No, this is not about the rampaging rapist home builders in Texas and their screwing buyers over mold damage.
Moldbug, not his real name, seems to be a leading Libertarian social philosopher blogger today.
I was exposed to his ideas recently by a quasi-Libertarian friend and was puzzled because I thought the ideas and arguments just didn't make sense.
Martin Regnen provides a Condensed Moldbuggery guide and also concludes it doesn't makes sense.
One example of the limitation of Moldbug's thinking is his dividing people today into three classes or castes. (No, people who divide people into classes isn't one of the classes.) Moldbug has:
Eloi - the educated liberal artistic elites who run things,
Morlocks who do all the illegal work or collect welfare,
and Proles who do the real work.
If you are flummoxed it may be because this is an almost complete reversal of H.G. Wells creation of Eloi and Morlocks. If you are familiar with H.G. Wells you realize that this should have been:
Eloi - the beautiful people, artistic and intellectuals who have no power but live in beautiful garden surroundings.
Proles - those who do all the work and live in the dark fiery Hellish industrialized underground.
Morlocks - the powerful masters of industrialization who the proles work for. In The Time Machine proles and Morlocks are really condensed into just the Morlocks.
The Eloi always end up being eaten by the Morlocks unless an unlucky time traveller comes along.
There is much other stuff in his works like for democracies with two major political parties, the more progressive party is referred to as the Inner Party and the more conservative party is the Outer Party. His key point is that supporting the Outer Party is not an effective strategy against progressivism. In case you haven't gotten it progressives are the evil Eloi who must be destroyed.
ProgressivismI won't waste more time on this unless I get interesting comments. Even despite my social and political orientation - a Universalist Progressive, I can't see how more than a few misguideds would see Moldbug's hypotheses as more than a sad waste of limited intellect not worth mining the dross for a possible few gold flakes of real useful, or at least interesting, ideas.
Progressivism (also called Universalism) is responsible for the vast majority of the world's problems today. It is a non-theistic religion descended in a direct line from the various Dissenter sects of England. Although the belief in God was dropped during the religion's evolution in order to improve its ability to spread, the core of progressive beliefs are very similar to the Quaker beliefs of a few centuries ago. In short, progressives are dangerous and creepy religious maniacs who don't need to believe in God but that makes them no less dangerous, creepy or maniacal.
The conflict between progressivism and conservatism
Progressivism always wins in the long run. Conservatism can at most slow down the implementation of selected progressive ideas. This is because progressives dominate the universities, media and non-governmental organizations which allows them to mold public opinion. Progressives dominate those institutions because progressivism is a far more attractive ideology for people who are intelligent, ambitious and status-seeking. In the US conservatives are largely members of Protestant sects of American origin (mostly Evangelical sects) whereas progressives are the spiritual descendants of the English dissenters, so this conflict is essentially a religious one.
Still, I am happy to see this is what passes for sophistication on the Libertarian Right.
10 comments:
http://www.metafilter.com/66006/The-Unqualified-Reservations-of-Mencius-Moldbug
"A perceptive reader does not need 50,000 words to determine that "Mencius Moldbug" is a long-winded pretentious self-important ass whose method of reasoning is flawed at best, but more likely dishonest, and his writings are wordporn for mental masturbaters. "
What specifically do you disagree with? Do disagree that the progressives/democrats are the inner party? Do you disagree that the progressives are more powerful?
I think it's pretty obvious that both are true. For example, about $200 billion in government money is allocated towards universities that have 99% progressive faculty. How much money is allocated towards universities with conservative faculty? Or another measure. Consider the civil service, a group ten or twenty million strong that actually run the government. What percent vote Democrat versus Republican?
Or another example: compare the U.S. in 1900 to the U.S. in 2009. How many of the policy battles have progressive won in the long term? How many of the policy battles have conservatives/libertarians/populists successfully resisted or rolled back?
Again, it is quite obvious to me that the progressives are far stronger and won almost all the policy battles.
I won't debate this because the frame is crazy and skewed. If I start arguing if it can really be said that the Democrats are the same as Progressives and that they are the "Inner Party" I am already arguing within an invalid skewed frame.
There may be other reasons outside this skewed frame why progressives eventually win out over conservatives trying to preserve uncivilized behaviors and relics of bygone eras.
(Populists are also not an opposition to progressives but in many cases are the progressives or their allies.)
There are other skewed memes in Finbarr's comment regarding universities and their orientation and the assumption that those who directly work for governments really control the governments.
Devin's reply illustrates that there is a mentally constructed framework most Libertarians have that has many ideas that connect and reinforce each other. Too bad the whole intellectual structure is not build on solid ground. Most people can see by standing outside of it that this Libertarian structure simply falls apart and falls down in the real world.
Like the Communist intellectual frame the Libertarian beliefs may be "well conceived in theory but doesn't work in life."
While I don't completely agree with it Devin Finbarr did have an interesting post about the health care reform debate.
Gary-
If you can humor me a bit more, I'd like to probe a bit further in order to figure out where the crux of our disagreement lies.
There may be other reasons outside this skewed frame why progressives eventually win out over conservatives trying to preserve uncivilized behaviors and relics of bygone eras.
(Populists are also not an opposition to progressives but in many cases are the progressives or their allies.)
Let's separate the question of whether or not the progressives have been correct, from the question of whether they have been on the winning team.
Do you agree that the left/progressives have won most of the policy battles over the last century? Of course it may indeed be that the progressives won because they were on the side of truth and righteousness. But it seems pretty incontrovertible to me that the left has indeed been winning their battles.
Also, I agree that there are populists on the left/progressive side too.
There are other skewed memes in Finbarr's comment regarding universities and their orientation
The claim that a given institution is "to the left" is always a relative statement. The institution can be left of:
1) the "Truth"
2) the center of public public opinion in Europe and America
3) the American median voter
4) the median 20th and 21st century American voter.
Someone who is on the left, and believes the beliefs of the Left to be truth, often observes that the university/democratic party/NY Times is often to the right of 1) and the right of 2), and is thus hopelessly and scandalous right wing. This is a valid view point.
My argument is simply that the universities are in general to the left of 3) the American median voter and 4) the median voter over the past 100 years of American history. For example, university employees overwhelmingly donate money to Democrats and Obama. If you define the center-left pole as the views of the Brookings Institute, and the center-right pole as the views of the Hertitage Institute, it is clear to me, and every other college graduate I know, that the ideological views of the professors are overwhelmingly closer to the Brookings Institute/center left position. When I was in school, the left-wing bent of the professors was a running joke, even among the left-wing students.
It's also clear, that in 1910, the views of the views of the university were much closer to those of Ron Paul, than to Krugman or Brookings.
Again, I don't wish to argue now about whether this ideological shift is good or bad. But it is very clear to me that this shift has happen. Do you agree?
the assumption that those who directly work for governments really control the governments.
Employees of the government are not 100% in control. Perhaps only 85% in control. The civil service has two huge advantages when battling politicians:
1) Civil servants are very, very hard to remove. They have numerous ways of fighting back (such as leaking to the press). Thus politicians tend not to acquiesce with the civil service, because the civil service can always outlast them in any battle.
2) The Civil Servants form concentrated voting blocks that are very disciplined at advancing and protecting their own interests.
As a result, government agencies tend to never die, and battles between civil servants tend almost always win their battles with the politicians.
Like the Communist intellectual frame the Libertarian beliefs may be "well conceived in theory but doesn't work in life."
I am not actually libertarian (and neither is moldbug)
I feel that Propertarianism is a variation of Libertarianism. I also don't find these philosophical debates fruitful.
I feel it is a waste of my time to muck about determining if a framework I am not interested can be in some sense "true" even if not useful.
If people ask me to engage in Marxist or Freudian discussions I would feel the same way.
"Mining the dross?"
Either your metallurgy or wordsmithing needs a brush-up, Gary.
n.
1 Waste or impure matter: discarded the dross after recycling the wood pulp.
2 The scum that forms on the surface of molten metal as a result of oxidation.
3 Worthless, commonplace, or trivial matter: "He was wide-awake and his mind worked clearly, purged of all dross" (Vladimir Nabokov).
[Middle English dros, from Old English drōs, dregs.]
Also foreign matter. dregs, or mineral waste.
Something regarded as worthless, rubbish.
This word is also used in coal mining as well as smelting
...in the production of coal, however, from both open cast and deep mines approximately sixty per-cent of the total production is slack or dross with only...
Also rarely used in other mining syn. dregs and slag.
Late to the party, I know, but I don't understand why you refer to Moldbug as a libertarian blogger. Moldbug is not a libertarian in any way, shape, or form. (Although it wouldn't surprise me to see him vote for a Libertarian candidate just to be obnoxious.) If any true-blue libertarian were able to converse with him for five solid minutes without either smacking him or running away in horror, it would be astounding.
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