Category Archives: Politics

Dark Progressivism

Politics

I think what separates me from radical leftists is that I believe that there are forms of evil beyond mere greed and bigotry — and that these forms of evil are far worse than injustice.

But many leftists see a world where the ultimate evil is injustice — usually motivated by bigotry or greed or both. That is where the moral spectrum terminates. For them, it’s justice, injustice… and justifiably violent reactions to injustice. After long, egregious oppression, the oppressed feel intense righteous anger, and it is understandable that they sometimes express it violently.

I see this as a deeply stunted conception of morality, and that people who are stuck inside that conception are susceptible to unwitting participation in the worst forms of evil.

Far worse than injustice is a desire to make a person or group suffer for no other reason than hate. This kind of hate is not mere anger. It is an enduring desire to inflict suffering and annihilation not as a means to some other goal, but for the intrinsic sadistic gratification of inflicting it.

My diagnosis of Progressivist support of Hamas is they think Hamas was driven to sadistic violence by injustice, because, according to such Progressivists, it was an act of opposition to injustice, and the expression of their feelings of oppression, the violence — even the exuberant cruelty of that violence — was understandable and justified.

And I think there is a profound darkness in this understanding and justification of radical evil.

I suspect that the darker Progressivists feel this same evil in themselves toward others who have treated them unjustly, people toward whom they feel enduring resentment, people they would like to punish and humiliate. At some submerged semi-suppressed level, they relate to Hamas — sympathize (feel-with) — and revel in witnessing them act on their hatred and actualize real bloody, sadistic revenge.

For Dark Progressivists, feelings of profound hatred and desire to inflict suffering and annihilation on those they call unjust are the primary animus of their “social justice” mission. They are evil and they don’t even know it. Or as one famous Jew put it, “they know not what they do.”

This is what I intuited in the souls of Progressivists even before they gave over en masse to Dark Progressivism in the summer of 2020 — and before their latent antisemitism came to light in 2023.

They are not coming from a wholesome place — despite their idealistic and impossibly aspirational rhetoric. To anyone with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, and most of all, noses to smell it, it is manifestly obvious that what animates their hearts, souls and efforts is not good, but in fact, infernal.

They call for a perfectly just world, first, to make unfavorable comparisons between an impossible worldly paradise and this existing flawed world. And second, to justify violent dismantlement of this flawed world — allegedly as ground-clearing for paradise, but in actuality, for the sake of the sadistic annihilation itself.

Scalar being

Extended Self, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Once we accept the existence of collective beings, and we understand that these beings can suffer the same psychological problems any individual person can have, or isolated complexes within an individual persons can have — the world looks radically different.

Nietzsche clearly saw being as scalar in this way, observing:

Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

And

Morality as the self-division of man. — A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover’s faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth.

Are all these really selfless states, however? Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “impossible and yet real”? Isn’t it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when a pigheaded man says, “I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man’s way?”

The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above-mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not “selfless.” In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.

Even in his notorious attacks on people (Wagner, being the most famous), Nietzsche was attacking representative agents of collective beings:

I never attack people, — I treat people as if they were high-intensity magnifying glasses that can illuminate a general, though insidious and barely noticeable, predicament. This is how I attacked David Strauss or, more precisely, the success of an old and decrepit book in German ‘culture’, — I caught this culture in the act… And this is also how I attacked Wagner or, more precisely, the falseness, the half-couth instincts of our ‘culture’ that mistakes subtlety for richness and maturity for greatness.

And of course, for those with ears to hear it, Nietzsche’s famous concept of Übermensch obviously referred to a collective being, not some solitary hyper-ambitious dark-triadic wannabe Caesar or Jesus figure.

So when I read Progressivist analysts and commentators scratching their heads over the latest Wall Street Journal poll, showing that Democrats are at a 35-year popularity low, trying to understand how it it is possible that any sane, moral, semi-informed person could possibly hate the left —

…seeing that no group of people in the history of humanity has ever been this benevolent, this sensitive to the plight of the vulnerable and marginal, this concerned about this planet and its living inhabitants, this self-aware and attentive to its own biases, blindnesses, privileges, power imbalances, this obsessed with justice and ethical conduct, this independent- and critically-minded, and this courageously determined to make the most radical changes to the world…

— I marvel at how they miss the possibility that they are caught up in a collective narcissism.

But nobody can tell any narcissist — individual or collective — anything they don’t already believe. The groupthink of the left summarily dismisses the views of anyone who challenges its own self-conception and self-image — its vision of its own exceptional moral, intellectual and technical character — and in fact lashes out in a classically narcissistic way at anyone who refuses to see it as it wishes to be seen.

So Progressivists as a group, and as individuals insofar as they think, speak and act as Progressivists, are hated the way all narcissists are hated — while they themselves collectively experience nothing but persecution from vicious, stupid, inferior people who misunderstand them and fail to appreciate their unbelievable, mind-boggling awesomeness.

Note: Progressivism isn’t the only insane collectivity out there, of course. Everyone these days — and in every time, for that matter — is caught up in some collective being or another. It seems the most prominent collective beings active today are contemptible in differing ways. I’ve been caught up in several of them, myself. Nobody is immune. But that is the point: Nobody is immune! Progressivism thinks it is exceptional and immunized, thanks to its special awareness and its mitigating techniques. This conceit makes Progressivism a zillion times more self-oblivious and meta-uncritical than it should be, given its pretensions and aspirations.

A great many people who lack the audacity to indulge their narcissistic impulses in their own individual self will instead gratify them by identifying themselves with a collective narcissism, and “selflessly” giving over to it. You see it often with parents who hyper-protect and privilege their own children over the reasonable needs of other people, we see it in historically oppressed groups who claim special status with special benefits to compensate for past wrongs. We see it in religious fanatics who imagine themselves as having special relationships with “God” with inside knowledge and a special duty and destiny.

Observing the Golden Rule, interpreted ever-more radically, at ever-deepening meta-levels, is the hardest thing a person can attempt. Most of us fuck up and mistake the self or the collective with whom we identify with God.

“Doing the Work” of liberation

History, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Reading the passage below from Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic, a constellation of thoughts hit me in rapid succession. I will try to recreate it.

Here is the passage:

Understanding the essence of Technic as related to the instinct for violent appropriation and domination of the ‘beast of prey’ (which, coherently with his misinterpretation of Nietzsche, he deems as ‘noble’), Spengler unveils both the fundamental connection between Technic and Western modernity, and the former’s essential tendency to uproot and rewrite reality.

Both these aspects of Technic, and particularly its violence, were witnessed first­hand by one of the most eclectic German authors of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger. A volunteer in the ranks of the assault Shock Troops, Jünger barely survived the ‘storms of steel’ of the First World War. In the trenches on the Western Front, he had a chance to experience the cataclysmic power with which Technic can literally uproot the reality of the world, unleashing its power like an ‘elemental force’ capable of rewriting what humans believe to be the unchangeable substance of the world. As it was immediately clear to the then young author, the First World War was the dawn not just of a new kind of ‘warfare of materials’, but of an altogether new kind of reality. From the murderous flood that had buried the reality of old, a new cosmic order was about to emerge — and the experience of this passage left Jünger at once utterly paralysed and strangely exhilarated.

. . .

During the interwar period, such ‘demoniacal lightness’ didn’t abandon Jünger, as he attempted to distil his early intuitions of the new spirit of the age in his 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker).

In its pages, Jünger developed an exalted, apocalyptic vision of a new world reborn as a product of Technic, and centred around the totalizing principle of Work. This was no mere ‘work’ as we commonly understand it, but Work as a fundamental principle to which every social form and structure was to be adapted. As Technic would vanquish any previous form of reality and all remnants of the old and feeble values, Work would transform the innermost aspects of all things, and particularly of humans, as if by rewriting their whole genetic code. The actualization of the prime symbol of Work would then amount to a thorough mutation of the existent, that would be at once metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic.

One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.

It will take the rise of Nazism, the death of his son in battle, the collapse of Germany and, most importantly to Jünger, the invention of the atomic bomb, to swerve him off the path of a heroic embrace of Technic’s coming reign.

Here is the sequence of thoughts:

  • “Arbeiter” as Jünger conceived it is a clear expression of what Eric Voegelin identified as the essential characteristic of political gnosticism in its various forms. “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order… the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God.” The goal of political gnosticism is to make the eschaton (a reality which is essentially beyond time) immanent within history, which is impossible.
  • In the Jewish religion, the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This means observant Jews refuse to acknowledge the man-made gods of political gnosticism. They are a fly in the ointment of every totalitarianism, if not a monkey wrench thrown into the machinations of the social constructors who wish to be or make or imagine a divine counterfeit. As Dara Horn said, “I think there actually is a complete intertwining between the history of the Jewish people and anti-semitism — and I don’t think you can understand one without the other — because it goes back to the Passover story. The foundational concept of Am Yisrael, of the people of Israel, is monotheism, belief in one God, rejection of idolatry. And today we see those things, and it sounds like religion. We think of that as like a spiritual idea in the ancient Near East, that’s a political idea, and you see it dramatized in the Passover story. In other societies in ancient Near East, like ancient Egypt, they’ve got lots of gods. And one of the gods is the dictator. The Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. The whole story of the Exodus is a showdown between the God of Israel and the Egyptian gods, especially the Pharaoh. So when the Jews in ancient times said that they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually were saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. … An anti tyrannical movement is always going to piss off tyrants.”
  • Then I recalled the most famous use of the term “arbeiter”: over the gates of Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei”: “Work makes one free.” Reading this slogan in Jüngerian light is horrifying. And when I recall that one of the slogans of “antiracism” is “Do the Work” and with a goal of spiritual liberation, it all comes into focus. Attacking Jews, whether in the name of Nazism, Marxism, Progressivism, or political Islamism — this is something every totalitarianism eventually does. Of course a camp that literally annihilated Jews, in order to annihilate the Jewish people and its stubborn covenant with God, in order to annihilate the reminder of God’s presence in the world would bear the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

No, reality is not constructed.

Only some kinds of truth — objective truths — are constructed. These truths are pluralistic and relative, and it is wrong to treat them as absolute.

But higher truth is given and revealed to those who will receive it. This truth — a relational truth — acknowledges an Absolute reality that is beyond construction and comprehension.

And this Absolute and the truth that testifies to the Absolute morally binds us in crucial, undeniable and unavoidable ways.

Walk good.

Mandy Patinkin is an amoral idiot and a terrible Jew

Politics
My response to a fellow Jew who claimed that Mandy Patinkin’s “anger was palpable and rightly so”:

His anger is not justified. His anger is morally perverse and more than slightly stupid. It is an actor trying to play the part of the angrily prophetic “good jew”, to win approving applause from Israel’s enemies.

Here is the plain truth: If Hamas were to surrender and return the hostages, the war would end immediately. But Hamas has not surrendered, and they still hold hostages.

Hamas only wants Israel to stop fighting only to enable it to recover, rebuild and make more attempts to annihilate Israel, or at least punish its citizens for the crime of existing. It doesn’t even pretend otherwise, and it doesn’t have to, thanks to the moral bankruptsy of Progressivism.

Now I’m going to challenge you to think critically for yourself instead of passively accepting the “critical thinking” narrative you’re being fed by your trusted sources. What made enemies of the Jewish people so evil and despicable was NOT that they fought the Jews until they were defeated and unable to fight back. That is simply fighting a war to victory. If you recall, this also describes how the Allies fought in WWII. They didn’t make peace with the Germans and Japanese once they were temporarily unable to continue their plans to dominate the world. No! — the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. That is what Israel is doing, and it is what they SHOULD be doing.

Here is really what made the enemies of the Jewish people so evil and so despicable: The Nazis and the like attacked peaceful Jews who were not fighting them. They wanted the Jews to no longer exist.

And this, of course, describes Hamas, not Israel.
I suggest that playing the part of the good Jew should be the opposite of what this silly “angry prophet” wannabe is doing.

Being a good Jew is to insist that people stop attacking Israelis and to insist that they live in real peace — with no long term plans whatsoever to annihilate Israel.

Is that really so unreasonable?

Sadly, the sacrifice demanded at the altar of Progressivism’s golden calf is reason itself. One must conform to the attitudes and feelings and beliefs dictated by the editorial staff of whatever overclass propaganda vehicle one subscribes to — the less reasonable the better. The tastiest sacrifice of all, though, is Jewish self-respect.

And then, as if this weren’t plenty, I wrote a follow-up. My friend expressed concern that Gaza was exacerbating antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment worldwide. I responded:

Antisemites always find reasons to have the attitudes they’re going to have, anyway. They blame everything on Jews, so it should come as no surprise that their own antisemitism is also the Jews’ fault.

But wow — it really helps their case when “the good Jews” agree with them. Progressivist loudmouths keep throwing that in my face when they insist that “antizionism is not antisemitism.” They know Jews who hate Israel and who agree with them about everything, so clearly this has nothing at all to do with Jewishness.

Of course Progressivists are unprincipled to the core, and don’t remember all that stuff they said in the BLM days about internalized racism of black police officers who did a lot of the violence they decried as racist. Nor do they remember all their claims about the impossibility of overcoming 400 years of racism. They’ve somehow magically removed 2000 years of antisemitism without even trying, and they know they are not antisemitic, because they don’t feel antisemitic.

One logic applies to them and another to everyone else. When it comes to progressivists, there is one principle and one principle alone : Progressivists, and Progressivists alone, decide everything, arbitrarily, in accordance with their momentary whim, and nothing anyone else says matters.

Progressivism has been betraying liberalism for years, and now it is betraying the Jewish people. Every time I think Progressivism has hit bottom it finds new lows.

A clarification on ethnicity vs identity

Politics

Ethnicity is our participation in an ethos and our belonging to it.

Identity is how we conceptualize that belonging.

But we can misconceive identity and become hopelessly confused about it. This is what has happened to Progressivists.

The way Progressivists conceptualize identity has nothing to do with actually participating in or belonging to any ethos — including those with which they identify.

What Progressivists know least of all is that the only ethos a Progressivist can belong to is Progressivism — and Progressivism alone.

There are no intersections with Progressivism, only within it.

The moment someone begins to participate in the Progressivist ethos — when they start to belong to it — they lose their ability to participate in their former ethos. They no longer belong to it. They no longer represent it. Their old ethnicity has been traded in for a Progressivist-issued identity, which authorizes and obligates them to “speak as” a member of their former ethnicity — but, in truth, the only speaking they can do post-conversion is ventriloquizing Progressivist formulas.

The Progressivist ethnicity is oblivious to all participatory being — including ethnicity — so they have no idea what they belong to. If they weren’t oblivious to ethnicity, they’d recognize that Progressivism is their only genuine identity, and the identities they list as theirs, which they mistake for the elements of their self-constitution are only Progressivist furniture. Their being is possessed in full by Progressivism.

Again, whoever views their own ethnicity in the glaring identitarian light of Progressivism, immediately ceases to belong to that ethnicity.

In my last post, I mocked the term “Latinx” — a truly dumb word used only by folks who’ve defected to Progressivism and therefore have no legitimate claim to speak for real Latinos.

In that post, I claimed the “x” stands in for their new unconscious ethnicity.

But I missed a vicious dad joke opportunity, which I must now remedy.

The real problem with the “x” suffix is…

…it should be a prefix.

Even simpler: The minute you view your ethnicity from the identitarian schema of progressivism you’ve lost that ethnicity and are no longer in any position to represent it. You’ve defected to a new denatured global ethnicity: Progressivism. The customs of your new ethnicity demand obsessive categorization of all persons into identities, and then viewing persons, including yourself, as Platonic manifestations of these categories. Everyone who still participates in your former ethnicity will see that you have become alienated from the identity you imagine yourself the spokesperson for, but you won’t care, because in your nightmare you are awake and they are the ones who are still asleep.

The Progressivist ethnicity

Politics

Progressivists talk endlessly about identity, but rarely mention ethnicity. Why?

I’ll tell exactly why: because Progressivism is itself an ethnicity – but one that denies it. Progressivism has its own ethos, its own moral code, its own culture. But it conceals all this behind a universalist veil.

Progressivists sincerely believe they have transcended ethnocentricity through their awareness of ethnocentricity, that they have effectively addressed bias through awareness and careful technical neutralization of bias, that their dissection of their own privilege with their razor-sharp – but single-edged – critical tools has enabled them to identify and renounce all privilege. Their belief that they’ve overcome naive realism allows them to exercise it in its purest form. The result is an unacknowledged, thoroughly denatured ethnocentricity masquerading as moral objectivity.

To become Progressivist, one must trade in one’s former lived ethnicity for a Progressivist-certified identity.

That identity has little or nothing to do with the lived ethnicity it purports to represent. The identity functions more like an identification card to present to fellow Progressivists, to inform them of your rank and function within the ethos.

When a Progressivist “speaks as” an identity, this is to show one’s ID card, which authorizes the card-carrier to enjoy the privileged access to objective truth and morality to which all Progressivists are entitled – that is, other Progressivists will assign validity to what is said – plus whatever special perquisites one’s identity within Progressivism affords.

But that is the outside view. Viewed from within, one has awakened to their true condition. It is a conversion. It is political salvation. “I was blind to my privilege – but now I see!”

But what they don’t see is the blindness they’ve adopted in exchange for all their new apparent insights. It is blindness to the fact that Progressivism is an ethnicity that displaces all other ethnic participation. And it is blindness to the possibility that one might still be blind where one suspects it least, where it matters most – in one’s own most deeply held moral convictions.

To clarify the difference between Progressivist-assigned identities and authentic ethnic participation and belonging, we need new language.

The term “Latinx” offers a model.

Studies show that very few Latinos or Latinas outside academia use it. Most actively reject it. “Latinx” marks someone who has traded their ethnic belonging for a Progressivist-issued identity.

Progressivists believe the “x” signifies indeterminate gender. But I propose that it signifies severance – a cut, a disconnection from the culture it claims to represent.

The “x” marks what must remain unknown. Because if the convert were to name their new ethos, they’d be bound – by their own principles – to renounce the power it gives them. But that power is the entire point of the new identity. The “x” conceals the new ethnicity behind a mask of moral transcendence. The “x” is an ignorance that is strength.

So let all those who identify as Latinx be called Latinx, as opposed to whatever ethnicity they once participated in.

And let’s also let Progressivists who identify as Black be called Blax.

And so on: Jewx, Gayx, Womynx, Asianx, Muslimx, etc.

And if Progressivists complain – as they certainly will – we can chalk it up to cultural difference.

Another banality of evil

Politics

Since Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial, Adolf Eichmann has been the paradigmatic example of “banality of evil”: the autistically unemotional functionary who is “just following orders” with no individual evil intent, but with no sense of moral responsibility for the role he plays as a cog in an evil machine.

But this is only one species of banal evil. Another banal evil is at large today, but one that is almost the exact reverse. This one trades unemotional autism for hyper-sentimental borderline disorder. Instead of just following orders, she “just follows her heart” with no sense of obligation to understand what evils this sentimentality tolerates, supports, encourages or generates. She feels no obligation to think at all — only to emotionally react to whatever is thrust before her gaze — with no sense of moral responsibility for supplying emotional fuel to an evil machine.

Disgusted

Politics

Over the last decade, I’ve heard more and more milquetoast leftish revolutionaries semi-reluctantly accept censorship and even terrorism as maybe legitimate tactics, at least for people who share their ideological tendencies and goals.

Last year, the target of maybe acceptable terrorism was an insurance CEO. This year’s maybe acceptable terrorism target is a zionist couple. When I read the news, I told a friend:

We have a growing domestic terrorism problem, though not the one most professional-managerial types want to pay attention to. I’m really not looking forward to hearing the same kinds of vapid mealtime pseudo-soul searching I heard after Brian Thompson was shot dead on the street. “Well, you know there’s a lot of anger about this genocide. Maybe it would be a good thing if more Zionists felt some fear about who they’re supporting. I don’t know — is fear of violent retribution always a bad thing?…” blah blah blah.

One thing I’ve learned since October 7th: Decency is far scarcer than I ever imagined.

Sure enough, my daughter posted on the DC murders and received this message on Instagram:

I keep having the same thought.

I do not want to prohibit any speech. But if I were going to prohibit any speech it would be speech advocating prohibition of free speech.

I am against all terrorism. But if I were going to terrorize anyone with the fear of being gunned down on the street it would be people who express their support for terrorists who gun people down on the street for holding an opinion they disagree with.

Almost a quarter century ago, I learned a famous quip from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, commonly misquoted as “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” Here is the verbatim:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

A little practical wisdom.

The Greeks had a word for that. Phronesis.

Collective madness

Philosophy, Politics

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Why? Individuals constantly check their perceptions, ideals, norms, opinions, beliefs and plans both with their fellows individuals and with the concrete data of life. This prevents their ideas from becoming fully self-referential, self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling and alienated from life outside the mind.

But with groups, these very checks against individual madness generate collective madness. Group-think and group-feel permeate the beliefs and attitudes of all its individual members. When the individual tries to reconcile their own individual perceptions, conceptions, intuitions and pangs of conscience with those of their peers, they find that they are alone and out of step. Since few people put much work into testing their own beliefs or trying to get their beliefs to integrate in any coherent way, so most people just assume their trusted sources are trustworthy and that their integration with the people around them will produce personal integrity. Instead of challenging the norms around them, they assimilate. They just go with what their peers think, feel, say and do, and assume all critique of these things from groups or individuals are invalid for some known or unknown reason. And when most of what we know about the world comes from content generated by our own group, it is easy to inhabit a largely imagined world instead of a partially imagined one that must answer to controversy and the chaos of reality.

All it takes is readiness to believe in the exceptional virtuousness of one’s own group and the exceptional viciousness of those who oppose you, and a dash of ordinary human incuriosity, and collective madness is inevitable within two generations.

This is one of those times where anyone who is not actively working to keep their minds in contact with mind-transcendent reality is almost certainly floating off in one or another bubble of collective solipsism.

Deadly political sins

Politics

Resentment, envy, vengeance and sadism are vicious impulses that any decent politics should deprioritize, if not delegitimize altogether, and that each person should try to overcome, not feed and cultivate.

Notice, all these vices are oriented not by positive goals, but by negative ones against particular people, against an enemy.

Any ideology that sees resentment and envy as demanding redress, vengeance as an entitlement of the aggrieved, and sadism as justified when it is an expression of anger at past mistreatment will produce cycles of intensifying anger and violence.

Any politics founded on these vices will corrupt any person who participates in it. And such contentious enemy-focused negative ideologies need their enemies as participants, and consequently seek to force their participation in conflict. Participating as an enemy carries the same risk of corruption as participating as a partisan.

Defeat and annihilation of the enemy is one kind of victory for a negative ideology. Corruption and degradation is another.

Abundance Agenda is designerly politics

Politics

I’ve been reading Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance. This book has sparked a lot of conversation and debate, and, I think, at least with me, a lot of much-needed hope.

For me, the book and its ideology, called the Abundance Agenda, has more methodological and rhetorical significance than any or all of the specific policies it advances. Don’t get me wrong, I do like what they propose, but much more than that, I love how they do their proposing.

This movement does a lot of the best things designers do. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. Abundance Agenda is designerly politics.

First and maybe best, they demonstrate a commitment to positive persuasion. This has been missing in leftist politics for a long time. When I say “positive persuasion” I am not talking about appealing to “emotional positivity” (though they do lead with optimism). I mean that they offer possibilities we can want, instead of possibilities we want to avoid or defeat.

The book starts by telling what we designers call “Stories From the Future”, meant to appeal to the maximum number of people. The goal is to get a critical mass of citizens to align behind their vision of life, and all the policies and initiatives that will bring that vision to life and support its establishment and growth.

In design, we work backwards from these desirable stories. We ask ourselves “can we do this today?” Wherever the answer is “no” we ask “What is required to do it?” The answer to that question is a capability or set of capabilities. A capability might be a new policy, or a new process, or a new technology of some kind, or an organizational change or even a new organization. Once we develop these capabilities, and turn our answer from “no” to “yes, we can do this today” we can start actualizing the story.

In other words, in design we operationalize backwards from a story.

This is what the Abundance Agenda is doing — starting with clean energy and housing.

Part of what is exciting about it is that many of the technological capabilities required for the stories it proposes are in place. Can we do this today? Yes, we can.

The missing capabilities are social ones — alignment problems. And — glory hallelujah! — they embrace these alignment problems as the very substance of politics.

I read a piece criticizing Abundance Agenda as a sort of technocratic revival. I found that angle of attack interesting, because it is right, but not nearly right enough. Technocracy is not bad because it puts experts in positions of power. It is bad because the experts become so enamored with their expertise that they stop responding to non-experts. They feel qualified to engineer society instead of codesigning it with those who will live with the consequences of their actions.

I see Abundance Agenda as rejecting technocratic social engineering and instead embracing technocratic social design. That makes all the difference.

One other thing good designers know very well is that all design involves trade-offs. Designers who work for clients who refuse to make trade-offs in a misguided drive for perfection end up with much worse solutions than clients who seek the wisest trade-offs. Much of what Abundance Agenda criticizes about contemporary leftism is along these lines. In general, the left refuses to make intentional trade-offs aimed at optimal outcomes. It avoids even acknowledging the need for them. Its “idealism” seems to hope for a world without trade-offs — which is unrealistic — and condemns all trade-offs, or at least ones that affect the groups they care about, as unacceptable flaws, which makes them uncompromising, in a bad way.

What the Abundance Agenda needs now is a center-left Ronald Reagan to announce that it is, once again Morning in America. Because the cement gray malaise of now is reminiscent of the drab brown late-70s. It is high time for a sunburst. Sometimes optimism, not anger, is the most powerful force.

(This post needs serious editing. I’m posting it, anyway.)

Confessions of a chicken hawk

Biography, Ethics, Politics

This one is difficult.

I was driving around the Emory campus yesterday and saw a sign for Oxford Road. It made me want to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Oxford Town”. This song was especially relevant to me right now because I am in the middle of a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a Jewish leader in the civil rights movement. “What do you think of that, my friend?” I think what you do, Bob. All decent people must think that. We fucking know it.

I decided to listen to the “Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan” album from the beginning.

The third song on that album is “Masters of War”. I tried to place myself in 1963, when this song and this attitude was new. It was difficult to do. The countercultural ethos has followed the well-worn path of religious degradation, from the shock of world-transformative revelation, to inspired movement, to new vital establishment, to commonsense conventional wisdom, to the default doctrine for all educated Americans, to ready-made attitude equipped with bromides and logical formulas.

And in this last, most degraded state, any war of any kind is automatically viewed as illegitimate, unnecessary and the manufactured product of masters of war trying to get rich on death.

The response to any war is a “surely there is another way” recited as automatically as a libertarian’s “deregulate it” or progressivist “institutional racism” or “cognitive bias” as all-purpose diagnoses and remedies.

They aren’t even responses. They are strings of words erected as a barrier to engaging the problem. I realize I am paraphrasing Hannah Arendt:

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

The particular reality that from which counterculture fundamentalists want protection is moral obligation.

We hate the idea — I, personally, hate the idea, and have always hated it — that there are times when people are obligated to kill and risk death to protect our own people from those who want us to suffer and die.

And, like it or not, people really do exist who actively want the suffering and annihilation of other people. This desire for suffering and annihilation of others is what evil is.

Suffering and annihilation are what war is about. But for evil, suffering and annihilation is the whole purpose, and war is its own end. Part of the joy of evil is forcing others to play their war games, and to taste violence, to face seduction of violence, in the effort to stop its spread. And if they can drag their enemies into evil with them, or create such confusion that people lose the ability to see the difference, so much the better.

Of course, masters of war want to paint every conflict as a simple Good versus Evil struggle. They are despicable moral manipulators. But to abuse this truth by using it to claim the opposite — that there is never Good versus Evil conflict — is hardly better. It is the evil of equating defense against evil with evil. It is the evil of denying evil, and relativizing everything so thoroughly that we willfully ignore evil and allow it to flourish.

Most left-leaners want that to not be true, or to treat this problem as one they can evade. They try to complicate the situation, blur it, muddy it, distance themselves from it. “I can’t understand something this complex.” “I cannot do anything about this, so it is not my problem.” “This is the outcome of a long and tragic process, so we cannot assign blame.” Or “Life is simply tragic. It will never not be tragic. So let it be tragic.” As if simply calling life tragic allows us to transcend the tragedy and look at it from above as mystical spectators and not within as participants. This latter is Christian nihilism, and this mystical nihilism can linger on long after Christian doctrine evaporates from the soul. Faith outlives its beliefs.

They all boil down to “I don’t want to care.” We might say “I don’t give a fuck” with punk bluster, as if we are proud of it, as if we are shameless. Hopefully we are lying, because dishonesty is less damning than genuine shameless selfishness.

How do I know any of this? Because I am guilty of it myself. I was even more guilty in the past, when I was young and draft eligible. I have never been brave enough for combat. I have always been mortified of war. That is shameful.

But I am even more ashamed to pretend shirking one’s war duty is not shameful. Most shameful of all is withholding gratitude and admiration of soldiers who do answer the call and risk their lives to defend their families, their people and all they hold sacred.

Of course, if nothing is sacred, there is nothing to admire or despise. There is no cause for pride or shame. Intellectually honesty knows better. We fucking know better, most of all when we refuse to admit it.

Chord: Intellectual Conscience

Chord, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Someday I will collect the passages that reshaped my soul. This one, by you-know-you, would certainly be among them:

The intellectual conscience. — I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress — as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors {“discordant concord of things”} and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

Another:

The two principles of the new life. — First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon. Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

But then there is this:

The need for little deviant acts. — Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom; to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself; to do as everyone does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: — many tolerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ — this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognised custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognised as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

Confession: this rabbit hole excursion was inspired by an article by Mary Harrington, “Truth Seeking Is Not a Pathology”. A couple of standout quotes:

Does anyone here remember James Damore? He was fired from Google in 2017 for circulating a memo arguing, with all possible reference to the scientific evidence, that not all sex differences in employment choice are down to discrimination. He was pilloried and punished in essence for telling the truth. Now, just recently I read a Free Press interview with Damore, who lives in Europe now. It was a sympathetic piece; in the course of it the writer suggested Damore may have an autism spectrum disorder.

First: a necessary disclaimer. Lots of people find it helpful to have a label and diagnosis for those ways they feel different. What follows is in no way intended to dispute or invalidate that experience. But it’s also widely accepted that there’s a cultural component to what reads as “normal” or “different” in people’s psychological makeup. So what if another way of looking at at least some individuals who get lumped in with these supposed “disorders” is less as “disordered” than as outlier personalities, more oriented toward truth than social consensus?

Another:

The two World Wars were the climactic frenzy of Europe’s industrial civilisation – and the second of the wars was ended by truth-seekers, who split the atom just to see if it could be done. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who developed the atom bomb, perfectly expresses the engineering, truth-seeking mindset, when he said in 1954: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

This is, at its core, the engineer mindset. Engineers want to know: is it technically sweet? And: does it work? The “why” or “what to do about it” as Oppenheimer puts it, is for many a secondary consideration to whether it’s technically sweet, and whether it works.

In the case of the bomb, it did work. The consequences were apocalyptic for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the cultural ripple effects are still with us.

….

What if our turn away from the world of atoms, to the world of bits, was a civilisation recoiling in terror from the cataclysmic achievements of these truth-seeking engineers? My hypothesis is that in response, we turned our technical skills inward and set about re-engineering ourselves. And this is how, in the 1960s, we arrived at the twin engines of the transhumanist revolution: computing and biotech. But as a consequence, it was also the point at which the engineering mindset turned on itself.

And:

The quintessential character of the long, post-Hiroshima twentieth century has been the application of nominalist science to ourselves, while multiplying institutional power and managerial bureaucracies to cover the resulting concatenating falsehoods. The kind of people who succeed in this managerial culture are those that prioritise social consensus over truth.

…

Think of the HR edict: “Bring your whole self to work”. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment will realise that it isn’t actually an invitation to bring your whole self to work. It’s a trap for truth-seekers.

Most people have enough sense not even to bring their whole self to Christmas dinner with the family, let alone work. The edict is designed, consciously or not, to surface people like James Damore, so they can be offloaded in favour of people who are better at calibrating for social consensus. Over time, then, the aggregate effect of policies like this is to increase the number of consensus-seekers, which is to say those adapted to managerialism, and to decrease the number of truth-seekers.

Unpleasant left-liberal musings

Ethics, Politics

Can we stop pretending that efficiencies ever serve meaning?

The perpetual false promise: X technology will help us do our meaningless tasks more efficiently, and free up time to spend on more meaningful work.

No. When we do meaningless tasks more efficiently it means we can allot less time to the work. And that meaningful work that woven so awkwardly into the meaningless tasks is now squeezed all the way out. Now we can do twice as much work in the same amount of time. And half the workforce can be cut.

That is how things actually go down.

Another unpleasant truth to understand: When there is a need for exploitative labor, people are exploited. When there is no need for exploitative labor, people are eliminated.

This is why equality is a reasonable political goal. Only roughly even distribution of power guarantees general human dignity. Equality is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When equality becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of envy and resentment, which is the dark heart of illiberal leftism.

If a free market actually delivers roughly even distribution of wealth, it is a good thing. If it delivers gross inequality, it is a bad thing. A free market is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When a free market becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of pure greed, which is the dark heart of — I’ll coin it, now: illibertarianism.

Atrocity accountants

Politics

Last year I started reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Radical Evil. A passage rang true to me, and it keeps coming back to mind:

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

Since the publication of this book in 2002, nearly everybody has adopted the general worldview of Bernstein’s philosophers and political theorists. Most people think exclusively with words. Whatever they cannot say, they cannot think.

Because they are equipped with pre-fab ideas and language to recognize, process and respond to injustice, human rights, ethics and cognitive biases, this is where the average mind channels its passionate intensity.

But for the same reason, because they have no cognitive tools for evil, evil can operate undetected.

Anyone who wants to commit evil in plain sight can do so by using magician’s tricks to misdirect attention to matters of justice, human rights or ethics. The only reason people would behave in an evil way is if the injustice of more powerful people drove them to such acts. See what you made them do?

Or they can use quantification to de-thicken human action, and morally flatten it into statistics. They count bodies, and whether these deaths are intentional murders or accidental deaths no longer matters. 1,139 eyes for 1,139 eyes. 1,139 teeth for 1,139 teeth.

Which brings me to another point. It gives me chills to notice how automatically most people assume war is an act of pure vengeance. That Israel is entitled to some number of Palestinian deaths, at which point enough is enough? The punishment must be proportionate to the crime?

Are you fucking kidding me? That is actually an evil logic.

The purpose Israel’s war in Gaza is not to balance some magical atrocity spreadsheet.*

The purpose of the war is to ensure October 7th can never happen again. Which is the diametric opposite goal of Hamas, which explicitly stated that the October 7 attack against Israel was just the first of many. Hamas would launch “a second, a third, a fourth” attack until Israel is annihilated. And observe the social justice magician’s trick, as the same Hamas official continues on to say: “We are victims – everything we do is justified.”

But according to the atrocity accountant’s calculations, after Israel has extracted its due pound of flesh, it must consent to a ceasefire with an enemy whose entire raison d’etre is its annihilation, and hope it doesn’t ever succeed.

This is how “good” people think, now. This is how “good” people not only tolerate, but support and encourage evil.

We are dying of stupidity.

  • Note: Incidentally, this atrocity accounting is the logic behind “antiracism”. The best way to balance the justice spreadsheet is to subject oppressors to equal humiliation, or rather allow the oppressed to savor the joys of sadism until they have finally gotten their fair share of this delicacy. It is a disgusting way to understand the world, but it appears it is the only way many “leftists” know how to process moral questions.

This is, of course the opposite of what Martin Luther King advised. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Today’s smug hate-mongers claim time has proved MLK naive. He is now, according to them, obsolete. But these same people were around during MLK’s time, and interfered constantly with his mission. The last half of his last book argues against the misguided “black power” approach. They are nothing new. The resentment-mingers are always there, always tempting good-willed people to succumb to their violent impulses, always calling good “naive”.

And this atrocity accounting is also the opposite of the Dhammapada: “The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified. Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.”

How ironic is it, that the same set who condemns “cultural appropriation” appropriates Buddhist meditation techniques, while embracing resentment politics and identitarianism, which is profoundly anti-Buddhist. And they support the most virulent and bloody cultural appropriation of all time, the wholesale appropriation of the Jewish religion by Islamic supercessionists, who incidentally spread their religion through imperial expansion and colonized the region as settler-colonists. No group could possibly be more anathema to the principles Progressivists pretend to care about than the Islamists theocrats who seek Israel’s annihilation. But of course Progressivists have no principles — only ideas they “leverage” to justify seizing more and more dominance. Only an overwhelmingly powerful group could be this unaware and unbothered by their own profound hypocrisy. Their accusations against those categories of person they hate are projections of their own worst characteristics. If you can’t see it yet, someday you will, and you’ll convince yourself you always saw it, and were never a part of it. But I remember, and I will never forget any of this. I’ll listen and listen, but I will hear right through you, hypocrites.

Neocons, proggos, now MAGA. Y’all are all exactly the same. You are different only to yourselves — and that is what makes you alike. Keep pointing at each other, though. Keep on pointing.

Mutuality, again

Biography, Ethics, Politics

I will say this again, because it is relevant to at least three imploding relationships I am currently witnessing:

When a relationship lacks mutuality, it cannot be repaired in any normal mutual way, nor can it be destroyed by mutual consent.

Trying to reach an agreement with someone with an inert understanding, who lacks motivation to seek the validity of alternative understandings is futile — and the pursuit of mutuality where mutuality is impossible is a participation in the brokenness.

Someone who refuses to listen to what you have to say, will listen even less to what you have to say about their refusal to listen.

It doesn’t matter why they won’t listen. They might believe they already know. They might believe they have a right to not hear you. They might think you are so deluded or stupid that their understanding must replace yours. They might think you are consciously or unconsciously motivated by wicked motivations, called bias or demons based on whether they prefer to express the same concept in secular or religious jargon. They might think they will be harmed by listening. They might use emotion or moral outbursts to make communication impossible. But in all likelihood they’ll just find ways to perpetually delay conversing. They’re very, very busy. An urgent matter requires their attention,right now,at this decisive moment.

Whether they cannot listen or simply will not does not matter. Listening will never happen.

I’ve learned to stop trying.

I learned it with individuals. Now they are no longer my friends.

I am learning to do it with collectivities. Ideologies whose members to refuse to hear dissenting views lose their rights to reason.

I can’t find an old post, so I’ll rewrite it:

A: There is a problem with our friendship.

B: I disagree.

A: And that is the problem.

And while I am repeating myself:

Ethics are the rules of participation in an ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Peace requires mutual commitment to peace.

That so few people understand this is profoundly telling.

Standing united against

Politics

A little more than a decade ago I saw a horrifying documentary on ISIS. Unexpectedly, I was struck by a comforting thought: While Americans disagree on many important matters, we can all at least agree on what we oppose. Theocratic Islamist extremism is something we stand united against, even if we sometimes find it hard to stand united for anything.