In my STEM field, citations have exploded because (1) modern word-processing software makes it much easier than it used to be to add citations ad infinitum, and (2) if you don't cite somebody (who really shouldn't be cited), they will email you to complain, and so it's just must easier to cite them up front. And those emails are in turn driven by academia bean-counters who look at citations as a mertic of qaulity for advancements and promotions. I expect that this phenomenon is occuring across all of science.
I found that there are certain authors and publications that you need to cite in order to be taken seriously by the journal reviewers. If you do this early and often in your paper, it establishes that you are part of the current status quo and not some maverick trying to rock the boat. If you present a concept, in one case advancing the ideas of the establishment, and in the other, challenging them with the very same concept, you will find that of course they are treated very differently by the reviewers. Therefore it makes sense to cite the established "experts" (based on their status) in the field regardless of whether you agree with them or not. By the time they get to the conclusion of your paper, most reviewers will have already lost interest.
I think - in defence of Yarvins take on why big tech has no power - he wasnt explicitly saying that the media controls big tech, more that the values of the media (and by extension "the cathedral") are in lock step with the establishment in Washington, and his inference being that the media sets the agenda in that regard.
Washington effectively looks to the NYT for guidance on issues and then takes action. I dont believe he is stating it quite that sequentially, but the idea is that the media-academic axis effectively comes up with whats important and whats not, and the correct-thinking nodes of the permanent government absorb this and move accordingly.
"Washington effectively looks to the NYT for guidance on issues and then takes action."
The NYT is absolutely the modern Pravda of the progressive oligarchy and the cities and institutions they rule. I swear my friends in the Blue Bubble read it religiously and would have no idea of proper verbal and intellectual etiquette without it.
But that being said, no person, group or institution is in charge. The Doctrine (basically Critical Social Justice as constantly filtered through the social-media hivemind) rules the world, and sets up a sort of invisible electric fence inside the brains of our ruling class.
The Doctrine flows through them, but they don't craft or edit it, they just wield it to accrue power and attack enemies.
Yes, very well put. This is one of many (oh so many!) aspects of the current situation that Moldbug is blind to. He thinks there must be someone in charge, someone pulling the strings; but there isn't. The strings pull themselves.
Moldbug has no "ideas" that are not either (1) masticated regurgitations of what his intellectual superiors (not a high bar) have written, or (2) wild crazy nonsense. In the latter category we can put his notion that the US should be run by a figure like Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong Un.
Moldbug should just move to Russia or North Korea, where he can live out his dream of living under an autocrat.
Oh, give it up! Moldbug is a moron who gets almost everything wrong. Why anyone (let alone our esteemed host!) pays any attention at all to his wild gesticulations and spittle is a mystery.
Regarding those WEF clips: If Tony Blair is so concerned about vaccination status, he should pressure his country's Office of National Statistics to resume publishing it in regard to all cause mortality, which it stopped doing last May for (queue posh British accent) utterly unfathomable reasons:
As for that German lady ensuring hate speech laws will come to America: Hey lady---be more German. (Also, enjoy your silly GAE satrapy's coming de-industrialization and destitution. Pro tip: shipping Light Natural Gas across the Atlantic in tankers is markedly less efficient than having it pumped through a pipeline under the Baltic sea. Nixing nuclear didn't help either. And here I thought Germans were good at physics...)
EDIT: If anyone wants a ground-zero accounting of Germany's unfolding energy crisis, I highly recommend Eugyppius. He focuses more on Covid, but every couple weeks includes vignettes about his ruling clowns' management of electric grids and whatnot. This is his latest in that track:
God I miss Trump. Border security. No LBGTQWXZ bullshit. No DEI bullshit. Low inflation, strong economy. Peace. Prosperity. We must take our electoral process back.
I enjoyed the article on the military -industrial complex and the belief systems that make Washington tick. As somoene whose worked in Washington 25+years I agree policy is not (usually) a direct result of bribery (unless you count job offers/fancy conferences/career building as bribery), but I think the belief systems - the genunine acceptance of whatever the elite Consensus is - cannot be deemed entirely responsible for policy choices becuase the belief system could not survive without the financial incentives attached to it. A city full of surplus elites competing for limited resources cannot afford to throw its weight behind just beliefs - they need jobs and careers, and will retrofit their beliefs to jive with whatever the The Current Thing is at the moment. In other words, Washingtonians may have convinced themselves they are true believers - and maybe they are for a moment - but as soon as the financial incentives change, the Current Thing has a way of evolving. If realism or restraint were profitable, I think it would suddently become in vogue in Washington. I'm not holding my breath.
the globalists prefer deconstruction because that is how the constraints (regulatory capacity of the nation-state) on digital capitalism and globalism are reduced or destroyed.
re: high-social-trust, evolutionary psychology and the foundations of western civilization ("classical liberalism")
As her Henrich @ Harvard, the co-emergent evolutionary features of "classical liberalism" are:
"WEIRD"
W - western, outbred gene pool, cousin marriage banned, Constitutional order, high-social-trust
E = educated, historically increasing literacy and numeracy, higher IQ is selected for in the market economy, lots of low IQ is wiped out by the black plagues, etc.
I = industrialized, innovative (partly genetic, due to outbreeding in NW Europe)
R = rich, wealth increased as the feudal economy was replaced by market economics, river and sea trade (Hanseatic League)
D = democratic. representative politics and governance were medieval (not Enlightenment), such as communas, fueros and cortes in the Spanish March, or the earlier advocacy of peasants' rights by the Clunic Abbeys.
"Musk's willingness to clean house — by some accounts, he has fired over two-thirds of Twitter’s former staff — could have a domino effect throughout Silicon Valley, putting a dagger in the heart of the Left’s ideological control over America’s powerful tech sector."
I think this is right.
Here is what I think I know. Business ownership and C-suite managers are still mostly profit oriented despite the indications that woke has infected them. They previoysly had the Trump economic expansion that increased labor demand and then Covid related government policy that constrained labor supply. Talent acquisition is a competitive advantage. Also marketing departments were profiling up and communing consumers noting the woke trends. So these owners and managers agreed to go with the trends to support bottom line benefits.
But it was a mistake. Ownership and management know it now. Their work cultures degraded to a mess of social and political activism instead of just getting work done. And Musk broke the crust on the acceptance for correcting the mistake. So these businesses are shedding the toxic employees. It helps the bottom line while also positioning the company to be ore politically correct in light of the building anti-woke, anti-CRT public sentiment.
It will not die easily because of the MSM being hopelessly staffed by these campus-indoctrinated cultural Marxists... but die it will. We are moving toward a time when anyone infected with this toxic parasitic mind virus will be labeled as unfit for hiring. That then moves to the education system source... the head of the snake... where parents will demand their kids are not infected due to the economic harm they would suffer.
As I've stated before, most of higher education is so corrupt and dysfunctional (admin bloat, etc.) that it just needs to be burned to the ground (metaphorically speaking) and replaced with one or more new systems that are better (anti-fragile to disruption, capable of meta-narrative analysis, etc.).
The monopolistic, centralized nature of education bureaucracy is one of its many evils.
"That then moves to the education system source... the head of the snake... where parents will demand their kids are not infected due to the economic harm they would suffer."
Let's hope so, but the Academic Left is very firmly entrenched.
A better framing might be to look at how "big tech" evolved, specifically as part of the surveillance state and military-industrial-complex (and broader corporate-state).
THE CIA IS INVESTING IN FIRMS THAT MINE YOUR TWEETS AND INSTAGRAM PHOTOS
Among 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving CIA venture capital funding, several are developing tools to mine social media.
Lee Fang
April 14 2016, 10:57 a.m.
... Alongside its investments in start-ups, In-Q-Tel [CIA's investment arm] has also developed a special technology laboratory in Silicon Valley, called Lab41, to provide tools for the intelligence community to connect the dots in large sets of data.
In February, Lab41 published an article exploring the ways in which a Twitter user’s location could be predicted with a degree of certainty through the location of the user’s friends. On Github, an open source website for developers, Lab41 currently has a project to ascertain the “feasibility of using architectures such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks to classify the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of Twitter messages towards a specific topic.”
Collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries has potential benefits for counterterrorism, but such CIA-supported surveillance technology is also used for domestic law enforcement and by the private sector to spy on activist groups.
Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiation for a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a “tech unicorn” — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.
What Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) Gets Right and Wrong
BY KEITH PRESTON ON DECEMBER 6, 2021
...
excerpts:
Like other similar thinkers (for example, Michael Anton or the recently deceased Angelo Codevilla) these types of critics mistakenly conflate the “Brahmins” with the entirety of the ruling class. In fact, Codevilla even referred to them merely as the “ruling class” as if the Brahmins were the sole source of power. But this sector exists only at the mercy of the wider body of ruling class power, which is the full framework of the political, military, financial, industrial, and technological elite, which is, in turn, a subset of the global elites in these same categories.
Interestingly, Yarvin cites Burnham as an influence, but he misses one of Burnham’s core insights, i.e. that classical liberal-bourgeois capitalism was superseded by managerial capitalism, not just in the US but in all developed countries, in the mid-20th century, and it was through the entrenchment of managerial capitalism that the Brahmins were able to obtain the hegemonic social and cultural role they have since achieved.
Also, the managerial class was faced with an insurgency within its own ranks in the postwar period which paralleled the expansion of the professional class, particularly within the public sector during the same time period (recognizing this was one of the things Irving Kristol got right).
Another critical factor is that the postwar “Information Age” created the framework for both classical bourgeois capitalism and managerial capitalism to be superseded by digital capitalism of which Yarvin himself is a part as a Silicon Valley software developer. Like Peter Thiel, Yarvin is merely part of the “Silicon Valley Right” or the right-wing of digital capitalism.
...
The traditional financial establishment faced an intra-ruling class challenge during the late 20th century from the insurgent Sunbelt industries that emerged in the postwar period (whose political frontmen were figures like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich). But the northeastern financial establishment has been able to launch a largely successful counterattack through its alliance with digital capitalism against traditional industrial capitalism and with the Brahmins against the sinking traditional middle class to upper-middle class (Chamber of Commerce types, small capital, the petite bourgeoisie, etc.).
The Brahmins that Yarvin claims to oppose have been empowered primarily by the rise of digital capitalism and the traditional financial establishment. Additionally, the “woke” ideology (what I call “totalitarian humanism”) that presently constitutes the self-legitimating ideological superstructure of the ruling class is not the sole creation of the Brahmins alone.
[->] Every ideological superstructure has a materialist base and class base
(which in the case of totalitarian humanism would be digital capital, the tech revolution, “financialization” of the kind that has emerged from neoliberalism, the expanded technocratic class which is the product of the wider degree of specialization and the division of labor rooted in increased technological sophistication).
From what I can tell, Yarvin went viral because he was willing to dig past the surface level of the left-vs-right narrative, and that was interesting and useful to the populist-right "base" (Bannon) because it provided them with a high-brow sounding perspective that was (from their viewpoint) "anti-establishment" and almost revolutionary.
Yarvin apparently openly embraces "NRx" (neo-reactionary-right) ideas about the end of capitalism and democracy as we know them, so that gives people the impression he is "edgy".
As far as I can they are semi-accurate in their analysis of the crisis that the establishment faces.
I wrote a post sometime ago thematically related to your post on evil, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, but it's more pointing out that collectively, we are clinging to certain philosophical positions like they are capital T Truths, but they really, really aren't. It's called Triumphalism and Defeatism:
Recall that the 9th Postulate of Lenski’s ecological-evolutionary theory was that “societies evolve in response to changes in their natural and social environments.” Sociocultural change is of two types, innovation and extinction. The first involves adding new elements such as
[] technologies,
[] social practices,
[] institutions, or
[] beliefs
to the system. The second type of change is, of course, the elimination of old elements in the system. While extinction certainly occurs, the process of sociocultural evolution is predominantly a cumulative process, that is, change and innovation are added far more to the system than older elements are eliminate. This, Lenski adds, is one reason why sociocultural systems have grown more complex over time.
There are ultimately only three major factors determining the characteristics of the sociocultural system:
[] 1) Human’s genetic heritage;
[] 2) The biological, physical, and social environment; and
[] 3) The influence of prior social and cultural characteristics of the society itself.
The force of historical experience therefore plays a major role in shaping social institutions and thought. The rate of innovation and change varies across different societies. There are several factors that influence this rate.
[] 1) Store of existing cultural information;
[] 2) Population size;
[] 3) Stability of the physical and biological environment itself;
[] 4) Contact with other societies;
[] 5) Character of the physical environment itself;
A pretty conventional view of history (I'm not sure what the origins of it are, sorry*) are that techno-economic disruptions, such as the invention of the windmill or printing press, or market economics, drive social change and changes in collective awareness/thinking as well as values (and religion).
Using "Triumphalism" as the primary explanation of social change is close to being absurd. It is definitely incoherent.
-----
* gerhard lenski is one of the best sources of social-science data on social change:
re: subjective meaning and objective truth - opposition or integration?
Can you summarize?
I read Mary Harrington's piece on Gnosticism and it doesn't come to terms with the real referents in ancient purity myths: evil, sin, "clinging", desire, spiritual impurity, "paganism".
It does focus on "embodiment" and "truth", but it doesn't explain how metaphysical "truth" relates to spiritual purity and scientific-objective "truth".
It also doesn't account for systems theory, cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology and recent brain science (McGilchrist).
From an evolutionary perspective, morals are fundamentally biological, they are about how kinship group altruism and intense social cooperation became one of the most important survival adaptations in ancient, primeval human populations. One of the evolutionary changes in the human brain that enabled kindship-group (parochial) altruism, social cooperation and eusociality was an enhanced ability for INHIBITION of "primitive" emotions that were non-altruistic and non-cooperative. (Neanderthals brains were much less capable of advanced social cooperation and probably less capable of reading body language relating to altruism and social cooperation).
The mythic religions of the Axial (post-Bronze-Age) era were like a software upgrade to the INHIBITION circuitry that had evolved in the human brain. (McGilchrist)
Modern rationalism (which co-emerged with AGENTIC VALUES) didn't account for the importance of such INHIBITION circuits. Thus, "capitalism" and "democracy" are in a crisis. ("colonization of lifeworld by systems", Habermas)
Postmodern deconstruction and relativism just makes all that worse.*
John Vervaeke (brain science) has proposed a way to "reverse engineer" the adaptive features of mythic culture (hierarchic social order) and thereby make modern rationalism and postmodern "construct awareness" part of a post-postmodern (fluid-holistic) anti-fragile software upgrade to human culture.
> enabled kindship-group (parochial) altruism, social cooperation and eusociality was an enhanced ability for INHIBITION of "primitive" emotions that were non-altruistic and non-cooperative.
> The mythic religions of the Axial (post-Bronze-Age) era were like a software upgrade to the INHIBITION circuitry that had evolved in the human brain. (McGilchrist)
This sounds like you are saying non-altruistic and non-cooperative emotions are problematic. They aren't. We would turn into a beehive without them, and that's a Bad End to me
> Postmodern deconstruction and relativism just makes all that worse.
As I remember that article pointing out (if it wasn't there, the same guy said this elsewhere) the postmodern critique is fundamentally correct. Like everything, postmodernism has downsides and upsides, potential for salvation and potential for perdition. Though I think the potential for salvation in this case doesn't come from postmodernism itself, but from the possibilities it creates. Said possibilities have not been exploited.
> John Vervaeke (brain science) has proposed a way to "reverse engineer" the adaptive features of mythic culture (hierarchic social order) and thereby make modern rationalism and postmodern "construct awareness" part of a post-postmodern (fluid-holistic) anti-fragile software upgrade to human culture.
Yeah, this sounds like lunatic gibbering that won't ever cash out into anything real. Philosophy is a problem, but it is not THE problem. THE problem is spiritual, the problem is we have given up on striving to greater heights. We need a 21st Century Sermon on the Mount, and just like the Sermon on the Mount, philosophy is not up to the task of producing that.
Yeah, I don't think any politician (nor Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed for that matter) ever read evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology, so how useful can they really be? I don't understand the vagaries of it, but I do know I don't see any useful outputs coming out of that black box, which inclines me to the LUNATIC GIBBERING judgement.
But let's flip it around, and say it is not gibbering, that there is something useful there. How do you bring it to the masses?
The early church banned cousin marriage as part of their political project to destroy the old, "tribal-clannish" and "pagan" culture and then impose a new civilization/empire.
Banning cousin marriage had significant biological effects: over several hundred years the gene pool in NW Europe (the Franks) became more variable.
Side note: evolution is basically three things:
- variation
- selection
- retention
Because the post-clannish gene pool was more more variable, there were more people with higher IQs and more people with "classically liberal" personality traits (openness to new experience, etc.).
Technological, economic and social disruption and innovation led to the selection of genes for higher IQ and "liberal" personality types that could function under emerging market economics and Constitutional order.
The older, inbred "clannish" Feudal social form rested on a foundation of things like Fealty Oaths and Moots, and a non-trade local economy (Serfs and Warlords).
The expansion of the "liberal", urban-commoner middle class gene pool and the Manorial economy created what we now consider to be "western civilization".
That process (which itself now can't be "seen" withOUT an understanding of cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology) did not INITIALLY require that the "masses" understand that banning cousin marriage, or increasing literacy, developing higher IQs, more "open" personality types, expanded river and sea trade, scientific or technological innovation or "democracy" would be beneficial. "INITIALLY".
Autopoiesis - "emergence" in self-organizing systems:
The Church had no knowledge of autopoiesis or evolution when it reached that decision. Which is my point, you can have major positive impacts in the world without ever engaging with evolutionary psychology. Or likely with philosophy, for that matter.
After the end of the ice ages, expanding agrarian settlements and walled cities depended on one or more educated, capable elites: priests, warrior castes, craftspeople (such as bronze smiths), and librarians-scholars to innovate and develop new forms of civilization that prevailed over the marauding nomadic tribes during and after the Bronze Age.
The slave and peasant classes were not the primary innovators, although important agricultural innovations, such as selection and breeding of polyploid crops, were done by farmers (presumably with unusually high IQs).
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
Hey, this is stuff I've been thinking about, except I didn't engage with evolutionary psychology at all to get to it. I guess I'll buy this stuff is so great if an evolutionary psychologist uses his gnosis to become a hyper-politician and save us all, but I know that won't be happening, so...
You apparently don't understand that something being "useful" doesn't necessarily entail "bringing it to the masses".
A-bombs were not "brought to the masses" before they were used to end WW2.
Generally speaking, the leading edge of social, intellectual and technological disruption is carried out by a small number of innovators that convince those in power to do things differently, or they inspire a competing group of elites.
The US Constitution represented the values and ideas of a competing group of elites, the merchant class, that overthrew the older elites: state-church bureaucracy and the royalty.
The "masses" were mostly illiterate (frequently inebriated) and learned about the relevance of Enlightenment ideals via written communication from the Committees of Correspondence that were read out loud by literate relatives, or people in pubs, (churches?), etc.
A-bombs weren't actually needed to end WW2, Japan would have fallen eventually anyway. But in the American Revolution, sure, an intellectual vanguard came up with some ideas, but they were also practical men, politicians, they could and needed to distill those ideas to something the illiterate common man could follow, there is no revolution without persuading the common man to fight (not that I'm advocating a revolution at the present time).
But I don't see evolutionary psychology persuading any politicians.
(Jesus didn't read aeronautical engineering, so you better not ever get on an airplane.)
re: "Useful", more:
PROJECTION
Scientific rationalism, and more generally "Enlightenment" values and ideas ("classical liberalism"), have a well known history, but if you are actually so ignorant that you don't understand them, or never learned them, this might be useful:
Over the last few decades, a growing body of research has revealed not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions. To explain these patterns, I’ll first show how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and the family—influence our motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions. Then, to explain the peculiar trajectory of European societies over the last two millennium, I lay out how one particular branch of Christianity systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, thereby altering people’s psychology and opening the door to the proliferation of new institutional forms, including voluntary associations (charter towns, universities and guilds), impersonal markets, individualistic religions and representative governments. In light of these findings, I close by arguing that the anthropological, psychological and economic sciences should transform into a unified evolutionary approach that considers not only how human nature influences our behavior and societies but also how the resulting institutions, technologies and languages subsequently shape our minds.
-----
A paleo-libertarian's description, using classical history, no evolution:
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness. There are not two camps here: liberalism versus mythic religion. There are three: mythic religion, rational liberalism, and transrational spirituality.
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic. (As Ronald Reagan would say, it tossed the baby with the dishes.) Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine.
... all the talk of a new spirituality in America is largely a waste of time unless those two central dialogues are engaged and answered. Unless spirituality can pass through the gate of science, then of liberalism, it will never be a significant force in the modern world, but will remain merely as the organizing power for the prerational levels of development around the world.
> Jesus didn't read aeronautical engineering, so you better not ever get on an airplane.
You are not getting my point at all. It isn't that science is useless. It's more that science is incapable of changing the hearts of men, at scale.
> Unless spirituality can pass through the gate of science, then of liberalism, it will never be a significant force in the modern world
I agree. I am working on that actually. But I don't see a 21st century spirituality ever coming from scientists or philosophers. Not in its kernel. Though of course, getting their support could be useful.
In my STEM field, citations have exploded because (1) modern word-processing software makes it much easier than it used to be to add citations ad infinitum, and (2) if you don't cite somebody (who really shouldn't be cited), they will email you to complain, and so it's just must easier to cite them up front. And those emails are in turn driven by academia bean-counters who look at citations as a mertic of qaulity for advancements and promotions. I expect that this phenomenon is occuring across all of science.
I found that there are certain authors and publications that you need to cite in order to be taken seriously by the journal reviewers. If you do this early and often in your paper, it establishes that you are part of the current status quo and not some maverick trying to rock the boat. If you present a concept, in one case advancing the ideas of the establishment, and in the other, challenging them with the very same concept, you will find that of course they are treated very differently by the reviewers. Therefore it makes sense to cite the established "experts" (based on their status) in the field regardless of whether you agree with them or not. By the time they get to the conclusion of your paper, most reviewers will have already lost interest.
I think - in defence of Yarvins take on why big tech has no power - he wasnt explicitly saying that the media controls big tech, more that the values of the media (and by extension "the cathedral") are in lock step with the establishment in Washington, and his inference being that the media sets the agenda in that regard.
Washington effectively looks to the NYT for guidance on issues and then takes action. I dont believe he is stating it quite that sequentially, but the idea is that the media-academic axis effectively comes up with whats important and whats not, and the correct-thinking nodes of the permanent government absorb this and move accordingly.
"Washington effectively looks to the NYT for guidance on issues and then takes action."
The NYT is absolutely the modern Pravda of the progressive oligarchy and the cities and institutions they rule. I swear my friends in the Blue Bubble read it religiously and would have no idea of proper verbal and intellectual etiquette without it.
But that being said, no person, group or institution is in charge. The Doctrine (basically Critical Social Justice as constantly filtered through the social-media hivemind) rules the world, and sets up a sort of invisible electric fence inside the brains of our ruling class.
The Doctrine flows through them, but they don't craft or edit it, they just wield it to accrue power and attack enemies.
Yes, very well put. This is one of many (oh so many!) aspects of the current situation that Moldbug is blind to. He thinks there must be someone in charge, someone pulling the strings; but there isn't. The strings pull themselves.
I think you’re conflating a number of Yarvins ideas here
Moldbug has no "ideas" that are not either (1) masticated regurgitations of what his intellectual superiors (not a high bar) have written, or (2) wild crazy nonsense. In the latter category we can put his notion that the US should be run by a figure like Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong Un.
Moldbug should just move to Russia or North Korea, where he can live out his dream of living under an autocrat.
Oh, give it up! Moldbug is a moron who gets almost everything wrong. Why anyone (let alone our esteemed host!) pays any attention at all to his wild gesticulations and spittle is a mystery.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/subscriber-commentary-and-review-6d1/comment/12217625
You don’t agree with anything he’s said on the nature of power in modern America?
Most of what he says is wrong, and the rest is obvious and derivative (of, e.g., Marx).
Regarding those WEF clips: If Tony Blair is so concerned about vaccination status, he should pressure his country's Office of National Statistics to resume publishing it in regard to all cause mortality, which it stopped doing last May for (queue posh British accent) utterly unfathomable reasons:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/if-you-dont-like-the-data-stop-reporting
As for that German lady ensuring hate speech laws will come to America: Hey lady---be more German. (Also, enjoy your silly GAE satrapy's coming de-industrialization and destitution. Pro tip: shipping Light Natural Gas across the Atlantic in tankers is markedly less efficient than having it pumped through a pipeline under the Baltic sea. Nixing nuclear didn't help either. And here I thought Germans were good at physics...)
EDIT: If anyone wants a ground-zero accounting of Germany's unfolding energy crisis, I highly recommend Eugyppius. He focuses more on Covid, but every couple weeks includes vignettes about his ruling clowns' management of electric grids and whatnot. This is his latest in that track:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/energy-transition-farce-continues
God I miss Trump. Border security. No LBGTQWXZ bullshit. No DEI bullshit. Low inflation, strong economy. Peace. Prosperity. We must take our electoral process back.
"take our electoral process back", LOL! Like, by demanding that the Georgia SoS "find" 12,000 votes? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/in-recorded-call-trump-pressures-georgia-official-to-find-votes-to-overturn-election-idUSKBN2980MG Or did you mean by storming the Capitol and assassinating the Vice President?
How does an unarmed crowd assassinate anyone? Especially someone protected by armed Secret Service officers?
Hyperbolic man of profound cognitive dissonance speaks... but there is nothing of value nor intellectual honesty to listen to.
Do better please.
I enjoyed the article on the military -industrial complex and the belief systems that make Washington tick. As somoene whose worked in Washington 25+years I agree policy is not (usually) a direct result of bribery (unless you count job offers/fancy conferences/career building as bribery), but I think the belief systems - the genunine acceptance of whatever the elite Consensus is - cannot be deemed entirely responsible for policy choices becuase the belief system could not survive without the financial incentives attached to it. A city full of surplus elites competing for limited resources cannot afford to throw its weight behind just beliefs - they need jobs and careers, and will retrofit their beliefs to jive with whatever the The Current Thing is at the moment. In other words, Washingtonians may have convinced themselves they are true believers - and maybe they are for a moment - but as soon as the financial incentives change, the Current Thing has a way of evolving. If realism or restraint were profitable, I think it would suddently become in vogue in Washington. I'm not holding my breath.
the globalists prefer deconstruction because that is how the constraints (regulatory capacity of the nation-state) on digital capitalism and globalism are reduced or destroyed.
re: high-social-trust, evolutionary psychology and the foundations of western civilization ("classical liberalism")
As her Henrich @ Harvard, the co-emergent evolutionary features of "classical liberalism" are:
"WEIRD"
W - western, outbred gene pool, cousin marriage banned, Constitutional order, high-social-trust
E = educated, historically increasing literacy and numeracy, higher IQ is selected for in the market economy, lots of low IQ is wiped out by the black plagues, etc.
I = industrialized, innovative (partly genetic, due to outbreeding in NW Europe)
R = rich, wealth increased as the feudal economy was replaced by market economics, river and sea trade (Hanseatic League)
D = democratic. representative politics and governance were medieval (not Enlightenment), such as communas, fueros and cortes in the Spanish March, or the earlier advocacy of peasants' rights by the Clunic Abbeys.
M.S. Lyons is my favorite substack!
"Musk's willingness to clean house — by some accounts, he has fired over two-thirds of Twitter’s former staff — could have a domino effect throughout Silicon Valley, putting a dagger in the heart of the Left’s ideological control over America’s powerful tech sector."
I think this is right.
Here is what I think I know. Business ownership and C-suite managers are still mostly profit oriented despite the indications that woke has infected them. They previoysly had the Trump economic expansion that increased labor demand and then Covid related government policy that constrained labor supply. Talent acquisition is a competitive advantage. Also marketing departments were profiling up and communing consumers noting the woke trends. So these owners and managers agreed to go with the trends to support bottom line benefits.
But it was a mistake. Ownership and management know it now. Their work cultures degraded to a mess of social and political activism instead of just getting work done. And Musk broke the crust on the acceptance for correcting the mistake. So these businesses are shedding the toxic employees. It helps the bottom line while also positioning the company to be ore politically correct in light of the building anti-woke, anti-CRT public sentiment.
It will not die easily because of the MSM being hopelessly staffed by these campus-indoctrinated cultural Marxists... but die it will. We are moving toward a time when anyone infected with this toxic parasitic mind virus will be labeled as unfit for hiring. That then moves to the education system source... the head of the snake... where parents will demand their kids are not infected due to the economic harm they would suffer.
As I've stated before, most of higher education is so corrupt and dysfunctional (admin bloat, etc.) that it just needs to be burned to the ground (metaphorically speaking) and replaced with one or more new systems that are better (anti-fragile to disruption, capable of meta-narrative analysis, etc.).
The monopolistic, centralized nature of education bureaucracy is one of its many evils.
"That then moves to the education system source... the head of the snake... where parents will demand their kids are not infected due to the economic harm they would suffer."
Let's hope so, but the Academic Left is very firmly entrenched.
Yep, neo-liberal, corporate sell outs.
re: "big tech has no power" (Yarvin)
A better framing might be to look at how "big tech" evolved, specifically as part of the surveillance state and military-industrial-complex (and broader corporate-state).
Here is part of that puzzle:
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
excerpt:
THE CIA IS INVESTING IN FIRMS THAT MINE YOUR TWEETS AND INSTAGRAM PHOTOS
Among 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving CIA venture capital funding, several are developing tools to mine social media.
Lee Fang
April 14 2016, 10:57 a.m.
... Alongside its investments in start-ups, In-Q-Tel [CIA's investment arm] has also developed a special technology laboratory in Silicon Valley, called Lab41, to provide tools for the intelligence community to connect the dots in large sets of data.
In February, Lab41 published an article exploring the ways in which a Twitter user’s location could be predicted with a degree of certainty through the location of the user’s friends. On Github, an open source website for developers, Lab41 currently has a project to ascertain the “feasibility of using architectures such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks to classify the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of Twitter messages towards a specific topic.”
Collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries has potential benefits for counterterrorism, but such CIA-supported surveillance technology is also used for domestic law enforcement and by the private sector to spy on activist groups.
Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiation for a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a “tech unicorn” — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.
...
Wild that 1970's neo-Malthusians may have inadvertently preserved American hegemony.
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
What Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) Gets Right and Wrong
BY KEITH PRESTON ON DECEMBER 6, 2021
...
excerpts:
Like other similar thinkers (for example, Michael Anton or the recently deceased Angelo Codevilla) these types of critics mistakenly conflate the “Brahmins” with the entirety of the ruling class. In fact, Codevilla even referred to them merely as the “ruling class” as if the Brahmins were the sole source of power. But this sector exists only at the mercy of the wider body of ruling class power, which is the full framework of the political, military, financial, industrial, and technological elite, which is, in turn, a subset of the global elites in these same categories.
Interestingly, Yarvin cites Burnham as an influence, but he misses one of Burnham’s core insights, i.e. that classical liberal-bourgeois capitalism was superseded by managerial capitalism, not just in the US but in all developed countries, in the mid-20th century, and it was through the entrenchment of managerial capitalism that the Brahmins were able to obtain the hegemonic social and cultural role they have since achieved.
Also, the managerial class was faced with an insurgency within its own ranks in the postwar period which paralleled the expansion of the professional class, particularly within the public sector during the same time period (recognizing this was one of the things Irving Kristol got right).
Another critical factor is that the postwar “Information Age” created the framework for both classical bourgeois capitalism and managerial capitalism to be superseded by digital capitalism of which Yarvin himself is a part as a Silicon Valley software developer. Like Peter Thiel, Yarvin is merely part of the “Silicon Valley Right” or the right-wing of digital capitalism.
...
The traditional financial establishment faced an intra-ruling class challenge during the late 20th century from the insurgent Sunbelt industries that emerged in the postwar period (whose political frontmen were figures like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich). But the northeastern financial establishment has been able to launch a largely successful counterattack through its alliance with digital capitalism against traditional industrial capitalism and with the Brahmins against the sinking traditional middle class to upper-middle class (Chamber of Commerce types, small capital, the petite bourgeoisie, etc.).
The Brahmins that Yarvin claims to oppose have been empowered primarily by the rise of digital capitalism and the traditional financial establishment. Additionally, the “woke” ideology (what I call “totalitarian humanism”) that presently constitutes the self-legitimating ideological superstructure of the ruling class is not the sole creation of the Brahmins alone.
[->] Every ideological superstructure has a materialist base and class base
(which in the case of totalitarian humanism would be digital capital, the tech revolution, “financialization” of the kind that has emerged from neoliberalism, the expanded technocratic class which is the product of the wider degree of specialization and the division of labor rooted in increased technological sophistication).
...
Very good. Everyone should read the whole thing (a single page). It's far more correct and useful than any thousand pages of Moldbug's drivel.
From what I can tell, Yarvin went viral because he was willing to dig past the surface level of the left-vs-right narrative, and that was interesting and useful to the populist-right "base" (Bannon) because it provided them with a high-brow sounding perspective that was (from their viewpoint) "anti-establishment" and almost revolutionary.
Yarvin apparently openly embraces "NRx" (neo-reactionary-right) ideas about the end of capitalism and democracy as we know them, so that gives people the impression he is "edgy".
As far as I can they are semi-accurate in their analysis of the crisis that the establishment faces.
ok, lol
I wrote a post sometime ago thematically related to your post on evil, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, but it's more pointing out that collectively, we are clinging to certain philosophical positions like they are capital T Truths, but they really, really aren't. It's called Triumphalism and Defeatism:
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/triumphalism-and-defeatism
Anyway, let me know what you think!
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Lenski1.htm
excerpts:
... the nine basic principles undergirding Lenski’s theory.
1) Humans are by nature, social animals who engage in “antagonistic cooperation” in order to maximize their need satisfaction.
...
2) Like Malthus before him, Lenski notes that our reproductive capacity exceeds our productive capacity.
...
3) Human societies are part of the global ecosystem and cannot be understood unless this factor is taken fully into account.
...
4) Like most sociologists Lenski asserts that society is a system; however, he continues, it is an imperfect system at best.
...
5) Economic goods and services are not distributed equally to all members of society —some always get more than others.
...
6) Goods and services within societies are distributed on the basis of need (subsistence goods) and power (surplus goods).
...
7) Elites rule through a variety of means, but force undergirds all power and authority.
...
8) Societies are remarkably stable systems that tend to resist change.
...
9) Societies evolve in response to changes in their natural and social environments.
[#9 is explained in more detail, below]
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Lenski2.htm
excerpt:
Recall that the 9th Postulate of Lenski’s ecological-evolutionary theory was that “societies evolve in response to changes in their natural and social environments.” Sociocultural change is of two types, innovation and extinction. The first involves adding new elements such as
[] technologies,
[] social practices,
[] institutions, or
[] beliefs
to the system. The second type of change is, of course, the elimination of old elements in the system. While extinction certainly occurs, the process of sociocultural evolution is predominantly a cumulative process, that is, change and innovation are added far more to the system than older elements are eliminate. This, Lenski adds, is one reason why sociocultural systems have grown more complex over time.
There are ultimately only three major factors determining the characteristics of the sociocultural system:
[] 1) Human’s genetic heritage;
[] 2) The biological, physical, and social environment; and
[] 3) The influence of prior social and cultural characteristics of the society itself.
The force of historical experience therefore plays a major role in shaping social institutions and thought. The rate of innovation and change varies across different societies. There are several factors that influence this rate.
[] 1) Store of existing cultural information;
[] 2) Population size;
[] 3) Stability of the physical and biological environment itself;
[] 4) Contact with other societies;
[] 5) Character of the physical environment itself;
[] 6) Attitudes and ideologies toward change; and
[] 7) Technological innovation itself
...
A pretty conventional view of history (I'm not sure what the origins of it are, sorry*) are that techno-economic disruptions, such as the invention of the windmill or printing press, or market economics, drive social change and changes in collective awareness/thinking as well as values (and religion).
Using "Triumphalism" as the primary explanation of social change is close to being absurd. It is definitely incoherent.
-----
* gerhard lenski is one of the best sources of social-science data on social change:
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Lenski/Index.htm
re: subjective meaning and objective truth - opposition or integration?
Can you summarize?
I read Mary Harrington's piece on Gnosticism and it doesn't come to terms with the real referents in ancient purity myths: evil, sin, "clinging", desire, spiritual impurity, "paganism".
It does focus on "embodiment" and "truth", but it doesn't explain how metaphysical "truth" relates to spiritual purity and scientific-objective "truth".
It also doesn't account for systems theory, cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology and recent brain science (McGilchrist).
From an evolutionary perspective, morals are fundamentally biological, they are about how kinship group altruism and intense social cooperation became one of the most important survival adaptations in ancient, primeval human populations. One of the evolutionary changes in the human brain that enabled kindship-group (parochial) altruism, social cooperation and eusociality was an enhanced ability for INHIBITION of "primitive" emotions that were non-altruistic and non-cooperative. (Neanderthals brains were much less capable of advanced social cooperation and probably less capable of reading body language relating to altruism and social cooperation).
The mythic religions of the Axial (post-Bronze-Age) era were like a software upgrade to the INHIBITION circuitry that had evolved in the human brain. (McGilchrist)
Modern rationalism (which co-emerged with AGENTIC VALUES) didn't account for the importance of such INHIBITION circuits. Thus, "capitalism" and "democracy" are in a crisis. ("colonization of lifeworld by systems", Habermas)
Postmodern deconstruction and relativism just makes all that worse.*
John Vervaeke (brain science) has proposed a way to "reverse engineer" the adaptive features of mythic culture (hierarchic social order) and thereby make modern rationalism and postmodern "construct awareness" part of a post-postmodern (fluid-holistic) anti-fragile software upgrade to human culture.
* https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
> enabled kindship-group (parochial) altruism, social cooperation and eusociality was an enhanced ability for INHIBITION of "primitive" emotions that were non-altruistic and non-cooperative.
> The mythic religions of the Axial (post-Bronze-Age) era were like a software upgrade to the INHIBITION circuitry that had evolved in the human brain. (McGilchrist)
This sounds like you are saying non-altruistic and non-cooperative emotions are problematic. They aren't. We would turn into a beehive without them, and that's a Bad End to me
> Postmodern deconstruction and relativism just makes all that worse.
As I remember that article pointing out (if it wasn't there, the same guy said this elsewhere) the postmodern critique is fundamentally correct. Like everything, postmodernism has downsides and upsides, potential for salvation and potential for perdition. Though I think the potential for salvation in this case doesn't come from postmodernism itself, but from the possibilities it creates. Said possibilities have not been exploited.
> John Vervaeke (brain science) has proposed a way to "reverse engineer" the adaptive features of mythic culture (hierarchic social order) and thereby make modern rationalism and postmodern "construct awareness" part of a post-postmodern (fluid-holistic) anti-fragile software upgrade to human culture.
Yeah, this sounds like lunatic gibbering that won't ever cash out into anything real. Philosophy is a problem, but it is not THE problem. THE problem is spiritual, the problem is we have given up on striving to greater heights. We need a 21st Century Sermon on the Mount, and just like the Sermon on the Mount, philosophy is not up to the task of producing that.
re: lunatic gibbering
PROJECTION
You apparently don't understand evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology, which isn't surprising.
Yeah, I don't think any politician (nor Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed for that matter) ever read evolutionary theory or evolutionary psychology, so how useful can they really be? I don't understand the vagaries of it, but I do know I don't see any useful outputs coming out of that black box, which inclines me to the LUNATIC GIBBERING judgement.
But let's flip it around, and say it is not gibbering, that there is something useful there. How do you bring it to the masses?
Another classic example:
The early church banned cousin marriage as part of their political project to destroy the old, "tribal-clannish" and "pagan" culture and then impose a new civilization/empire.
Banning cousin marriage had significant biological effects: over several hundred years the gene pool in NW Europe (the Franks) became more variable.
Side note: evolution is basically three things:
- variation
- selection
- retention
Because the post-clannish gene pool was more more variable, there were more people with higher IQs and more people with "classically liberal" personality traits (openness to new experience, etc.).
Technological, economic and social disruption and innovation led to the selection of genes for higher IQ and "liberal" personality types that could function under emerging market economics and Constitutional order.
The older, inbred "clannish" Feudal social form rested on a foundation of things like Fealty Oaths and Moots, and a non-trade local economy (Serfs and Warlords).
The expansion of the "liberal", urban-commoner middle class gene pool and the Manorial economy created what we now consider to be "western civilization".
That process (which itself now can't be "seen" withOUT an understanding of cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology) did not INITIALLY require that the "masses" understand that banning cousin marriage, or increasing literacy, developing higher IQs, more "open" personality types, expanded river and sea trade, scientific or technological innovation or "democracy" would be beneficial. "INITIALLY".
Autopoiesis - "emergence" in self-organizing systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis
The Church had no knowledge of autopoiesis or evolution when it reached that decision. Which is my point, you can have major positive impacts in the world without ever engaging with evolutionary psychology. Or likely with philosophy, for that matter.
A classic example:
After the end of the ice ages, expanding agrarian settlements and walled cities depended on one or more educated, capable elites: priests, warrior castes, craftspeople (such as bronze smiths), and librarians-scholars to innovate and develop new forms of civilization that prevailed over the marauding nomadic tribes during and after the Bronze Age.
The slave and peasant classes were not the primary innovators, although important agricultural innovations, such as selection and breeding of polyploid crops, were done by farmers (presumably with unusually high IQs).
Again, that is not a example at all, those developments were made by people with no knowledge of evolution, much less evolutionary psychology.
A general model of social change and human consciousness:
re: David Ronfeldt's TIMN model of social change
disruption -> disintegration -> regression to ideological tribalism -> reintegration at a higher level / social form
https://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/02/overview-of-social-evolution-past.html
---excerpts---
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
...
---end excerpts---
Hey, this is stuff I've been thinking about, except I didn't engage with evolutionary psychology at all to get to it. I guess I'll buy this stuff is so great if an evolutionary psychologist uses his gnosis to become a hyper-politician and save us all, but I know that won't be happening, so...
You apparently don't understand that something being "useful" doesn't necessarily entail "bringing it to the masses".
A-bombs were not "brought to the masses" before they were used to end WW2.
Generally speaking, the leading edge of social, intellectual and technological disruption is carried out by a small number of innovators that convince those in power to do things differently, or they inspire a competing group of elites.
The US Constitution represented the values and ideas of a competing group of elites, the merchant class, that overthrew the older elites: state-church bureaucracy and the royalty.
The "masses" were mostly illiterate (frequently inebriated) and learned about the relevance of Enlightenment ideals via written communication from the Committees of Correspondence that were read out loud by literate relatives, or people in pubs, (churches?), etc.
A-bombs weren't actually needed to end WW2, Japan would have fallen eventually anyway. But in the American Revolution, sure, an intellectual vanguard came up with some ideas, but they were also practical men, politicians, they could and needed to distill those ideas to something the illiterate common man could follow, there is no revolution without persuading the common man to fight (not that I'm advocating a revolution at the present time).
But I don't see evolutionary psychology persuading any politicians.
You are apparently incapable of logical thought.
(Jesus didn't read aeronautical engineering, so you better not ever get on an airplane.)
re: "Useful", more:
PROJECTION
Scientific rationalism, and more generally "Enlightenment" values and ideas ("classical liberalism"), have a well known history, but if you are actually so ignorant that you don't understand them, or never learned them, this might be useful:
https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/overview
excerpt:
Over the last few decades, a growing body of research has revealed not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions. To explain these patterns, I’ll first show how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and the family—influence our motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions. Then, to explain the peculiar trajectory of European societies over the last two millennium, I lay out how one particular branch of Christianity systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, thereby altering people’s psychology and opening the door to the proliferation of new institutional forms, including voluntary associations (charter towns, universities and guilds), impersonal markets, individualistic religions and representative governments. In light of these findings, I close by arguing that the anthropological, psychological and economic sciences should transform into a unified evolutionary approach that considers not only how human nature influences our behavior and societies but also how the resulting institutions, technologies and languages subsequently shape our minds.
-----
A paleo-libertarian's description, using classical history, no evolution:
https://phillysoc.org/liggio-the-hispanic-tradition-of-liberty/
-----
A post-postmodern, new age philosopher's (anti-"woke") meta-narrative:
https://www.lionsroar.com/liberalism-and-religion-we-should-talk/
excerpt:
...
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness. There are not two camps here: liberalism versus mythic religion. There are three: mythic religion, rational liberalism, and transrational spirituality.
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic. (As Ronald Reagan would say, it tossed the baby with the dishes.) Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine.
... all the talk of a new spirituality in America is largely a waste of time unless those two central dialogues are engaged and answered. Unless spirituality can pass through the gate of science, then of liberalism, it will never be a significant force in the modern world, but will remain merely as the organizing power for the prerational levels of development around the world.
> Jesus didn't read aeronautical engineering, so you better not ever get on an airplane.
You are not getting my point at all. It isn't that science is useless. It's more that science is incapable of changing the hearts of men, at scale.
> Unless spirituality can pass through the gate of science, then of liberalism, it will never be a significant force in the modern world
I agree. I am working on that actually. But I don't see a 21st century spirituality ever coming from scientists or philosophers. Not in its kernel. Though of course, getting their support could be useful.