And we’re back… with this month’s subscriber community thread: where I gather a roundup of some of the more striking things I’ve read recently, and you can discuss anything you’d like in the comments (disclaimer: not literally anything).
I was going to include a few different pieces on Elon Musk buying Twitter, but am still thinking that one through, including what it might mean and whether I want to write about it at more length. Feel free to suggest any good pieces on the subject.
Separately, I’m currently searching for good Substacks that showcase and explore great visual art, including painting and sculpture. If you have any recommendations, I’d appreciate it. Or, if no really good ones yet exist , and you know your stuff, then you should consider starting one!
Speaking of the arts, a friend I know who’s rather deep within the orchestra music world has started a Substack under the pen name of Don Baton (get it?) to write on how ideologues are tearing the classical music scene apart and generally trashing our culture.
In this particular piece, Don explores how and why the work of a previously little-known composer, Florence Price (get it?), has suddenly become the mandatory Current Thing for orchestras across the United States, and what that says about the future of music.
The Phoenix-like rise of Florence Price’s reputation over the last three years is unprecedented. There might be no instance in the 250-year-or-so history of the classical music canon in which a long-deceased composer has burst onto the orchestra scene as suddenly and as ubiquitously as Florence Price…
But Price’s exhumation and rising genius cult make little sense on the merits of her music alone… As the audiences that have emerged from her concerts over the last couple years with charmed puzzlement on their faces may have guessed, the Florence Price phenomenon is not an artistic one. Rather, it hails from the realm of politics.
Don is not only a very talented writer, but a genuine renaissance man with a deep knowledge of music and history, so I’m looking forward to reading more from him. (He’s also started weekly suggestions of composers and works that really deserve wider recognition – this week: a stunning symphony by Kalinnikov). So I suggest you check out The Podium and subscribe if this is something that might interest you.
Haidt’s lengthy new essay (which he says he agonized over for at least three months), published as it was in prestige freak-out-porn magazine The Atlantic, has received an unusually large amount of attention in mainstream media. In it he makes his case for why all our problems can be blamed on social media, including the coming collapse of civilization. You should read it.
Now, I like Haidt. He’s a really smart, affable guy who’s produced some really great work. I also happen to dislike life on social media generally. And I certainly agree that the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid. But I think this piece suffers from some serious tunnel vision.
By here pointing the finger at only a single variable – the structural dynamics of social media technology – as the cause of all of our political and cultural upheavals he offers an explanation that seems uncharacteristically naïve for such a typically sophisticated thinker. But what troubles me more is that in doing so (whether intentionally or not) he deflects any attention from any role the ideological regime’s behavior may have played in stoking conflict and advancing the degeneration of all our institutions, politics, and culture. And this is very convenient, because if the only problem is social media and the unreliable peasants who say things on it, then the solution becomes a simple one: censor the internet (and discourse in general) even harder.
No wonder the oligarchic media seems positively overawed with the essay right now. That’s never a good sign.
In contrast, Hanania has published a long discussion on his Substack with Gail Heriot, a law professor and member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, explaining in great detail how the US Civil Rights Act of 1991, which amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has, when it comes to employment law, effectively made “presumptively everything illegal.”
And how, because the law was (deliberately) written so vaguely, the bureaucrats who get to decide what is allowable and what is not have for decades now essentially had total power over not only employment law but the whole incentive structure of our private economy and culture. This then became a root cause of what we now think of as “wokeness” and the entire culture war.
This is a really astute essay on the seeming rejection among Gen Z of ideals or standards of any kind – whether aesthetic, moral, or otherwise. You might consider of the zealous ideological movements of our time and think this must be the opposite of what’s happened. But, by rejecting the idea that there is any fixed truth, post-modernism necessarily occludes the possibility of genuine ideals existing beyond personal identity and utility.
In current social justice movements, this reasoning now extends to every kind of ideal: all standardised criteria for excellence, in upholding some fixed understanding of what excellence is, come to be seen as little more than marginalising forces exerted by capitalism, white supremacy or the patriarchy. Through this lens, tinted by the cultural criticism of Foucault, ideals are simply unfair standards that have been set by malicious actors and do not exist in relation to any kind of objective truth.
Esmé notably traces this conflict back considerably deeper, however:
But this is not simply a political gesture; at the root of it, it is a metaphysical gesture. Though it may seem like just another expression of Left-wing anti-hierarchical sentiment, the rejection of ideals is inextricably linked to a philosophy which has dominated Western culture since the Enlightenment: the repudiation of Platonic ideals. It could even be said that the entire history of modern philosophy — from Descartes to Kant and Nietzsche to Foucault — has been a series of reactions against ideals; and liberalism, itself a product of this philosophy, shares with it the same enemy: Plato.
In his theory of Forms, Plato argued that beyond the material world there exists an eternal realm of immaterial Forms, including the transcendent properties of being: Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Even though these ideals are metaphysically beyond human societies, Plato believed that it was essential for them to guide human societies. His entire political philosophy revolves around the need to aspire towards ideals, and so to uphold universal standards of beauty, bodily health, and all-round excellence or arete.
Platonic philosophy promotes these ideals not because they serve corrupt institutional structures, capitalism, the patriarchy or a particular race, but because they correspond to eternal truth: truth beyond this world.
But the Enlightenment began a long revolt against Plato, and soon:
Within a couple of centuries, Liberalism came to fear ideals. After all, their very existence evinces some standard that is superior to the human individual and his or her personal preferences, causing he or she — knowing of nothing but a world in which their own agency is taken as the prime source of meaning – to be offended by them. For the liberal, the very principle of the eternal appears totalitarian; that it should have any control over their life is practically fascistic.
This is a great observation. If your priority is that there should be no limits on the individual, then of course Plato and all his philosophical descendants would be threatening. But now anti-Platonism has progressed to something beyond even this, and we’ve arrived at the virtue and standards-less Last (Wo)Man… “Goblin Mode.”
Somewhere BAP has something pithy but also slightly illiterate to say about all this.
“New crypto. You mine it by promoting about it. Once every eight minutes, a decentralized algorithm searches for tweets containing the word ‘ViraCoin’ with a positive sentiment score, weights them by number of likes, and then picks one at random to award a ViraCoin to.”
“Sounds… awful.”
“No, you don’t understand. This is just the first step. Once we make it super-big, we’ll introduce other things into the algorithm. Charities. Political causes. We’ll have millions of people competing to praise UNICEF in order to get that next million-dollar ViraCoin drop. If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness. We’re an at-scale solution to awareness. Solve that, and you solve poverty, inequality, racism…”
You wander off. There’s an open bedroom, with a few people sitting on the bed talking inside. A woman in a blue dress is saying something about how she’s trying to build a secular scientific interpretation of Buddhism.
“There’s no alpha left in secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism,” says the guy on her right, a thin white man with a carefully trimmed beard. “Half of California spent the past hundred years trying to create secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism, you can’t throw a stone without hitting one.”
“You don’t understand,” says the woman, “they stopped halfway. There are a bunch of Buddhist doctrines nobody’s ever come up with secular rationalist versions of. Like reincarnation…”
The war in Ukraine distracted me from paying attention to and writing about the French election as I had planned (Russian interference!). But it turned out to be the same dull “Macron faces Le Pen and wins again” story anyway. Still, there are interesting dynamics to investigate here, and Caldwell has I think here written one of the better English language articles I’ve read on the subject.
Increasingly, the elite and the non-elite political tendencies have no more contact with one another than if they were living on isolated islands. Macron is the candidate of rich cities, beach towns, ski resorts and the “instagrammable” parts of France.
But, 60 kilometres outside of France’s cities, Marine is the most popular politician. She is the candidate, writes Fourquet, of people whose work involves repetitive tasks, bad smells, irregular hours and loud noises. In the very richest neighbourhoods, though, it is as if she doesn’t exist. In the first round in the 6th arrondissement of Paris (the one that contains St-Germain-des-Près and all those cafés Hemingway drank in), she got 4% of the vote and finished sixth. Just 854 people ticked her box.
…An astonishing 43% of Macron’s voters are already retired, according to Fourquet. That may be why they don’t mind Macron’s pension reform, which will only kick in for voters born after 1969. Le Pen dominates the generation of voters born between 1973 and 1987.
If you’ve read other good analyses of the election and the state of French politics now, I’d be interested in your suggestions.
Kotkin points out a really interesting divide as part of an article describing what he thinks is a growing political clash within the American business elite:
Some of this reflects understandable concern over Biden’s energy policies and taxes on the analogue economy — where food is grown, products are manufactured and shipped, and oil and gas are drilled. In recent years, Republicans have reaped support from many of the families tied to the “old economy” that markets tangible products. Looking at contributions, the differences between business sectors are stark: with manufacturers and agribusiness favouring the GOP by three to one, while the entertainment, internet and publishing industries overwhelmingly support the Democrats. To some extent, this is a conflict between those who invest and make stuff, and those who gorge on media and digital tools.
What makes Musk so different from his tech counterparts is that he remains, primarily, an industrialist, more in the mould of great Valley founders like Robert Noyce or Jerry Sanders — building cars, spaceships, and tunnel-making equipment. Like any manufacturer he needs reliable, affordable energy and worries about overregulation, which sets him against California’s ultra-progressive legislature… By contrast, Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft manufacture almost nothing in the United States, and primarily make their money based on advertising or charging for services without much in the way of competition.
Finally, Rebel Wisdom has managed to bring two of my favorites together for a fantastic discussion, and on one of my favorite topics, too. You won’t find many better uses for an hour of your time then watching this, as far as I’m concerned.
Thank you for bringing Don Baton's Substack to our attention. I just subscribed to it.
I'm a classically-trained musician who shares the same rigorous approach to the western classical music canon as he does, and I appreciate his writing tremendously. I wouldn't have known about it had you not highlighted it here.
For a good take on Macron versus Le Pen, Ed West (Wrong Side of history substack) has a decent read: https://edwest.substack.com/p/marine-le-pen-and-the-thatcher-paradox?s=r He compares France to Britain and notes that the French younger generations are increasingly more conservative than their elders, which is the reverse of Britain's voting habits.
West is also worth subscribing to for his blend of current events and history. I'd think you'd enjoy his essays.
Completely different topic we are following here : the major shift in Sweden now going thru serious riot problems after their pro immigration policies. A case study...
In re the Florence Price article, it really does remind me of Havel's Greengrocer, not because I think we live in a Communist dictatorship, but because of the ways people are forced to navigate a dogmatic and vindictive monoculture, where one wrong statement (even one misinterpreted word or phrase overheard by a stranger) can result in social, career and even financial death.
We all know why Florence Price has suddenly been thrust into the classical pantheon, everyone doing it knows what they're doing and why, and I assume everyone attending one of these performances also knows what's happening and why--but no one is allowed to say so and speak the simple truth that this is some form of cultural reparations, that for various reasons our cultural leaders have all unanimously decided the current paramount value in all fields is antiracism, that the first purpose of culture now is "rectifying historical wrongs" or "centering marginalized voices" or whatever the current jargon is. Or, more to the point (as the article states), we are not celebrating Price for her work, but for her race and gender.
So if I know it and they know it, you have to assume any black people in the vicinity know it too, and it becomes obvious to everyone that what we're watching is a dishonest performance of guilty white liberals desperately trying to save their hides by mouthing current platitudes about 'white supremacy' and bowing and atoning to any black person they can find--not because they've thought any of it through, or because they think Florence Price is better than Brahms, but because this is what the "movement" and its dogma demand.
Now that the New Left has successfully seized the means of cultural production, if you're to have any career in culture you must bow to their demands and parrot their dogma. And much like all their Left predecessors, this has created a culture and society where public fealty and being a good soldier for the cause matter first and foremost, while every statement and action quickly begin to reek of fear, paranoia and dishonesty.
“Now, I like Haidt. He’s a really smart, affable guy who’s produced some really great work. I also happen to dislike life on social media generally. And I certainly agree that the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid. But I think this piece suffers from some serious tunnel vision.“
Yup. Agree 100%. I became a great big Haidt fan after reading Righteous Mind. But he blew past the prior years before big tech and social media evolved as censors of right-leaning opinions and content. Wikipedia used to be reliable. The left-drift of the mainstream print, video and film media was accelerating before Twitter got popular. The root of this sickness goes straight to the education system. The corruption of the media… including social media… is directly related to the number of graduates indoctrinated in the critical theory mind virus that have been launched into almost every industry and discipline. The classical music story is just another example. The fix requires a purge of the education curriculum and identification of those currently corrupted by it. They need therapy and should NOT be hired until they clear up that mind virus.
“But the Enlightenment began a long revolt against Plato, and soon:
Within a couple of centuries, Liberalism came to fear ideals. After all, their very existence evinces some standard that is superior to the human individual and his or her personal preferences, causing he or she — knowing of nothing but a world in which their own agency is taken as the prime source of meaning – to be offended by them. For the liberal, the very principle of the eternal appears totalitarian; that it should have any control over their life is practically fascistic.”
I think there is a bit of a miss here as the ideas solidify a foundation (the roots if you will) that provide the individual the security to pursue creative self interest. Look up libertarian patriarchy and read the book “Nudge”.
“ Physicals vs. Virtuals, as I’ve been telling you.”
Yes. Interesting that this is the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. Her problem is that she did not incorporate any idea of globalism into her vision. Let’s use Musk for example. He shrugs and it really does not benefit the physicals as other less capable people in the global economy just start peddling alternatives. It would take the food producers to shrug before getting the attention of the moochers. Interesting that the looters are sort of shooting themselves in the foot this way by causing inflation… thus preventing a need of the producers, like the Canadian truckers, to shrug.
NS Lyons, (or anyone else) in your opinion is Curtis Yarvin reliable?
I’m really loving his stuff but he strikes me as a megalomaniac. Curtis is clearly brilliant, but he claims such a gigantic perspective that my instincts tell me to be careful.
I am torn on, and often frustrated by, Curtis Yarvin. On the one hand, I find much of his analysis on how power works and how our system has become an oligarchic regime undeniably persuasive. He has a brilliant mind and his critique is very powerful.
On the other hand, I find his solution, such as it is, to be, uh, underwhelming. Because – and I can’t really believe I am writing this sentence – scrapping the constitutional democracy we have (to the extent that we have one) and replacing it with a monarchy (dictatorship) probably will not end well at all.
We know this because of course just about every modern dictatorship (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc.) turned out rather badly. And Yarvin has, to my knowledge, never been able to address why his monarchy would produce an enlightened Augustus instead of Stalin. He constantly reverts to talking about the past and the Carolingians and whatnot, when the power of kings was actually well-limited. Which is true. But he has never accounted for the growth of the modern centralized state and the fact this means it is now seemingly inevitable that, with the power of the total state at his fingertips, the 20th century king becomes Stalin.
Or, best case scenario, we get to be run by the average American CEO as absolute monarch. Who wants to be run by Disney’s Bob Iger? Because that’s approximately who you’re probably gonna get, not freaking Aragorn.
I think I’d rather take my chances with reviving the Republic.
But then sometimes Yarvin seems to suggest that all he means is that we elect another super-powerful president like FDR, who will clean out the unaccountable bureaucracy but keep the constitutional system. He is never very clear about this, because all of his writing is exceptionally playful and ironic. And so it’s not entirely clear he doesn’t just mainly enjoy playing with ideas and generally being a bit of a troll.
Ultimately I think of Yarvin as a bit of a utopian: he has good reasons not to like what we have now, but his imagined plans for a rosy future would almost certainly end in a shitshow. So I’d say he’s a bit like Marx: read him for some often very strong critical analysis of the system as it is, but beware his prescriptive solutions.
Yarvin has a "brilliant mind"? Holy fuck! Yarvin is a raving moron. That you take him at all seriously, N.S., drops my respect for you by quite a few floors.
Eh, if Yarvin has a problem, it's not his lack of raw brain power. It's that he's the kind of possibly-on-the-spectrum intellectual without the humility, understanding of genuine humanity, or common sense necessary to realize his lofty system-level theories will probably just get a lot of people killed. That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't understand anything about how political power works.
Seems to me that understanding of how political power works is pretty common. What are Yarvin's insights that a thousand other students of politics had not already figured out? I claim there are zero. Then there are his "lofty system-level theories will probably just get a lot of people killed", if anyone were insane enough to try to implement them. So that all adds up to raving moron in my book. Still shocked that it doesn't in yours.
Thank you for that fulsome answer. Curtis Yarvin is a rascal, spectacular in his analysis of power and I suspect he is dead impatient with human foibles, so offers up this monarchy as an ironic fuck you to us plebeian humans with a crackle of “that’s all we deserve.” I highly recommend everybody read the “gray mirror”in Curtis Yarvin’s substack it is truly brilliant and unique.
For what its worth I feel like he gets carried away and makes these grand sweeping statements about society, politics or international relations that can prove to be pretty wide of the mark.
Some of his World War 2 interpretations are just ridiculous.
The glaring one for me though is how he has repeatedly missed the boat on Russia. He would often advocate US withdrawal from Europe in order to allow Russia to just come in and "take over" - which always seemed odd as their economy is the size of Spains. It indicated (to me at least) a pretty fast and loose style of analysis, that may be prevalent across the rest of his theories but youd never know because theyre not invading Ukraine.
That being said, I love his perspective on power in America and find it very compelling.
Great point about the metaverse owning the universe. These giant corporations have so much wealth and influence, and it’s mostly all generated by cluttering our minds—so much clutter you never stop and really think about this radical difference. It seems the Internet went from a dream of a diffuse community to the same old domination by major players. Although they do provide real services, one wonders what life would look like if they suddenly got wished into the cornfield one day… like 1995? Would we really miss 2022?
1. The end of the Cold War created space for the Successor Ideology to Flourish
During the Cold War, the West was in an existential struggle with the Soviet Union. That struggle was, of course, military. But it was also ideological. Which was the better system, democratic capitalism or Soviet communism? In the West, and, in particular, the United States, this struggle consumed our attention and provided both an interpretive framework for understanding the world (the good West v. the bad communists), and meaning to organize our actions. (“We must defeat the godless communists.”)
The West emerged victorious from the Cold War. But without an organizing theme, the West’s ideological underpinnings – freedom and religion -- lost their power. (Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, said, “Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy.”)
Into this vacuum of meaning rushed a new moral focus – the evil of oppression. Critical theory provided the philosophical foundation, and the New Faith became ascendant. Its direction and excesses have disturbed conservatives and liberals, alike, in part because they see the woke as myopic, focused only on oppression at home, while ignoring the geopolitical realities of the wider world.
2. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a temporary distraction.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine acted like a wake-up call to this country. It reminded us that there were other threats in the world besides the White Patriarchy. And, at first, the macro-aggression in Ukraine made concerns with microaggressions seem like a quaint luxury. But this change in orientation will not last. The invasion of Ukraine does not represent an existential threat to the United States, and, in any case, it will eventually be over. Unless Russia invades NATO (currently a dim prospect), attention soon will return to the more pressing issues of injustice at home.
3. You Can’t Beat Something With Nothing
Many have noted that the New Faith has many hallmarks of a religion, including a metaphysics, epistemology, and moral code. It has filled the gap left by the decline of religion and of ideological fervor that accelerated after the Cold War. What can the counter-revolution offer as an alternative?
Francis Fukuyama suggests that liberalism offers the best way to manage a culturally diverse society. But liberalism does not provide meaning to life or something to struggle for.
In his new book (which, I admit, I have not yet read) Yoram Hazony apparently suggests a return to government-promoted Judeo-Christian moral traditions. But in a world in which belief in God is seen largely as superstitious, it’s not clear how much traction this will gain.
Hazony also recognized, in his essay, “The Challenge of Marxism,” that Woke principles have a certain appeal because they are grounded in some truth -- there are power differentials between groups, and this power is used to oppress. Any response to the New Faith must recognize and address this.
So where does this leave us? You can’t fight something with nothing. Neither traditional liberalism nor national conservatism seem to offer a compelling alternative into which Woke religious zeal can be diverted. It may be that the New Faith will fall victim to its own excesses, and will burn itself out. But, for the time being, the movement is still on fire.
I’m still mulling over your April piece on Russia-China-Ukraine-Trans-Atlantis, especially beginning from the section where you quote Marc Andreessen. Meanwhile, what do you make of this, if anything?
I just read an in-depth analysis of the problem by a hippie-turned-Orthodox priest (his path seems quite similar to Paul Kingsnorth). He was writing back in the 60s, but the piece is even more timely now. The language and framing is explicitly (Orthodox) Christian, but given that the decline of the West is so closely correlated with the decline of Christianity, I don't see that as a methodological problem:
Having read a bit more of Fr. Seraphim's work, he traces the root of the problem all the way back to the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. I'm inclined to agree, insofar as that's the true origin of the Western divergence. I don't think you can make a convincing case for God on a purely rational level. So, as soon as Western Christendom centered reason over tradition and first-hand mystical experience (contrary to the other major revealed religions), everything that followed - Renaissance humanism, the Enlightenment, and Nietzsche - was inevitable.
That same focus on reason also enabled the Scientific Revolution, without which the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible. Which means we can also thank the Scholastics for the eventual dominance of nihilistic Western civilization over the rest of the world, which otherwise might have been unaffected by the West's intellectual crisis.
Makes me realize how spot-on Spengler was when he described the West as Faustian civilization. I don't think you can separate the impulse that gave us dominion over the world from the one that made us lose our souls.
I remember finally listening to his take on covid/vaccines and was blown away by how badly he missed his own point. As you point out, he is probably aware of the links to his own thesis but daren't pull at the thread incase he becomes the next Jordan Peterson.
I agree with your point, but as it has been said, discretion is the better part of valour: maybe he values a more quiet existence, the public debate is quite a din.
Hey i'm inclined to agree w u, but we should also take into account the pressure public apostates from the Left consenus have to face these days: not only would he be tarred and banished as some sort of quasi-bigot a al Jordan Peterson, but assuming he has a wife and kids and they live in Blue areas and attend or are employed by Blue institutions, his newfound status as a heretic would affect them significantly and make them some level of black sheep.
(Just to bolster: I know friends of the Alan Dershowitz family, and when he became pro-Trump, his blackballing extended to his grandchildren! My friends in brownstone Brooklyn would no longer allow their kids to play with the Dershowitz kids.)
I don't know really anything about Jon Haidt, but he seems much more comfortable as an insider offering reasoned critique rather than an outsider offering vehement dissent. Either way, he's still done some good work.
Thank you for bringing Don Baton's Substack to our attention. I just subscribed to it.
I'm a classically-trained musician who shares the same rigorous approach to the western classical music canon as he does, and I appreciate his writing tremendously. I wouldn't have known about it had you not highlighted it here.
For a good take on Macron versus Le Pen, Ed West (Wrong Side of history substack) has a decent read: https://edwest.substack.com/p/marine-le-pen-and-the-thatcher-paradox?s=r He compares France to Britain and notes that the French younger generations are increasingly more conservative than their elders, which is the reverse of Britain's voting habits.
West is also worth subscribing to for his blend of current events and history. I'd think you'd enjoy his essays.
Hello N.S ! Regarding Musk and Twitter - I would recommend Mary Harrington's piece for UnHerd : https://unherd.com/2022/04/do-we-need-king-elon-musk/
You probably saw it... I actually wrote a commented summary for our French speaking audience
https://www.laselectiondujour.com/elon-musk-chevalier-blanc-de-la-liberte-dexpression-n1576/
Completely different topic we are following here : the major shift in Sweden now going thru serious riot problems after their pro immigration policies. A case study...
In re the Florence Price article, it really does remind me of Havel's Greengrocer, not because I think we live in a Communist dictatorship, but because of the ways people are forced to navigate a dogmatic and vindictive monoculture, where one wrong statement (even one misinterpreted word or phrase overheard by a stranger) can result in social, career and even financial death.
We all know why Florence Price has suddenly been thrust into the classical pantheon, everyone doing it knows what they're doing and why, and I assume everyone attending one of these performances also knows what's happening and why--but no one is allowed to say so and speak the simple truth that this is some form of cultural reparations, that for various reasons our cultural leaders have all unanimously decided the current paramount value in all fields is antiracism, that the first purpose of culture now is "rectifying historical wrongs" or "centering marginalized voices" or whatever the current jargon is. Or, more to the point (as the article states), we are not celebrating Price for her work, but for her race and gender.
So if I know it and they know it, you have to assume any black people in the vicinity know it too, and it becomes obvious to everyone that what we're watching is a dishonest performance of guilty white liberals desperately trying to save their hides by mouthing current platitudes about 'white supremacy' and bowing and atoning to any black person they can find--not because they've thought any of it through, or because they think Florence Price is better than Brahms, but because this is what the "movement" and its dogma demand.
Now that the New Left has successfully seized the means of cultural production, if you're to have any career in culture you must bow to their demands and parrot their dogma. And much like all their Left predecessors, this has created a culture and society where public fealty and being a good soldier for the cause matter first and foremost, while every statement and action quickly begin to reek of fear, paranoia and dishonesty.
Yeah, pretty amazing how often that Greengrocer is relevant these days.
Welcome back. Great stuff!
“Now, I like Haidt. He’s a really smart, affable guy who’s produced some really great work. I also happen to dislike life on social media generally. And I certainly agree that the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid. But I think this piece suffers from some serious tunnel vision.“
Yup. Agree 100%. I became a great big Haidt fan after reading Righteous Mind. But he blew past the prior years before big tech and social media evolved as censors of right-leaning opinions and content. Wikipedia used to be reliable. The left-drift of the mainstream print, video and film media was accelerating before Twitter got popular. The root of this sickness goes straight to the education system. The corruption of the media… including social media… is directly related to the number of graduates indoctrinated in the critical theory mind virus that have been launched into almost every industry and discipline. The classical music story is just another example. The fix requires a purge of the education curriculum and identification of those currently corrupted by it. They need therapy and should NOT be hired until they clear up that mind virus.
“But the Enlightenment began a long revolt against Plato, and soon:
Within a couple of centuries, Liberalism came to fear ideals. After all, their very existence evinces some standard that is superior to the human individual and his or her personal preferences, causing he or she — knowing of nothing but a world in which their own agency is taken as the prime source of meaning – to be offended by them. For the liberal, the very principle of the eternal appears totalitarian; that it should have any control over their life is practically fascistic.”
I think there is a bit of a miss here as the ideas solidify a foundation (the roots if you will) that provide the individual the security to pursue creative self interest. Look up libertarian patriarchy and read the book “Nudge”.
“ Physicals vs. Virtuals, as I’ve been telling you.”
Yes. Interesting that this is the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. Her problem is that she did not incorporate any idea of globalism into her vision. Let’s use Musk for example. He shrugs and it really does not benefit the physicals as other less capable people in the global economy just start peddling alternatives. It would take the food producers to shrug before getting the attention of the moochers. Interesting that the looters are sort of shooting themselves in the foot this way by causing inflation… thus preventing a need of the producers, like the Canadian truckers, to shrug.
NS Lyons, (or anyone else) in your opinion is Curtis Yarvin reliable?
I’m really loving his stuff but he strikes me as a megalomaniac. Curtis is clearly brilliant, but he claims such a gigantic perspective that my instincts tell me to be careful.
I am torn on, and often frustrated by, Curtis Yarvin. On the one hand, I find much of his analysis on how power works and how our system has become an oligarchic regime undeniably persuasive. He has a brilliant mind and his critique is very powerful.
On the other hand, I find his solution, such as it is, to be, uh, underwhelming. Because – and I can’t really believe I am writing this sentence – scrapping the constitutional democracy we have (to the extent that we have one) and replacing it with a monarchy (dictatorship) probably will not end well at all.
We know this because of course just about every modern dictatorship (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc.) turned out rather badly. And Yarvin has, to my knowledge, never been able to address why his monarchy would produce an enlightened Augustus instead of Stalin. He constantly reverts to talking about the past and the Carolingians and whatnot, when the power of kings was actually well-limited. Which is true. But he has never accounted for the growth of the modern centralized state and the fact this means it is now seemingly inevitable that, with the power of the total state at his fingertips, the 20th century king becomes Stalin.
Or, best case scenario, we get to be run by the average American CEO as absolute monarch. Who wants to be run by Disney’s Bob Iger? Because that’s approximately who you’re probably gonna get, not freaking Aragorn.
I think I’d rather take my chances with reviving the Republic.
But then sometimes Yarvin seems to suggest that all he means is that we elect another super-powerful president like FDR, who will clean out the unaccountable bureaucracy but keep the constitutional system. He is never very clear about this, because all of his writing is exceptionally playful and ironic. And so it’s not entirely clear he doesn’t just mainly enjoy playing with ideas and generally being a bit of a troll.
Ultimately I think of Yarvin as a bit of a utopian: he has good reasons not to like what we have now, but his imagined plans for a rosy future would almost certainly end in a shitshow. So I’d say he’s a bit like Marx: read him for some often very strong critical analysis of the system as it is, but beware his prescriptive solutions.
I finally got to The World Order Reset which Sir RJF recommended. Thank You SIR! I just posted over there:
Phew! Words fail me, and that doesn't happen. Just can say thank You. Much to chew on from Your enlightening discussion. TYTY again.
N.S. Lyons is the best, eh!
You've got the right of it there, Sir.
Yarvin has a "brilliant mind"? Holy fuck! Yarvin is a raving moron. That you take him at all seriously, N.S., drops my respect for you by quite a few floors.
Eh, if Yarvin has a problem, it's not his lack of raw brain power. It's that he's the kind of possibly-on-the-spectrum intellectual without the humility, understanding of genuine humanity, or common sense necessary to realize his lofty system-level theories will probably just get a lot of people killed. That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't understand anything about how political power works.
Seems to me that understanding of how political power works is pretty common. What are Yarvin's insights that a thousand other students of politics had not already figured out? I claim there are zero. Then there are his "lofty system-level theories will probably just get a lot of people killed", if anyone were insane enough to try to implement them. So that all adds up to raving moron in my book. Still shocked that it doesn't in yours.
Thank you for that fulsome answer. Curtis Yarvin is a rascal, spectacular in his analysis of power and I suspect he is dead impatient with human foibles, so offers up this monarchy as an ironic fuck you to us plebeian humans with a crackle of “that’s all we deserve.” I highly recommend everybody read the “gray mirror”in Curtis Yarvin’s substack it is truly brilliant and unique.
For what its worth I feel like he gets carried away and makes these grand sweeping statements about society, politics or international relations that can prove to be pretty wide of the mark.
Some of his World War 2 interpretations are just ridiculous.
The glaring one for me though is how he has repeatedly missed the boat on Russia. He would often advocate US withdrawal from Europe in order to allow Russia to just come in and "take over" - which always seemed odd as their economy is the size of Spains. It indicated (to me at least) a pretty fast and loose style of analysis, that may be prevalent across the rest of his theories but youd never know because theyre not invading Ukraine.
That being said, I love his perspective on power in America and find it very compelling.
Well said and thank you
Great point about the metaverse owning the universe. These giant corporations have so much wealth and influence, and it’s mostly all generated by cluttering our minds—so much clutter you never stop and really think about this radical difference. It seems the Internet went from a dream of a diffuse community to the same old domination by major players. Although they do provide real services, one wonders what life would look like if they suddenly got wished into the cornfield one day… like 1995? Would we really miss 2022?
While Waiting for Lyons’ Next Post
1. The end of the Cold War created space for the Successor Ideology to Flourish
During the Cold War, the West was in an existential struggle with the Soviet Union. That struggle was, of course, military. But it was also ideological. Which was the better system, democratic capitalism or Soviet communism? In the West, and, in particular, the United States, this struggle consumed our attention and provided both an interpretive framework for understanding the world (the good West v. the bad communists), and meaning to organize our actions. (“We must defeat the godless communists.”)
The West emerged victorious from the Cold War. But without an organizing theme, the West’s ideological underpinnings – freedom and religion -- lost their power. (Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, said, “Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy.”)
Into this vacuum of meaning rushed a new moral focus – the evil of oppression. Critical theory provided the philosophical foundation, and the New Faith became ascendant. Its direction and excesses have disturbed conservatives and liberals, alike, in part because they see the woke as myopic, focused only on oppression at home, while ignoring the geopolitical realities of the wider world.
2. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a temporary distraction.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine acted like a wake-up call to this country. It reminded us that there were other threats in the world besides the White Patriarchy. And, at first, the macro-aggression in Ukraine made concerns with microaggressions seem like a quaint luxury. But this change in orientation will not last. The invasion of Ukraine does not represent an existential threat to the United States, and, in any case, it will eventually be over. Unless Russia invades NATO (currently a dim prospect), attention soon will return to the more pressing issues of injustice at home.
3. You Can’t Beat Something With Nothing
Many have noted that the New Faith has many hallmarks of a religion, including a metaphysics, epistemology, and moral code. It has filled the gap left by the decline of religion and of ideological fervor that accelerated after the Cold War. What can the counter-revolution offer as an alternative?
Francis Fukuyama suggests that liberalism offers the best way to manage a culturally diverse society. But liberalism does not provide meaning to life or something to struggle for.
In his new book (which, I admit, I have not yet read) Yoram Hazony apparently suggests a return to government-promoted Judeo-Christian moral traditions. But in a world in which belief in God is seen largely as superstitious, it’s not clear how much traction this will gain.
Hazony also recognized, in his essay, “The Challenge of Marxism,” that Woke principles have a certain appeal because they are grounded in some truth -- there are power differentials between groups, and this power is used to oppress. Any response to the New Faith must recognize and address this.
So where does this leave us? You can’t fight something with nothing. Neither traditional liberalism nor national conservatism seem to offer a compelling alternative into which Woke religious zeal can be diverted. It may be that the New Faith will fall victim to its own excesses, and will burn itself out. But, for the time being, the movement is still on fire.
I’m still mulling over your April piece on Russia-China-Ukraine-Trans-Atlantis, especially beginning from the section where you quote Marc Andreessen. Meanwhile, what do you make of this, if anything?
https://youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw
On the Death of Ideals:
I just read an in-depth analysis of the problem by a hippie-turned-Orthodox priest (his path seems quite similar to Paul Kingsnorth). He was writing back in the 60s, but the piece is even more timely now. The language and framing is explicitly (Orthodox) Christian, but given that the decline of the West is so closely correlated with the decline of Christianity, I don't see that as a methodological problem:
https://www.oodegr.com/english/filosofia/nihilism_root_modern_age.htm
Having read a bit more of Fr. Seraphim's work, he traces the root of the problem all the way back to the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. I'm inclined to agree, insofar as that's the true origin of the Western divergence. I don't think you can make a convincing case for God on a purely rational level. So, as soon as Western Christendom centered reason over tradition and first-hand mystical experience (contrary to the other major revealed religions), everything that followed - Renaissance humanism, the Enlightenment, and Nietzsche - was inevitable.
That same focus on reason also enabled the Scientific Revolution, without which the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible. Which means we can also thank the Scholastics for the eventual dominance of nihilistic Western civilization over the rest of the world, which otherwise might have been unaffected by the West's intellectual crisis.
Makes me realize how spot-on Spengler was when he described the West as Faustian civilization. I don't think you can separate the impulse that gave us dominion over the world from the one that made us lose our souls.
Agree 100%.
I remember finally listening to his take on covid/vaccines and was blown away by how badly he missed his own point. As you point out, he is probably aware of the links to his own thesis but daren't pull at the thread incase he becomes the next Jordan Peterson.
I agree with your point, but as it has been said, discretion is the better part of valour: maybe he values a more quiet existence, the public debate is quite a din.
Cool
Hey i'm inclined to agree w u, but we should also take into account the pressure public apostates from the Left consenus have to face these days: not only would he be tarred and banished as some sort of quasi-bigot a al Jordan Peterson, but assuming he has a wife and kids and they live in Blue areas and attend or are employed by Blue institutions, his newfound status as a heretic would affect them significantly and make them some level of black sheep.
(Just to bolster: I know friends of the Alan Dershowitz family, and when he became pro-Trump, his blackballing extended to his grandchildren! My friends in brownstone Brooklyn would no longer allow their kids to play with the Dershowitz kids.)
I don't know really anything about Jon Haidt, but he seems much more comfortable as an insider offering reasoned critique rather than an outsider offering vehement dissent. Either way, he's still done some good work.