Locke doesn’t say.

And indeed, it seems plain to me that these questions are obscured by Locke’s assertions. Doubtless it was true of the monarch, because the monarch had armed troops to back him up. But why should it be true now? And whatever the justifications might be, are there no limits?

Here’s one perspective. Our ancestors drove the Native Americans off the land and claimed much of it for the government. The railroads wanted incentives to build out their systems (see trickle-down), so the government gave them a big chunk of the land. Then the railroads sold it. A public resource was turned into cash by the rich. How would Locke explain that? What would be today’s equivalent? Giving leases to oil companies to drill on our national forests? Is that cool?

Conclusion

These are three examples of the simple-minded capitalism that infests our minds. From this kind of tripe, we get ideas about intellectual property in gene sequences, and patents on computer code. Why though? We did it without thinking.

Now it’s time for those of us who can to start thinking about these foundational idea. They were given to us by people like Adam Smith or William Stanley Jevons, as are all our ideas. And mostly they no longer describe reality. When they’re gone, replaced by something better, how can the filthy rich justify their wealth and power?

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Introduction And Index To The Ethics Of Ambiguity By Simone de Beauvoir

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My next book is The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir. I was introduced to Existentialism in a required philosophy course my freshman year at Notre Dame. I opted for a course on Christian Existentialism, where I read a good chunk of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I conceived a very reasonable dislike for him and for the entire project of trying to understand existence through some feat of reason. I was much more impressed with other existentialists, and very much a fan of Albert Camus, who focused on the absurd and ignored Sartre’s formulations of being-in-itself and being-for-itself and other invented words.

But behind the tortured definitions, Existentialists confronted an existence where traditional meanings had been eradicated. The Divine and its representatives on earth, the Church and the clergy, had lost their self-assurance, if not their legitimacy. The humanist replacements offered by 19th and early 20th C. thinkers were proven useless by the rise of totalitarianism. The hole in the soul, the deep emptiness of the void, was a dominant motif across the Western world.

It was a small comfort to me, facing conscription into an army fighting the illegal and immoral Viet Nam War, to see others confronting an ethical horror.

That feeling is back, as we look at the repulsive US government. The kinds of people who joyfully supported the Nazis and the Holocaust surround us today. The people we trusted to manage our institutions turn out to be weaklings, folding in the face of Trump’s bullying. Watching John Roberts and the Fash Five collapse democracy is painful, physically painful. I’m sure scientists and scholars watching the destruction of their life’s work feel the same anguish. Knowing that my family and other families will have to struggle to make sure their kids aren’t tainted by ignorance and immorality is horrifying.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt gave us a template for the rise of Trump/MAGA. The ideology of neoliberalism, the idea that the only thing that counts is the isolated, atomistic, utterly unconstrained individual, is at the root of the psyche of MAGAs. They believe in the rugged individual epitomized by the Marlboro Man. Their patriarchal religion sanctifies White male domination. Their disdain for expertise and its replacement with crackpots is the same as in Depression-era Germany. With Arendt’s help, we saw it coming but were unable to stop it.

Both Arendt and the Existentialists speak to us today. They don’t have final answers, but they offer a perspective that I think can be helpful, both for protecting ourselves and for preparing for a different future.

Existential Ambiguity

By way of background, I don’t believe there is a systematic explanation for our world. I think we have patches of knowledge that seem useful, that work; and patches of profound ignorance which we can and should acknowledge. We should treat all our “knowledge” as provisional, subject to change. We can’t have a theory of everything, but then, we don’t need one of those. We just need to know enough to survive and flourish.

With that in mind, what does de Beauvoir mean by ambiguity? She (and her translator, in this case Bernard Frechtman) write:

[Man] asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. … This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends. P. 7, Kindle edition.

This isn’t ambiguity as we use the word, as a state in which one of two things is true but we don’t know which. This is ambiguity in the sense that both things are true but they are, in some way, contradictory. This is like light, which is a wave or a particle, or maybe somehow both at once. It’s a kind of superposition.

We are fully conscious of ourselves. That means we see ourselves as existing in time, and as having a beginning and an end. We believe that our consciousness is a thing special to us, that it is impervious to the outside. But we also see ourselves as being the object of external forces, some helpful, some dangerous. We think we are alone in our subjectivity but we believe we are among other creatures who possess a subjectivity of their own, a subjectivity we cannot fully grasp.

We are both individual subjects for whom other human beings are objects, and we are objects for other individual subjects, both at the same time. That’s the ambiguity de Beauvoir is talking about. We are all Schroedinger’s Cat.

We can say a little more about that subjectivity than de Beauvoir did. First, we think our subjectivity not a fixed thing. It’s attached to our bodies and our experiences, but it changes as both change. And we know for sure that our personal subjectivity is affected by, and often changed by, other subjectivities. This adds another layer to the notion of our belonging to the collective of other human beings.

Ethics

At this point it’s sufficient to say that ethics is the area of philosophy which tries to answer the question of how we should live. That includes, among other things, how we should interact with others in the collective of which we are a part. It raises the question of our duties and obligations to others, and their corresponding duties and obligations to us. If any.

Ethics is usually defined as concerning morality, but that seems too bound to a specific culture. For purposes of this series I think it’s better to think of ethics as being about the shared nature of human beings, and this, I think, is how de Beauvoir addresses the subject.

This book is about ethics in the world Simone de Beauvoir faced:

[A]t every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting. P. 9

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A Better Future

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Posts in this series
The Republican Hundred Year War On Democracy
The Allies Of The Billionaires
A Better Future

In the first two posts in this series I described the constant onslaught led by the filthy rich against our democracy, and identified groups of people who supported those attacks. In this post, I offer two thoughts about going forward.

We cannot go back

The guidepost of the Biden Administration and the Congressional Democrats was a return to normalcy. They were convinced that Trump was a blemish on the brilliance of the US, a blemish that would come off with some scouring; that it was a nightmare from which voters had awakened. They believed that the US could resume its position as Leader of the Free World, the greatest economy ever, the center of innovation and progress and a beacon of freedom.

They restored an economy devastated by the Covid shutdown and the millions it killed and damaged. They were fairly successful in restoring the faith of our allies in our stability and worthiness to lead.

They were wiped out in the 2022 mid-terms. Harris promised to continue the restoration project. The voters rejected her. The Democratic Party dream of restoring normalcy is dead.

1. We cannot go back because that is not what the majority of us want. Whatever Trump voters want, it isn’t restoration. Non-voters wouldn’t go to the polls to vote for restoration or to vote against Trumpian chaos and destruction. Harris voters were willing to accept restoration, but even among them a large number, perhaps a majority, wanted much more.

2. We cannot go back because Trump has wrecked the institutions and norms we need for restoration. He has gutted agencies devoted to accumulation of soft power around the world, especially USAID. In the process he is potentially responsible for millions of premature deaths.  How do we recover from that?

He attacked our basic research institutions. He made it scary for foreign students to study and do research here. He handed our national health efforts to an ignorant buffoon. He turned the Department of Justice into a stable of third-rate lawyers loyal to himself. We aren’t going to recover from that for a long time.

3. We cannot go back because John Roberts and the Fasces won’t let us. They have wrecked the legal structure of the Administrative State, which sought to replace arbitrary decisions by the President with informed decision-making by independent boards for technical and scientific matters. They have blunted legislative power on purely political grounds. They have formed a protective barrier around the Presidency, so that Trump is effectively beyond the rule of law.

In the process, they have surrendered the the judicial power. Trump is free to do as he sees fit, throwing his tariff tantrums, his prosecutions, his lawsuits, his ICE thugs, and the US military around like a toddler angry at his toys. John Roberts and the Fash Five won’t let District Courts enforce the laws Trump is violating, meaning that the judicial branch is irrelevant.

When our young people think on this, why would they trust the government? How do we persuade them to follow the rules?

4. We cannot go back because no sane national leader would take us seriously. The period of US domination in world affairs is done. There is no going back.

5. We cannot go back because Trump has empowered the stinking worst of us to bully and torment us. They and their vile ideas sit like dead things in the dark poised to spread their deadly poisons.

6. We cannot go back because the filthy rich, the Theists, the Neoliberals, and the Grifters don’t like it and they will figure out how to hold on to as much of their power as they can. Too many weaklings sit in positions of authority, unwilling to protect the democracy that gave them their positions. They are easy prey for the anti-democracy ghouls.

But suppose a Democrat gets elected president, and Democrats take the House and Senate. It’s possible that she would try to rule like Trump, using the powers he asserts and those given him by John Roberts and the Reactionaries. That’s not far-fetched. See this at The Atlantic. Or maybe Roberts and the Revanchists will apply their double-standard to Democratic presidents, leaving the precedents for the next right-wing wannabe dictator.

Where should we go?

I don’t know.

But I do know we need to think about it starting immediately. The Democratic Party has run as the “We aren’t them” party for so long it’s in their DNA. Nothing changes unless we force change.

One possible starting place for a future is Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. They make a great program, and as the pic on the front page shows, they come with Norman Rockwell images. FDR articulated these ideas in his 1941 State of the Union Address, and expanded on them in his 1944 address:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

These principles are the precise opposite of the program of Trump and the filthy rich.

Changing the future

If we don’t organize and act together, the forces that put us here will try to restore the social structures that benefit them and no one else.  And as Hannah Arendt tells us, participation in the political sphere is one part of what it means to be a full human being. Certainly she participated, as this PBS documentary shows.

There are plenty of people willing to organize against Trump. We also need people to help us see and organize for a better future.

 

 

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The Allies Of the Billionaires

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In this post I offered a brief history of the efforts by the filthy rich to destroy the New Deal. Under Trump those attacks are now aimed at democracy. This post lays out the field of conflict between the filthy rich and normal people. Who are the allies of the filthy rich, and what can we do with that information?

Andrew Mellon stated the program of the billionaires after the 1929 stock market crash:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

That’s Trump’s program. In the 1930s, when the attacks began, that program got no traction. The only way the filthy rich could succeed was to find allies who would effectively shield their goals from view. It took a few decades, but they found or created those allies.

It seems to me that there are three groups of collaborators, Theists, Neoliberals, and Grifters. Their motivations are different, and in some ways radically different from the filthy rich, but they all benefit by tagging along with the billionaires.

Theists

There are several groups who teach that the US is a “Christian Nation”, and that it should be a theocracy, or at least that the “laws” of the Bible should govern all Americans, religious or not. Among them are Christian Dominionists, Christian Nationalists, and specific sects. They are supported by groups engaged in lobbying, litigation, and proselytizing. They have their own education structures, including universities and their own media.

There are a number of Christian sects that share some or many of their beliefs. For example, the Catholic Church agrees that all Americans should be governed by their moral teachings about abortion, and that Catholics should be exempt from lnsurance laws that relate to birth control; but retains some sense of the teachings of Jesus on other issues. There are lots of people who agree on specific issues, like equal marriage, and act on them, perhaps by home-schooling, or by supporting theistic lobbying and litigation groups.

The common thread among these groups is the belief that they know the moral truths of the universe, and that the rest of us should/must accept their views. They don’t want anyone reading or thinking anything but what they allow.

Neoliberals

Neoliberas see human beings as homo economicus. They say that human beings have a single goal, maximizing their personal utility. They think that life is a competition for scarce resources, and that the strongest will survive and get the most, and that is just fine. For more, and for a sane alternative, see this post.

Neoliberals fall into two groups. On one side are sellers of goods and services, that is, people who own a business. This group includes investors, the rich who don’t have to work for a living, and the theorists and teachers of this doctrine. The rest of us, the masses, the employees, the consumers, the users, we make up the other side.

The first class has specific goals, mainly getting rid of regulations, and cutting taxes. In this, they agree with the filthy rich. For the rest of us, neoliberalism only offers an explanation of our condition: it’s our fault.

Owner neoliberals differ from theists in two fundamental respects. First, they don’t care what people think or study or theorize about, except for economics. There, they rigidly push their own version, which you studied in Econ 101. Or maybe you learned it in high school, taught from a syllabus prepared by a neoliberal think tank like the Heartland Foundation , which is funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation and other right-wing operations.

They don’t want you to think clearly about economics, because you will see that they use it to preserve their power, and support the agenda of the filthy rich. They want you to ibelieve that their version of capitalism as foundational to democracy.

One of their tools is distraction. You do things you enjoy, whether it’s shopping, or going to the movies, or playing video games. These are fun and even necessary for a good life. But in excess they keep you from learning and thinking enough to participate in a democracy. You exist solely as a consumer. You work so you can buy entertainment and other stuff.

Expertise only comes with effort, even for the best of us. Here’s an example. At the top of this post is a painting by the American Thomas Kinkade. Take a quick look This painting is typical of the kind of art preferred by sellers of distraction. It doesn’t require anything of the viewer. It oozes with a brain-dead nostalgia, and hides every vestige of the reality of the era it depicts.

Now click through to this painting, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, painted in 1610. Look closely at what’s happening Even if you don’t know the story (it’s Daniel 13 in the Catholic Bible ), and even if you don’t know the life history of Artemisia, you can feel the pressing weight of sexual menace. This painting requires attention, and is made more potent with context both of its time, the artist’s experiences, and our me-too age. (Side note: I saw this painting in Paris in May in an exhibit at the Jaquemart André museum. There is also a fairly good copy of Judith Slaying Holofernes,  and the original of Joel and Sisera. And this is a reminder that Wikipedia is a terrific resource and worth a contribution.)

The point here is that owner neoliberals benefit if you limit your thinking to conventional stuff. It’s easier to make and sell profitably. Distraction pacifies you, makes you think you’re living a good life, but hides all other possible ways to live. Those other lives include participating in a functioning democracy.

Worker neoliberals? The billionaires just want you to vote for their candidate, work for them, and buy stuff. People who blame themselves for problems created by the elites don’t demand change. And they keep getting screwed.

Grifters

This is a group of second-rate people who cling to the illusion of competence. There are two main groups here: politicians and their strategists, consultants, and sycophants; and faux intellectuals who swarm in think tanks and even a few universities. Neither group wants you to think clearly about what they are doing.

The politicians want to serve a small club and you aren’t in it. They pretend to serve the median non-thinker in their party, weirdos for the Rs, and centrists for the Ds. Rs fight for the crazies. Ds punch left. Both parties serve their donors first.

The faux intellectuals have all sold out. They surrendered the essence of both the intellectual life and the democratic life, openness to the full implications of life in our society. In exchange, they get money and security. They pretend to provide a principled justification for the policies preferred by their donors, but only the ignorant are fooled.

So?

In any conflict, the first step is to identify the enemy, and to identify those on your side. Then you look for the weak points in the enemy lines. I think this description points to a couple of weaknesses in the alliance against democracy.

1. People who claim to be love liberty don’t want to be ruled by Theists. That includes a lot of neoliberals, both owners and workers. The Theist image of human nature is radically different from that of neoliberals.

2. The interests of owner and worker neoliberals are wildly different. The trick, I think, is to persuade workers that they are entitled to fair treatment as of right, not out of charity.

3. Republican politicians have been pushed so far into lunacy that they are vulnerable to attack from the left by almost any sane politician. Even if Alabama won’t elect a Dem, they should be willing to elect a Republican who won’t hurt them as much as the far-right loon Tommy Tuberville.

4. I don’t think there’s much hope for leaders of the Theists. The combination of self-righteousness and graft makes them impervious to criticism. But that isn’t true of regular people. I think many of them understand the actual teachings of Christianity, and can see where this administration betrays that teaching.

5. In general, I think most of the leaders of the allies are incorrigible. But I also think many followers are reachable, perhaps by shame. I’ll take that up in a later post.

6. What else?

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War And Peace And Trump

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While I was on the road, I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a novel about the wars between Russia and Napoleon between 1805 and 1812, told in part through the effect on several wealthy Russian families. Tolstoy himself was an aristocrat, and had served for several years in the Russian Army, as had other members of his family. There is also much discussion of his theories of what he calls the science of history.

War and Peace seems to be broadly accurate historically. However, there are a number of differences between Tolstoy’s accounts and the Wikipedia entry. For purposes of this post, accuracy isn’t the crucial point. Let’s look at two  questions Tolstoy raises.

How do people rise to power

It’s apparent from the first two thousand pages that Tolstoy thinks people and specifically historians place too much emphasis on the role of specific individuals in historic affairs. This is usually called the Great Man Theory. In the last chapter of the Second Epilogue he explains his theory of the science of history.

Tolstoy thinks there are deep forces in society that lead to great events. Let’s start with a simple example, a battle such as Austerlitz. The outnumbered French army defeated a larger Russian army. The battle takes place across a wide front.

Tolstoy says that in some places Russian soldiers march towards enemy lines under heavy fire, one turns and runs to safety, others see that and and also run, and that skirmish is lost. In other places a man shouts Huzzah and rushes on, others follow and the skirmish at that site is won. The battle is decided by the sum of such people, responding to the events in front of them and for their own reasons, not because of the Great Man, whether Napoleon or Tsar Alexander I. I think Tolstoy would say that the commands of the generals are a factor, but they’re just one among many, and are rarely decisive.

Tolstoy admires General Kutusov, the Russian, but not because of his brilliant tactics. Kutusov’s strength is his understanding of the spirit of his troops. He knows how his troops will respond to commands in battle. He knows in his heart that the loss at Austerlitz was due to the lack of spirit for the war, which was fought on foreign soil and only indirectly for the benefit of Russia. He knows that the same men will fight desperately to defend their beloved homeland. I’d guess Tolstoy thinks Kutusov himself is barely aware of this strength.

I think this is the way Tolstoy sees the forces moving in societies. For example, how did Napoleon rise from obscurity to leadership? I think Tolstoy would say that social forces arose in individual citizens of France based on their perception of events. As they interact with others, the perceptions of events harden, and the desires predicated on those perceptions become evident. People demand a leader who will answer to their desires. In the case of Napoleon, they got what they wanted.

These processes are unknowable. But historians always ignore the social forces that permit the rise of the Great Man and carry him forward, says Tolstoy. Instead, they attribute all the great results to to the Great Man and exculpate him from all errors and losses.

First lesson

Social forces arise today in the same way as in Tolstoy’s day. People perceive events, share their perceptions (which aren’t necessarily accurate pictures of reality) and the resultant perceptions harden in contact with their friends and their social circles. Almost everyone has to rely on the perceptions of others to understand much of what’s happening, and the selection of trusted people is the paramount determinant of people’s perceptions.

One difference, I think, is that in Tolstoy’s day, the biggest questions were about war. In a war the strength of one’s convictions is tested by willingness to fight and die. The soldier facing fire doesn’t go forward if there isn’t sufficient reason, and the command of the Emperor, or the preacher, or the internet influencer, is not enough.

It’s tough to whip up the same fervor about culture war issues. Take gender-neutral bathrooms. Who cares enough to die? Anyway, potty parity has been an issue for decades. I have receipts. Sooner or later, the actual problems will overwhelm these fake issues.

The Russian resistance

In Tolstoy’s telling, once the French crossed the border into Russia, the entire nation resisted at enormous personal cost. Kutusov was appointed supreme commander. The Russian forces were split. Kutusov took immediate command of one Army, but the other was distant. The French Forces were much larger than the two Russian armies combined.

He refused to give battle until the two Russian armies were joined. That meant falling back to Smolensk. The second army was delayed by a general who wanted to be the supreme leader, so Kutusov was unable to defend Smolensk, and fell back to Borodino where he tried to set up a defensive line. The second army arrived. The spirit of the Russian army was overwhelmingly in favor of killing the French, and Kutusov knew it.

As the French army advanced to the East from Vilnius, first to Smolensk (about 500 Km) and then to Borodino (about 400 Km), the Russian people left the towns and villages with their livestock and horses, burning everything that could be used by the enemy, homes, barns, silage, and storehouses There’s a scene from Smolensk where a fire is set to a huge barn, and a visitor objects. An onlooker tells him that’s the owner with the torch and laughing hysterically. They did this themselves, Tolstoy says. There was no central command, no order from the Tsar or a general or local leader.

This is repeated all the way to Borodino, about 130 Km from Moscow.

There the outnumbered Russian Army fought the French to a standstill, sustaining heavy losses. They did not have the strength to counter-attack. Kutusov moved his army to Moscow, but immediately realized he couldn’t defend the city with his weakened forces. He moved to  Tautino, in the rich provinces southeast of Moscow, where they recovered their strength and gained new troops, horses, and equipment over the next month.

Napoleon entered Moscow unopposed. The vast bulk of the citizens had left, leaving personal property but little food or forage and no horses or livestock for the French. The nearby peasants also left with their livestock, and burned their provender.

The French army, reduced by losses at Borodino, took to looting and drinking, losing their cohesion. Moscow consisted mostly of wood houses and buildings. It began burning almost immediately, either by arson or by accident, and was mostly rubble after four days.

By mid-October it was bitter cold and snowing. The French army left suddenly and in great haste, taking their heavy plunder and many prisoners. They moved back towards Smolensk to the West over the route where everything was burned and barren. They died in horrific numbers. The Russians gave small battles, but mostly just followed and picked off groups of soldiers using guerrilla tactics. Napoleon fled back to Paris, leaving his army to save itself. It didn’t.

Second lesson

Every Russian left ahead of the French, destroying almost all the food and forage. The peasants and serfs nearby did the same. This is how the Russians won. It was a victory by the entire nation. There weren’t any collaborators. No Quislings. No Vichy Government. No Vichy nobles. They all left, and they destroyed the French Army. The people did it on their own with no leader asking or demanding.

Trump is waging war against our democracy. He is aided by a group of anti-democracy self-proclaimed intellectuals, and a host of PR people, Republican Quislings, and the filthy rich with their pig corporations. They have a phalanx of reporters for major media cheering them on and covering up the reality of the assault.

There are ICE thugs in neck gaiters and balaclavas seizing our neighbors off the streets and assaulting protesters. There are other thugs in expensive clothes gutting our institutions. There are collaborators in huge law firms, universities, and other institutions. There are lawyers willing to sacrifice their self-respect and risk loss of their law licenses.

There are too many Vichy Democratic consultants and politicians ready to work with Trump and his voters. There are six anti-democracy members of the Supreme Court, and more in the lower courts.

But there are more of us who are ready to defend our democracy. I am inspired by Tolstoy’s tale of the heroic Russian people.

 

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Yarvin On Trump And His Henchmen

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin has written several substack posts on Trump and his henchmen since the inauguration. In Barbarians and Mandarins (BM) he reacts to the first six weeks.  In Actually You Shouldn’t Van People (Van) he says it’s a mistake to pick up non-citizens on the street and throw them in vans. He criticizes Trump’s tariff/trade actions here (M1) and here (M2), calling these policies “mercantilism”. He just thinks they’re being done wrong,

There’s a sense of unease in all of them, a sense that things aren’t happening as he expected. That seems to be one aspect of this WaPo piece.

Grading Trump’s administration

BM is about 6K words. My first step was to chop out the repetition, the “jokes”, the snotty remarks about “libs”, and the other irrelevant material. That left me with about 2K words, and I was being generous. He starts by awarding Trump a C-. He says the new administration has two types of people: Barbarians, people who have no experience in DC, and Mandarins who do.

The Bs want to destroy, the Ms want to run things, but neither has the capacity to make the hard decisions about what should be done. Lacking a plan to guide them, they become grifters. Mandarins, he says

… have no strategy: no plan and no endgame. Since action without strategy is ineffective and ineffective action is a grift, the Mandarins are the most convincing grifters of all.

He explains why this is so, perhaps hoping to help them see the Yarvin way.

He approves of Trump’s use of laws and agencies in ways they were not intended

Second, existing infrastructure cannot be relied upon to work or even be controlled. Generally the right first assumption is that it needs to be hacked—made to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect. (The metamorphosis of USDS into DOGE will be the gold standard here for many years.)

I note that this is what Trump and his henchmen have been doing with the tariff law, the Alien Enemy Act, and other laws. Also, courts mostly hold that this is permitted by law and the Constitution.

He uses the assault on government support for science as an example. He says that scientists want power first, and that good science is their secondary goal. The new team, both the Bs and the Ms, are slashing around wildly with no regard to what the new ideology wants.

He says this violates his theory of how kings rule. Slashing funding for scientists makes them angry and makes them hate the new ideology he ascribes to the administration. He says scientists are not happy about the way science funding is managed. The goal should be to make them happy by restructuring that funding. Then they will see that the new king loves and protects them, and they will respond with love. He doesn’t explain how this overcomes their personal demand for power.

Van

In BM, written on March 7, there’s a passing mention of the great work the new administration is doing on the immigration front, but he says it’s not enough, and then inserts his concerns about having state governments, apparently because he doesn’t like federalism. In Van, written April 2, he addresses the reality of ICE tactics:

I refer to the recent news of surprise visa revocations, immigration detention, etc, for a few immigrant grad students, professors, etc, clearly low human capital individuals, who have committed various retarded, if hardly unusual, misdeeds—like writing a pro-Hamas column (probably plagiarized, certainly banal) in the lame student newspaper.

He thinks these tactics are bad. He has no moral or principled objection to any of ICE’s tactics. He just thinks they will backfire on the whole project, create enemies, and destroy support. I stopped reading Van at the point where he explains that Hitler had a theory behind the Holocaust, a theory that is utterly wrong and revolting.

Mercantilism

M1 and M2 are generally supportive of tariffs, but not the way they’re being used. He blames this on the Bs and the Ms. This is from M2:

Trump always has the right reflexes. But a reflex is not a plan. It is not his job, but the job of his administration, to translate reflexes into plans. While executing with great energy and enthusiasm, the administration has had a rocky start in this translation.

These two posts are absurdly long, so I didn’t read them to the end.

Discussion

1. What the hell did Yarvin think would happen when Trump took power? Was he not paying attention during the last Trump presidency? Did he not notice Trump’s insatiable greed, his indifference to policy, his willingness to walk along with anyone who flattered him adequately? Didn’t he notice that Trump doesn’t like competent people,  that he ignores them or fires them? Did he think Trump would suddenly take an interest in policy when every reporter and his own staffers said Trump wasn’t willing to read anything?

Is Yarvin that naive? That credulous? That desperate?

2. Yarvin is supposed to be some kind of computer genius. Has he never watched a large enterprise change its computer system? You don’t rip out the old system and then build a new one. You don’t tear out an old system and put in a new on overnight. You run them side by side long enough to be sure there aren’t any glitches that will poison your employees and customers. Or, you test and retest, and then replace little sections one or two at a time. There’s a plan, there’s testing, and there’s careful attention to outcomes.

Now he’s concerned that people who took his advice to burn everything to the ground are making big mistakes?

3. I think there are problems with our current structure. Yarvin writes about some of them, but never in any sensible context, or with an actual idea about an effective change. For a reasonably sensible discussion see this by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. There’s a lot to think about in this article, even for lefties. Among other things, Chait complains about delays caused by citizen activists. He does not point out that the rich and their corporations use the same tactics to delay or overturn rules preventing toxic discharges and other horrors. These delay and destroy tactics have hamstrung government action on almost every front.

4. I’m done with Yarvin. Apparently he thought the Trump team had a plan for remaking the United States in ways that would be better as Yarvin understands better. His lack of contact with reality is unbearable.

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Yarvin Explains Why He’s Writing

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin explains why he’s writing in this post. He opens with a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, Que Fecit — Il Gran Rifuto, which, roughly translated, is He Who Makes The Great Refusal. Here’s the text:

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes forward in honor and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
undermines him all his life.

Translation by Keeley and Sherrard. Writing in 2007, Yarvin says:

Journalists and professors are all associated with what is essentially one large institution, the press and university system. There are few, if any, ideological quarrels between major universities, or between universities and mainstream journalists.

He says that they all agree on practically everything. The differences between universities are marginal, as are the differences between professors at these institutions, and the differences between journalists. He doesn’t agree with this consensus.

He notes the recent rise of right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, but these are weak, and in no way competitive intellectually with the universities and their acolytes.

He says he’s trying to create an entirely new perspective. He reads Cavafy’s poem first as a paean to the dominant system, and second to the value in dissent. The dominant system rewards joiners, and accomplishes many things. A world of refusers would be a horrible thing. But he wants to be the one who refuses to participate in the Great Consensus, he wants to create an entirely new perspective.

What I’m trying to assemble here at UR is a view of the world we live in that is genuinely alien—at least, as genuinely alien as I can make it. By “alien” I just mean strange, different, or unfamiliar. …

Snip

An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.

He says that there are two ways to do this. One is to start from scratch. This approach opens the door to appalling mistakes. One alternative is paleoconservativism. This is perhaps the most alien perspective on our times that he can think of.

Paleoconservatives evaluate the present by the standards of the past. He claims that their views aren’t taught anywhere, there is no education grounded in paleoconservatism. He doesn’t like present-day paleoconservatives, though. He thinks they’re too clubby, too esoteric, and probably too much in love with past regimes. Yarvin isn’t interested in recreating the Holy Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire.

He wants to look at 2007 the way people in 2107 do. In the end, he writes because he enjoys doing it and a bunch of people talked him into writing.

Discussion

1. I’m not wiling to read any posts based on Dungeons and Dragons. Or religion. And no more The Matrix, either. Checking ahead, no comparisons between humans and computer hardware.

2. I am sympathetic to the urge to look for different perspectives. I imagine that’s something everyone does when they’re dissatisfied with the status quo; and that academics do it in search of advancement. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of reading older books. Wisdom isn’t the special province of the present.

3. I don’t think it’s possible to start from scratch, as Yarvin claims he wants to do. There is no such place.

I also don’t think that we benefit from considering the present through the lens of the past. The wisdom of the past was directed at the conditions that existed when it was generated, and much of it was dreamed up to support the then status quo. We have to examine each idea in light of our present situation before we try to use it.

That means we have to identify the problem we want to solve carefully. Yarvin hasn’t precisely stated the problem that drives him to consider paleoconservatism. Based on what I’ve covered so far, I’d suggest some possibilities:

a. The people with power are unable to exercise all their power.
b.. Governmental regulation and public opinion are too cumbersome, and should be removed.
c. Democracy can’t solve irreconcilable differences, so civil war is inevitable.
d. The only serious problem facing our society is violence against person and property. Democracy won’t solve that problem so we need another system.
e. There’s something, as yet undefined, wrong with the way the universities and reporters pursue truth.

As to e., there is a consensus at the root of our education system, one shared with all academics and more widely across society. It’s what Jonathan Rauch calls the epistemic regime, the system we use to construct knowledge. I discuss it here, and in the three posts in that series.

We also use that system to construct and evaluate solutions to problems. Yarvin’s Heritage Foundation and other think tanks aren’t trying to solve problems. They exist to create justifications for undoing solutions currently in place as demanded by their donors. They have no new solutions, and their use of the epistemic regime is intellectually suspect.

Yarvin is toying with the idea of rejecting the epistemic regime but has nothing to suggest as a replacement.

4. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I’m trying to take this guy seriously. That’s not easy. I have trouble ignoring the possibility that Yarvin is just a contrarian, a jolly gadfly, skittering about puncturing platitudes with outrageous claims like this: “Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.”

5. Yarvin seems to think that scholars are all liberals. Whatever. I don’t suppose Yarvin has read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I wonder if he would say that Foucault was a liberal, or that he was part of the consensus he so dislikes?

6. Finally, a word about the Cavafy poem. Here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the title of the poem:

The great refusal (Italian: il gran rifiuto) is the error attributed in Dante’s Inferno to one of the souls found trapped aimlessly at the Vestibule of Hell, The phrase is usually believed to refer to Pope Celestine V and his laying down of the papacy on the grounds of age, though it is occasionally taken as referring to Esau, Diocletian, or Pontius Pilate, with some arguing that Dante would not have condemned a canonized saint. Dante may have deliberately conflated some or all of these figures in the unnamed shade.

The canonized saint in ths passage is Celestine V. Here’s the Dante line:

After I had identified a few,
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.

Dante says the speaker of the Great Refusal is a coward. Cavafy thinks that the great refusal is right for some people in some cases. The world needs people who refuse to accept the dominant social narative. Yarvin makes a point of saying that he’s made the right decision for himself.

 

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Yarvin on Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Blue Pill, Red Pill

In his second blog post, Curtis Yarvin makes what he calls a case against democracy. He begins by pointing out that we are all steeped in democracy and its values from birth, and it’s hard to change. To help see things differently (of course using The Matrix image of the red and blue pills) he offers ten statements about democracy and an alternative view. He doesn’t discuss any, so all discussion is mine. I’ll look at three, the first, and two chosen by the highly Enlightenment method: the 15th decimal digits of pi and e.

First PIll

blue pill:

Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

red pill:

The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

So close. Yarvin doesn’t ask himself where the rule of law comes from, nor why it’s working. I’d say that in a democratic polity  most people think they have a voice in deciding laws, so they are generally willing to obey the laws. That leads to the good stuff, which encourages further acceptance of laws. Of course, there are other reasons  depending on the nature of the individual and their sense of participation in humanity. Some people obey out of fear, or because that was engrained in them from birth. Others think about the alternatives, and agree to be bound. And there are many other possibilities.

Yarvin doesn’t ask himself who are the people who refuse to obey, like the current administration and its leaders. Are they acting like they live in a democracy? No. They act like they’re rulers. And it’s easy to see that a majority of people don’t like it. Of course the current administration goes much farther than others, but Yarvin might have noticed the abuses and corruption of the Bush administration, or that it pushed us into pointless wars and then failed at them. Maybe he suddenly has.

Third pill

blue pill:

The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.

red pill:

Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

Yarvin calls fascism and communism single-party democracies. But they were not democratic at all. They were all managed by a single person whose decisions were his own and were final. How exactly are they different from the monarchy he wants to install?

Fifth pill

blue pill:

Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.

red pill:

Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.

The premise here is that some person or group in each “Western” nation has ultimate power. It’s just as false that “the people” have ultimate power as it is that the civil service has ultimate power. Anyone who watched the Bush Administration run things would know this. The civil service is and always has been reasonably accountable to the political leadership, more in Republican administrations than in Democratic.

Yarvin doesn’t mention the role of the courts in all this. It’s a telling omission.

Leftism

In this post,  Yarvin tells us that the essential idea of leftism is that intellectuals (he prefers the term “scholars”) should run the world. Scholars are indistinguishable from priests.He asks:

Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?

I’d guess he means that the ideas that justify and organize a leftist mass movement come from intellectuals. For example, Karl Marx justified and motivated the leaders of the Russian Revolution. John Locke justified  the American Revolution and the form of its new government.

But that’s true of any revolution. There may be grievances, but grievances can be solved by negotiation or tweaks to the order of things. Regime change requires a replacement for the ideology that supports the existing regime. Does Yarvin understand that this applies to himself, to Ayn Rand, to all those right-wing jerks he cites?

1. In comments on my last post, people noted that Yarvin was going to debate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor with a specialty in democracy. Afterwards, someone posted what looked like a transcript of the debate on Blue Sky. It was taken down and the account closed, but I read it before it disappeared. Yarvin’s arguments felt like a ball falling down a Pachinko board, bounding from pin to pin with no clear connection. Or, as the WaPo described his blog posts,  he was “wildly discursive”.

At one point he said that Harvard doesn’t teach conservative thought. For example, no one teaches the thought of Julius Evola. This is from the Wikipedia page on Evola:

He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age ,,,.. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l’uomo differenziato—”the man who has become different”—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola’s definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Links and fn. omitted.

Evola was a major factor in Italian fascism, with ties to German fascism. After WWII he was closely involved with far right-wing Italian politics. It gets worse: “Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.”

So, Harvard doesn’t teach a marginal weirdo fascist. That’s what Yarvin thinks is a gotcha.

2. I’m on the road, and my main book for this trip is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s set in Russia between 1805 and 1812, and give a history of the Napoleonic Wars from the perspetive of Russia and five aristocratic families

Here’s how Tolstoy describes the attitude of one of his characters, Nicholas Rostov, towards Tsar Alexander I:

Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov’s army which the Tsar approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.

He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word. P. 467, Kindle edition.

Does Yarvin feel that looking at Trump or Musk?

 

 

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Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

The previous post discussed two aspects of Yarvin’s first blog post, his rejection of current ideologies and his loathing of democracy. This post describes the ideology he created, formalism.

The goal of formalism

Yarvin starts with the proposition that the only truly significant problem facing humans is violence. The goal of formalism is to rid the planet of violence. Only then can we focus on other problems.

Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems—Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc., etc., etc.—are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay ….

He means exactly this: until violence is ended, we must focus on one thing, getting rid of it. It’s an engineering problem, not a moral problem. He sets up pacifism as an alternative, and of course pacifism doesn’t solve violence.

He also dismisses the idea of social justice as a solution. He describes social justice as the idea that we should all have an equal share of the limited resources available to us. He says we don’t know how to equalize things, it won’t last, and it isn’t practical. We’d have to start by setting up rules about equality in things, and then take from some to give to others.

Solving violence with rules

Violence is the result of conflict and uncertainty. People are in constant conflict about stuff, but if everyone knows the result of the conflict in advance, there’s no reason to engage in violence. He seems to think that’s true of state-level conflict too: if we knew how a war would turn out, why wouldn’t the losing side surrender, he says. So, the first step is creating rules of ownership.

Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.

The starting place is where we are now. We make a list of everything that can be owned, and whoever has it gets to keep it. Then we can define violence:

Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

The United States is a corporation

Formalism says that the US government controls what happens inside the boundaries of the US. It has the power to collect taxes and make rules of behavior, and these powers are property, just like any other property right. The government isn’t going to voluntarily surrender them.

Yarvin tells us that the US government is a corporation, meaning “… it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.” In this setting citizens are serfs, actually corporate serfs. I think he sees private corporations as no different from the US government. He explains that the purpose of his exemplar, Microsoft, is to make money for shareholders by selling software.

But he doesn’t see the purpose of the US government. He thinks the government isn’t able to control much.

In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I’d be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

In his view, the US government is a poorly functioning corporation with no discernible control mechanism, loaded with assets and flailing around trying to do something for opaque reasons.

Yarvin’s solution

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

Snip

To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible. Links omitted.

He suggests that the current power structures be evaluated and shares in the reformalized US be distributed on the basis of the power of each recipient. Corporations have power, and would be shareholders. He cites the New York Times as an example. Perhaps some citizens have power, and might get shares, but that’s not clear. In any event, having divided up the power, we let the people with power decide what to do with the assets they control. The rest of us just stay out of the way.

The new power structures may not see the use for nation-states. He suggests that cities, but not states, perhaps should be “spun off”; pointing to Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong as positive examples. He points out that there isn’t any political violence in those city-states because there isn’t any politics.

That seems to be Yarvin’s main point. He thinks politics always leads to violence of some kind, whether it’s the violence of taxation or of limits on personal freedom, or physical violence. Somehow that problem is solved by getting rid of politics and replacing it with system of control by those who hold power now.

Discussion

1. I rearranged the order of the arguments hoping to clarify.

2. One obvious thing about this is the reductionism. Violence is a problem, sure, but we can’t wait for that to be solved before dealing with other problems. Those lesser problems, poverty, climate breakdown, moral decay, are at the root of a lot of the violence.

Another is the casual acquaintance with reality. This post was written ten years after Hong Kong was returned to China, and the latter was encroaching on democracy there. Anyone who has seen Crazy Rich Asians will see the outcome of the structure Yarvin imagines: great for the rich sons and daughters of the rich in Singapor.

3. The purpose of the United States government is set out in the Preamble to the Constitution. Yarvin doesn’t address it.

4. Yarvin takes the side of Walter Lippman in his debate with John Dewey over democracy, and goes even farther. Here’s a short paper describing the debate. Very roughly, Lippman thinks that our civilization is too complex for the ordinary citizen, so we should select experts to handle the complexities and advise the government rather than depend on the wisdom of the masses.

Dewey thinks that citizens should be educated in critical thinking, so they could participate in the discussions on issues that affect them. The people most affected by an issue would constitute a “public” in his parlance. This post gives an introduction to his thinking.

But Dewey had a larger reason for supporting democracy. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Dewey views democracy as an ideal of associated life in the sense that as an ideal he thinks that it reconciles the full expression of individual potentialities and the common good. In this sense, democracy sits at the apex of his historicised naturalist account of individuality and community. “From the standpoint of the individual”, as he puts it, democracy “consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain”, while “from the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common”…. Cites omitted.

Yarvin doesn’t address this debate.  He thinks the problems with democrcy, most of which were laid out by Lippman and Dewey, are so great that the solution is to burn it to the ground. So far he hasn’t identified a view of the individual that would enable him to address Dewey’s view of democracy. instead, he consistently ignores individual citiaens as if we were irrelevant to this discussion.

 

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