Very nice post, John. I agree that separation is really the best possible answer -- I don't debate politics with liberals at all anymore, as their way of seeing the world is simply incompatible with mine -- but I don't think they will ever let us live in peace, given their overwhelming demand for power and control.
Your post reminded me of this long quote from Richard Tarnas's book, "The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View", which identified these issues in 1991. Sorry, the quote is quite long:
"I would like to point out here the striking resemblance between this state of affairs and the condition that Gregory Bateson famously described as the "double bind": the impossibly problematic situation in which mutually contradictory demands eventually lead a person to become schizophrenic. In Bateson's formulation, there were four basic premises necessary to constitute a double bind situation between a child and a "schizophrenogenic" mother: (1) The child's relationship to the mother is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the child to assess communications from the mother accurately. (2) The child receives contradictory or incompatible information from the mother at different levels, whereby, for example, her explicit verbal communication is fundamentally denied by the "meta-communication," the nonverbal context in which the explicit message is conveyed (thus the mother who says to her child with hostile eyes and a rigid body, "Darling, you know I love you so much"). The two sets of signals cannot be understood as coherent. (3) The child is not given any opportunity to ask questions of the mother that would clarify the communication or resolve the contradiction. And (4) the child cannot leave the field, i.e., the relationship. In such circumstances, Bateson found, the child is forced to distort his or her perception of both outer and inner realities, with serious psychopathological consequences.
Now if we substitute in these four premises world for mother, and human being for child, we have the modern double bind in a nutshell: (1) The human being's relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to assess the nature of that world accurately. (2) The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific meta-communication. (3) Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world. 4) Existentially the human being cannot leave the field.
The differences between Bateson's psychiatric double bind and the modern existential condition are more in degree than in kind: the modern condition is an extraordinarily encompassing and fundamental double bind, made less immediately conspicuous simply because it is so universal. We have the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post-Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful, and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless, and impersonal universe, with these compounded by the post-Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in, and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover cannot ever be directly contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognized in one form or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfillment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.
If we follow Bateson's diagnosis and apply it to the larger modern condition, it should not be surprising what kinds of response the modern psyche has made to this situation as it attempts to escape the double bind's inherent contradictions. Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddism, cults, ideologies, nationalistic fervor, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained, there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimization, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self-negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full-blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self-destructive violence, delusional states, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and its social and political life is notoriously so determined.
Nor should it be surprising that twentieth century philosophy finds itself in the condition we now see. Of course modern philosophy has brought forth some courageous intellectual responses to the post-Copernican situation, but by and large the philosophy that has dominated our century and our universities resembles nothing so much as a severe obsessive-compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoes because he never quite gets it rightwhile in the meantime Socrates and Hegel and Aquinas are already high up the mountain on their hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.
But there is one crucial way in which the modern situation is not identical to the psychiatric double bind, and this is the fact that the modern human being has not simply been a helpless child, but has actively engaged the world and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity a Promethean project of freeing itself from and controlling nature. The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: its scientific method has required explanations of phenomena that are concretely predictive, and therefore impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfill their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual and human qualities. Of course we cannot be certain that the world is in fact what these explanations suggest. We can be certain only that the world is to an indeterminate extent susceptible to this way of interpretation. Kant's insight is a sword that cuts two ways. Although on the one hand it appears to place the world beyond the grasp of the human mind, on the other hand it recognizes that the impersonal and soulless world of modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather, that world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered intellectually justifiable. In Ernest Gellner's words, "It was Kant's merit to see that this compulsion [for mechanistic impersonal explanations] is in us, not in things." And "it was Weber's to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that is subject to this compulsion."
Hence one crucial part of the modern double bind is not airtight. In the case of Bateson's schizophrenogenic mother and child, the mother more or less holds all the cards, for she unilaterally controls the communication. But the lesson of Kant is that the locus of the communication problem, i.e. the problem of human knowledge of the world must first be viewed as centering in the human mind, not in the world as such. Therefore it is theoretically possible that the human mind has more cards than it has been playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological..."
It's not only the modern world which is schizophrogenic in its ontological assumptions, but also the entire political context in which, e.g. we are required to simultaneously believe that Europeans are the recipients of unearned privileges, even as they are disprivileged in all concrete respects. Official culture has become a mass of glaring and irresolvable contradiction and it has driven us quite mad. However, the deeper cause of this is almost certainly the mechanistic materialism and denial of nature that our social order is predicated upon.
There are positive effects. Those contradictions seem to be converting the fence-sitters, at least in my circle. Being condemned for your skin colour after a lifetime of effort to tune it out in others is jarring to normals.
So I think the destructive nature of these left-hemisphere impulses will do much of the work to bring people around.
I suspect it is in a large part because the "international community" would come down on any attempt to restore sane and stable governance (that is to say, white minority rule) like a ton of bricks and still retains the material capacity to do so. Thus, those naturally inclined to fix the situation by force perceive that at present any efforts to do so would likely prove futile.
My controversial take on the existence of liberalism in bleak environments is the role of emasculation. A lot is driven by women and their natures. Insufficient T might even be enough to explain it. As in, low-T men not laying down the law for everyone including the ladies.
Yes I have made some comments along those lines that pissed off people I consider friends here like Cindy Sheehan. But we have to be able to have uncomfortable conversations.
Sep 23, 2023·edited Sep 23, 2023Liked by John Carter
Yes. It is sorting out in real time, there are leftists taking the cock of the progressive establishment and groaning in pleasure like Naomi Klein, Chomsky, and Amy Goodman, and leftists who are right on the edge of red pilling or are fully red pilled like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Cindy Sheehan, and Tim Pool.
As an ex-leftist, I find it fascinating to watch this play out in real time and see who chooses for good, and who for evil and to what extent.
It is definitely possible to red pill. I was probably always a little right leaning but my early life social circumstances placed me at least nominally in the political left. Over time, as I’ve aged and made a habit to more often touch grass, I’ve drifted ever rightward, even if it seems impossible to determine which right clan I belong to.
Emissary led thinking tends to burn itself out over time, because entropy. You can’t fight Mother Nature forever.
I still don’t belong to The Sand Wars, Patriot Act right, or the right that venerates Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), he of the vaccine act and amnesty for illegals 🤷🏻♀️
So in my early political years, yeah, I voted left 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
But I don’t think I ever belonged there, I was always that outsider that got side👁d 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
I unblocked Neo Liberal Fedudalism if he could in return unblock me at least for the space of this conversation I would appreciate it, as that was a profound comment.
To me the schizophrenic aspect of Western liberalism is the misplaced characterisation - by both progressives and conservatives - of progressivism as a mentality that is nice-and-kind-but-naive-and-unrealistic. Whereas it is in reality an essentially mean-spirited mentality born of resentfulness, self-pity and more-virtuous/sophisticated-than-thou vanities. It is absolutely vital to any anti-progressive return to sanity that conservatism finally gets that through its collective head. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
It's funny you bring up Bateson, I actually mentioned Bateson earlier in the comments or maybe a retstack of the article as a lefty with holistic interdisciplinary thought, synchronicity and vibe is a thing.
This is a very nice essay; quite thought-provoking. On the left-right spectrum and NETTR, I would see it as the essence of the "right" to hold their heritage precious, while the "left" wants to destroy it in order to make the world a more righteous place. This makes them bipolar enemies, as the internet graphs suggest.
But the spectrum graph, showing limitless extremism to right and left, with sensible "moderates" at the origin, is nonsense. The graph can be considered a controlling framework invented by corrupt people who play the system to their own advantage by posing as the sensible middle themselves while fanning the natural enmity between the two sides. Often, it is the self-described "centrists" who are the real extremists.
In fact, there is no spectrum. On the "right," we immediately find that we vary radically on what exact heritage it is we want to protect, whether it be race, ethnicity, religion, culture, nation, law, or
environment, and which ones, since we all have different childhoods. So long as we are facing an aggressive "left" that wants to destroy it all, we are united comrades, but if we ever actually took power, we would instantly be in civil war with each other over those very issues. The "left" is more united, because they hold none of these things dear, and are glad to blow up all of it provided it will distress the other side.
On the "right" is a diversity of schools, each trying to preserve a different part of their heritage. No one of them is intrinsically further "right" than another ideologically. The only other measure of don't-wanna-go-there extremism is how low and violent one is willing to be to achieve one's ends. That, though, is the great moral question, and it applies to the "left" and the "centre" just as much as it does to the "right."
Excellent comment. I'm not totally sold that the right is purely backward-looking, but it undoubtedly inhabits temporality in a fundamentally different fashion from the left. The past is alive for the right, here with us now, a legacy that we hold in custodianship for the future. For the left there is no past. It's an eternal Year Zero.
As I told Kruptos, this topic is deserving of a full essay all on its own.
I think nothing needs to be done about the Leftists themselves, although it is wise for us to protect ourselves as best we can from the effects of the Left. But, left to their own devices, the very nature of their utopian outlook is destructive. And they of course destroy themselves.
I think the instincts on the Right to preserve - to literally conserve - help a lot here. Repositories of knowledge tend to be respected. A right-leaning Wikipedia would be respected, whereas the Left view it as another tool to further their aims. That is consistent with your thesis, that the left-brain mentality outlined by McGilchrist is incapable of managing reality. It will burn down its own house to meet some immediate goal.
This break with reality and its corollary, the quest for cosmic justice, means it is only a matter of time before reality hits. From our point of view they seem increasingly unhinged. But I think that is inevitable as their utopian goals cannot work. Once everything looks like San Francisco the moderate types will yearn for law and order.
I think that is to some extent inevitable. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent it. But the total capture of institutions makes that challenging. I don't see a good clean solution or a reset option.
Maybe isolated accelerationism in some sense. If we see enough Lampedusa type images, the raw reality of mass immigration, it may help jolt people into awareness of the policies behind it. Perhaps enough isolated examples of destruction in limited areas can be used to illustrate the whole.
It's not my house LOL I fled to the woods, no traffic lights in my county.
But on a more serious note yes the decadence is everywhere, I ran into a meth camp out in the woods by a trout stream carelessly trashing the place and I called in the Forest Service to have them removed, something I never would have dreamed of 10 years ago as a Mises camp guy, so yes realignments are happening, and at the risk of over left braining it, our models of the world evolve, particularly on places like Substack with a high signal to noise ratio.
All I know is I used to identify as center left. The goalposts moved & I found myself center right. My principals remain the same: antiwar & conserve the environment.
I would argue genuine conservatives would adopt both those positions. I especially believe traditional conservatives would do a superb job preserving the environment.
The left is full of people who love to strut their stuff about how much they care about the environment and are going to make everything "sustainable" and "renewable" to save the planet from Gorebull Warning, but they can't keep the cities they control free of the just the most filthy kinds of human behavioral pathologies.
Yes, I write about that on here extensively, it is a fundamentally conservative principle like not eating your seed corn due to glutinous unconstrained desire. The neo-con establishment GOP are at the end of the day just more progressives who eat their own seed corn.
Restraint is a feature of those from the Global North, although not evenly distributed around the globe. But within our populations there is much variety.
I am sure you are aware of the marshmallow test, which does a decent job of predicting life success.
Yep, and dare I say the un p.c. ability to notice the pattern of the current hegemony of fat black chicks with high time preference and literally zero self control.
What interesting is this shall I say vibrant urban youth driven culture for all it's neo-Marxist whining about capitalism serves consoomerism to a T. The actual corporate capitalists love consoomers who can't control their urges.
Or plan for any action, including simple behaviors.
Much of our demise is driven by ignorance, and the antidote is reality.
You may be familiar with the white liberal ladies who go forth to other parts of the world to prove how racist the rest of us are then are promptly abused and murdered in some uncivilized territory. Westerners who trash the Anglosphere countries as exploitative or broken are naive. Alas they will learn the hard way.
I agree with that last bit about getting centered, in nature. But it seems to me the crux is, we have to start getting comfortable using the power we are so busy talking and theorzing about.
Sep 23, 2023·edited Sep 23, 2023Liked by John Carter
I sometime ago resolved never to call a man a woman. I confront absurdity at every opportunity. Wielding real power is a much greater challenge I am still hesitant about.
It can be as simple as backing meaningful conventions. Marriage is to raise kids, for example. Shaming those who believe at the first sign of mild discomfort you leave to find yourself, lol.
Of course, explicit power. But we also have to build the foundations of a stable society. Conservative people have a better chance of raising stable kids who can continue the work. The Leftie women castrate their sons and alienate their daughters, so will not be the future. I think that matters too.
A small yet very important thing that everyone and anyone can do, is refuse to comply, participate and acquiesce to (using the schizophrenia-metaphor, or simile or whatever) the psychotic's descripton of reality.
Next level is always pitching in to help out, when you notice someone saying no to the psyhcotics, no matter who they are. Example: the local school board wants to have 10-year olds learning how to perform fellatio and stimulate the prostate, and the bible-thumpers, floorlickers and licecaps are the first ones to protest - join in! Doesn't matter if you find others of their idea or practices abhorrent - by joining in you achieve a chance to create common ground and accord, and sow spite among your opponents.
Right, enough of Captain Obvious (my son actually calls me that, the uppity boy!).
About the left - right thing: it's wrong. Can't put it simpler than that. Seating arrangements from the French Revolution does not an ideological slide-rule make.
Example: is lowered taxes on wages left or right? Lowered taxes is traditionally right, but then only for the well-to-do and major corporations. What if we change the taxation of labour so that the first [insert amount here] per family is untaxed, and only tax what someone earns on top of that?
Would that be left or right? What about having a tax code set up so a single minimum wage income, full time, is enough to support two adults and three children, and a dog?
Left? Not present-day left, no way. They're all about subsidies and welfare. Right? No hay José, the right's never changed one single thing to benefit the poor - especially the workingpoor - unless forced to.
Politics ain't binary, man. It's all vectors and stuff.
Regarding the left-right binary: indeed, on a policy level, you're exactly correct, and I was saying precisely this throughout the essay. It isn't a single axis or spectrum. It's more like a hyperdimensional idea-space, with axes describing a multitude of principle component values. Yet within this space we invariably see humans sorting themselves into two groups. Hence my suggestion of thinking of it in terms of brain hemispheres. The hemispheres are quite real; any given neuron belongs to one or the other; but it's meaningless to try and say which neuron in a given hemisphere is more left or right.
What is fascinating about the brain is, if not enough neurons fire then I'm not typing this, yet until they do fire I haven't yet thought what to type.
I often find that I don't know exactly what I'm going to write until I actually write it. In many ways it's a little bit like a text prediction algo a la ChatGPT. One word triggers another, and on the cascade goes.
Religious slurs against moslems and jews. I'm being fair and inclusive; can't call christians the pejorative "bible thumpers" and then not call out their borthers and sisters in the cult of the god of Abraham with smilar denigrating terms, that'd be discriminatory.
They call non-Abrahamites all kinds of nasty things and used to murder them, so they'll just have to lump it.
Sep 24, 2023·edited Sep 24, 2023Liked by John Carter
This was really excellent! A lot of helpful insights brought together! This is the kind of essay that raises interesting question and gets productive conversations started!
On the subject of what to do, I have many more questions than answers, but any viable solution must involve accountability for not only decision makers, but also for the theorists on whose models decision makers rely. No more Paul Krugman's continuing to sound off authoritatively on economic policies decade after decade of getting it wrong and still be treated like they're any kind of legitimate expert; no more warmongering neo-con-artists migrating from one administration to the next and one political affiliation to the other, getting us into disastrous wars under false pretenses. Skin in the game for anyone involved with creating or enforcing national policies. That's the downside of a wealthy civilization: the policy-makers have so much insulation from the costs of their bad decision-making that they can delay the day of reckoning until the costs are catastrophic. But those costs are the reality check that keep the Left Hemisphere's model-based strategems from getting too badly out of control. When those costs are removed or externalized, there's nothing left to course-correct.
I don't want anyone starting a war who isn't personally willing to pick up a weapon. We haven't had leaders who lead from the front for two centuries now, and those two centuries of cowardice are why our wars are so terrible.
Sep 24, 2023·edited Sep 24, 2023Liked by John Carter
1000% correct! That's also probably why today's leaders are happy to see the statues of great men torn down: it means fewer reminders of their own cowardice, as they lead from the rear, insulated from the costs of their decisions by many layers of bureaucracy.
Sep 25, 2023·edited Sep 25, 2023Liked by John Carter
There's a certain logic to it, though. Imagine you're a US or EU soldier stationed in Mali or the Khyber or somewhere, and your commander supposed to be inspiring and set an example is Joe Biden or Angela Merkel.
Mind you, I'm very much for the idea that anyone voting for war (of aggression, not defending the home country) is automatically volunteering to go in the front line, over the top in the first wave.
"the idea being that criticism is fine, but we should not tolerate using the left or its tools, such as cancellation, to solve our own ideological conflicts. All of these are worth reading in full."
It's worth reading Taleb's "Skin in the Game" - especially the section of the the intolerant minority
We have to know what we will not do or accept. Which means that there have to be those we will not hire, will not befriend, etc.
The prosaic version is "there's a difference between an open mind and a hole in the head"
To do the famous "yes, but" without the intention of criticism (as you said, good thought is explorative, and critique often comes from being triggered more than anything else and is therefore pointless): there seems to be a pathway from right wing thought to left brain hemisphere madness as well. It can start with the lament to "focus more on practical solutions", "we need to finally do something about it" etc. and end in rigid systems (models) for how society should be. This is the opposite of accepting organic thought and development based on a wide-angle and long-term view of reality. Think rigid theocracy, technocratic right-wing authoritarianism and the like. Classic ponerology, in other words, where real grievances are exploited by bad actors. In fact, the RH/LH distinction seems to be a useful way of looking at these things and recognizing them, too.
I 100% agree. In fact I had at the back of my mind that in many ways the countercultural switch of the last decade or so implies something exactly along these lines. Whichever side finds itself in the dominant position will then face precisely the temptations of power that lead to rigidly dogmatic authoritarianism, and the side out of power will be forced into a more contemplative mode in which it identifies the excesses and shortcomings of the powerful. As the critiques become more compelling, and the flaws in the regime harder to ignore, the ideas advanced by the 'right hemisphere' of society naturally emerge into ascendance ... and then the cycle repeats.
Exactly, exactly. An interesting case is when society descends into chaos, as in the Weimar republic. Here you can see LH and RH thought in battle, both on the left and the right, and sometimes even in the mind of one thinker!
The problem with this sort of thinking is that it's exactly this sort of broad tolerance which allowed the left to rise to power in the first place. If there isn't a hard a firm check to stop it, such as in a benignly tolerant state of intellectual openness, whichever side is naturally most inclined to grasp for power is likely to get it. That's the left.
A fascinating thesis. And it definitely describes the rightwing Substacks I have been reading -- and how I don't quite fit in, as my writings are more action oriented than descriptive.
But my right brain provides me with data points which don't seem to fit. I have memories of Progressives with bumper stickers that read "Just Breathe." My memories of academia were that the hard sciences had more right wingers, and that those who studied art, music, and literature tended to be on the political left.
And then there were my Libertarian Party days. LOTs of left brained autists there! Lots of refugees from the libertarian movement in this right wing corner of Substack. While the Reason crowd and many still active in the LP are spiritually leftists, there are plenty of Austrian School types who have gone full Alt Right. But the Austrian School types can be just as left brained as Objectivists. Question the axioms of praxeology or the Zero Aggression Principle and get Cancelled.
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But maybe a realignment is taking place. Go back 50 years and it was the Religious Right that was into censorship and it was the non communist Left that was edgy and taking humorous looks at inconvenient truths. Look at the early years of Saturday Night Live, for example. Today, the Babylon Bee is edgier than Saturday Night Live.
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Or maybe we are seeing the fruit of an education system which puts too much emphasis on reasoning and no longer puts much emphasis on memorizing facts or reading primary sources. Our problem may be that the political Left is out of its right mind...
I think you might be running with the "creative right brain/logical left brain" concept, which isn't actually accurate. Both creativity and logic call upon the faculties of both hemispheres, and there's nothing to say that eg artists can't be more left-brain dominant. Indeed, McGilchrist points to many of the artistic movements of the 20C with their disconnected, highly abstract forms reminiscent of images made by schizophrenics as evidence for left brain hyperdominance.
Instead, it's more that the right brain is for experiencing reality, the left brain for modeling and instrumentalizing it. It actually follows from this that you'd expect top scientists to make extensive use of their right hemispheres.
Agreed regarding academic visual art, as well as the composition side of academic music. But last I checked universities still teach musical performance using traditional standards.
But the art that New Age Progressives like is definitely right brain art. And Whole Foods Markets are decadent gourmet grocery stores with a veneer of serving causes in order to avoid the guilt.
And there are tree hugging Leftists who actually get out among the trees...
Or maybe we are seeing the fruit of an education system which puts too much emphasis on reasoning and no longer puts much emphasis on memorizing facts or reading primary sources.
This is an excellent point. We have essentially removed the grammar stage and are attempting to jump right to logic and rhetoric. We are trying to get people to think (a noble goal) but denying them their intellectual foundations. No wonder everyone is so neurotic.
I argued some years ago that we've started teaching the trivium in reverse.
We start off with rhetoric in primary and secondary school; these are all the correct conclusions which educated people believe. From there, we teach a bit of logic in undergrad. "Go source secondary information, and assemble it to prove the conclusions you learned about in High School." And then, should the student go on to PhD, finally do they start learning and/or researching new facts - but only about their extremely narrow domain.
The Alt Hypothesis had a video a long ways back where he discussed ana spect of this phenomemon. I forget what term her used - it was pithy - but his point was that everybody at university will believe the officially promoted conclusion, aside from the experts, who are more likely to align with dissidents. EG: everybody knows that IQ is fake, aside from the psychology department who reluctantly admit it's the best measuring stick they have. Everybody knows we live in a democracy, aside from the PolSci profs who talk about the Iron Triangle. The Spartans were gay - unless you talk to a Classics prof.
Overproduction of elites through universities, combined with the reversed trivium, results in far too many midwits who are highly trained at arguing, while holding the same basic opinions as a high school student.
I've read a couple of books by mainstream academics recently - pop sociology, basically. The authors share a common Marxist slant to their views, including an obsession over a fine-grained analysis of Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative.
And in every instance, this preoccupation is completely worthless at understanding the modern world. Who fucking cares if Milo Yannopoulis is right but not conservative, or Dr. Nobody-Ass Professor has a critique of liberalism from the left?
It's irrelevant to the grueling experience of living through the process of culture death. Functionally, the right recognizes this process, while the left seems to want to pretend that Amazon and Netflix and Pfizer are sufficient antidotes to depravity and depression.
More generally, I've noticed that as soon as Marxist terminology enters a conversation, that conversation becomes instantly incomprehensible. It's a dialect of the Black Tongue of Mordor, and it serves as a mimetic weapon to annihilate thought.
As a lifelong inhabitant of the corpus callosum, I really got a lot out of this excellent essay. Also, I had to look up “spandrel” (with one “L,” incidentally). Well done!
Excellent advice. And great read, as always. The kind of read I don’t mind waiting for so no rush, make sure YOU work in plenty of time ‘out of doors.’ It will keep you grounded.
I am going to do a brief thought experiment here if I may.
I think a perhaps a more useful idea than right or left is establishment and anti-establishment. This gets at conundrums the "right" often struggles with like neo-cons self identifying as "conservative" or "right wing," while in essence behaving like progressives who want to impose their flawed abstract left brain model on the world. Neo-cons are the establishment and the dissident right is anti-establishment which is why most of us correctly oppose neo-cons even though they self identify as "right." Woke and the WEF are the establishment again trying to impose their abstract left brain managerial models on the world. However a few on the left the Glenn Greenwalds and Jimmy Dores oppose the WEF establishment, and while their thought may not be to your taste, most here would surely admit they are better more sincere people than Max Boot and Bill Krystal?
I have a two part essay here on this topic. I can link to them below but I would like to get John's permission first before doing so. May I link to my essays on the topic for those who may interested in more reflections along these lines?
Thanks. Here are my essays on the American anti-establishment tradition and how the establishment has a linear forward spatial metaphor for time, while then anti-establishment BOTH the beats and John Birch society embraced a cyclical view of time
This is an untruth the dissident right clutches to its bosom with passion. Nothing is more establishment in nature than conservative Christianity, which seems to be the foundation, pillars and whole house of the dissident right. This is human nature; it ain't so surprising that any group wants its own principles and culture to prevail against all others. The classical liberalism that so many conservative Christians convince themselves they believe in is something in real life they absolutely loathe.
By establishment I mean the east coast urban American centers of wealth and power that developed in the 19thcentury, the suites in the suites, who became the professional managerial class.
Admittedly the word has some ambiguity, but do me the favor of reading the first essay I wrote above before just reacting. I am working hard myself on be less reactive to people's comments, so I get it, but we aren't enemies, I am a Christian rural person.
I understood perfectly what you meant, but nevertheless I expressed an underlying truth. And I ain't never thought myself to be your enemy though you've previously reacted with great fury to some of my Notes. Never mind.
All religions are instruments of conformity and policing of mind, an established order and with a horror of actual dissent. That's why all of them split into sects just as soon as their dogmas are codified into holy writness.
And any group belief becomes a religion, a cult. Conservatives and progressives are mirror images. This is just human nature. Very few people have the intellectual self-control to tolerate real divergence of belief in people they must interact with in daily life. That's why villages develop different micro-cultures and dialects from the village a day's walk down the road. That's why it's hard to govern a nation as big as America, which drew immigrants from everywhere. Why were conservatives sleeping on the job when the rhetoric changed from "melting pot" to "gorgeous mosaic?"
If you oppose woke which it seems you do, you do get the fully secular open market place of ideas of classical liberalism, is just woke with extra steps, don't you? You are not stupid, so surely you can see why that must be true? Without some foundational principle like religious belief everything is fluid and dissolves into flux and chaos. We know this even from deep mathematical principles like Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
I belong to no school of thought, to no dogma, to no political party. In every aspect of life I go with what seems right to me, what seems just, what seems plausible, what my instincts tell me. I've always been bad at tribal adhesion. It's true though that I'm as American as they come, and as culturally an expression of that rootless cosmopolitanness as can be found anywhere. Stuff gets into the marrow of one's bones, you can't really ever get it out.
Yes, it's true that every society must organize itself by foundational principles and conformity to them. That's why dissidence from hierarchal diktats is as old as fire, and why there's no cure for human nature. That's why people flee communities of the faithful--whatever the faith is, and I use "faith" expansively here--because they can't fit themselves to the cloth others cut for them.
Human civilization goes in cycles, one must be grateful if one gets to live in a good one and pretty miserable if one is watching the downturn in real time.
Americans are pretty lucky though; we have foundational documents crafted by people who seem to have been uniquely wise at the moment it was necessary to be. If more conservatives had had the wit to truly recognize what liberty encompasses and not have dissipated their energies in the wrong battles, we might have slowed the long cycle of history just a little bit.
Rootless cosmopolitan classical liberalism is an ideology whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. It is pretentious to claim you "belong to no school of thought," we all have an ideology ie basic presumptions we make that guide our actions and beliefs. Without out some ideology we would have total paralysis of action and our lives would fall into chaos and ruin.
I think it's more useful to look at John Stewart Mill's "On Liberty," and why it is the best most clear argument in favor of liberty and why it fails.
First the good part, it's true all societies at least in the their ruling elite class need to constantly debate and refine their ideas or stagnate. Restrictions on speech in the elite class that lead to detachment from reality are utterly toxic as we see in woke cancel culture.
The problem is destroying bedrock moral foundations does not work as well for non elite people who lack the self control of low time preference. If you have high time preference and do not reflect much before acting then an open market place of ideas is disastrous it means you may choose to trans off your dick, become a drug addict, and choose to inflate the money supply through printing money because some of it goes in your bank account but you are too ignorant to know that inflation eats it and then some.
Very nice post, John. I agree that separation is really the best possible answer -- I don't debate politics with liberals at all anymore, as their way of seeing the world is simply incompatible with mine -- but I don't think they will ever let us live in peace, given their overwhelming demand for power and control.
Your post reminded me of this long quote from Richard Tarnas's book, "The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View", which identified these issues in 1991. Sorry, the quote is quite long:
"I would like to point out here the striking resemblance between this state of affairs and the condition that Gregory Bateson famously described as the "double bind": the impossibly problematic situation in which mutually contradictory demands eventually lead a person to become schizophrenic. In Bateson's formulation, there were four basic premises necessary to constitute a double bind situation between a child and a "schizophrenogenic" mother: (1) The child's relationship to the mother is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the child to assess communications from the mother accurately. (2) The child receives contradictory or incompatible information from the mother at different levels, whereby, for example, her explicit verbal communication is fundamentally denied by the "meta-communication," the nonverbal context in which the explicit message is conveyed (thus the mother who says to her child with hostile eyes and a rigid body, "Darling, you know I love you so much"). The two sets of signals cannot be understood as coherent. (3) The child is not given any opportunity to ask questions of the mother that would clarify the communication or resolve the contradiction. And (4) the child cannot leave the field, i.e., the relationship. In such circumstances, Bateson found, the child is forced to distort his or her perception of both outer and inner realities, with serious psychopathological consequences.
Now if we substitute in these four premises world for mother, and human being for child, we have the modern double bind in a nutshell: (1) The human being's relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to assess the nature of that world accurately. (2) The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific meta-communication. (3) Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world. 4) Existentially the human being cannot leave the field.
The differences between Bateson's psychiatric double bind and the modern existential condition are more in degree than in kind: the modern condition is an extraordinarily encompassing and fundamental double bind, made less immediately conspicuous simply because it is so universal. We have the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post-Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful, and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless, and impersonal universe, with these compounded by the post-Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in, and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover cannot ever be directly contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognized in one form or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfillment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.
If we follow Bateson's diagnosis and apply it to the larger modern condition, it should not be surprising what kinds of response the modern psyche has made to this situation as it attempts to escape the double bind's inherent contradictions. Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddism, cults, ideologies, nationalistic fervor, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained, there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimization, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self-negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full-blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self-destructive violence, delusional states, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and its social and political life is notoriously so determined.
Nor should it be surprising that twentieth century philosophy finds itself in the condition we now see. Of course modern philosophy has brought forth some courageous intellectual responses to the post-Copernican situation, but by and large the philosophy that has dominated our century and our universities resembles nothing so much as a severe obsessive-compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoes because he never quite gets it rightwhile in the meantime Socrates and Hegel and Aquinas are already high up the mountain on their hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.
But there is one crucial way in which the modern situation is not identical to the psychiatric double bind, and this is the fact that the modern human being has not simply been a helpless child, but has actively engaged the world and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity a Promethean project of freeing itself from and controlling nature. The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: its scientific method has required explanations of phenomena that are concretely predictive, and therefore impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfill their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual and human qualities. Of course we cannot be certain that the world is in fact what these explanations suggest. We can be certain only that the world is to an indeterminate extent susceptible to this way of interpretation. Kant's insight is a sword that cuts two ways. Although on the one hand it appears to place the world beyond the grasp of the human mind, on the other hand it recognizes that the impersonal and soulless world of modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather, that world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered intellectually justifiable. In Ernest Gellner's words, "It was Kant's merit to see that this compulsion [for mechanistic impersonal explanations] is in us, not in things." And "it was Weber's to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that is subject to this compulsion."
Hence one crucial part of the modern double bind is not airtight. In the case of Bateson's schizophrenogenic mother and child, the mother more or less holds all the cards, for she unilaterally controls the communication. But the lesson of Kant is that the locus of the communication problem, i.e. the problem of human knowledge of the world must first be viewed as centering in the human mind, not in the world as such. Therefore it is theoretically possible that the human mind has more cards than it has been playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological..."
On point.
It's not only the modern world which is schizophrogenic in its ontological assumptions, but also the entire political context in which, e.g. we are required to simultaneously believe that Europeans are the recipients of unearned privileges, even as they are disprivileged in all concrete respects. Official culture has become a mass of glaring and irresolvable contradiction and it has driven us quite mad. However, the deeper cause of this is almost certainly the mechanistic materialism and denial of nature that our social order is predicated upon.
There are positive effects. Those contradictions seem to be converting the fence-sitters, at least in my circle. Being condemned for your skin colour after a lifetime of effort to tune it out in others is jarring to normals.
So I think the destructive nature of these left-hemisphere impulses will do much of the work to bring people around.
I suspect you're correct, but then again: South Africa. Somehow, liberalism remains strong there.
I suspect it is in a large part because the "international community" would come down on any attempt to restore sane and stable governance (that is to say, white minority rule) like a ton of bricks and still retains the material capacity to do so. Thus, those naturally inclined to fix the situation by force perceive that at present any efforts to do so would likely prove futile.
My controversial take on the existence of liberalism in bleak environments is the role of emasculation. A lot is driven by women and their natures. Insufficient T might even be enough to explain it. As in, low-T men not laying down the law for everyone including the ladies.
Yes I have made some comments along those lines that pissed off people I consider friends here like Cindy Sheehan. But we have to be able to have uncomfortable conversations.
Yes, and I am happy to be proven wrong. But there is no denying the reality of low T. No one benefits. It hammers the men and the women hate it.
What’s she up to these days? I remember meeting her back when we were both vigorously opposing The Sand Wars
Yes. It is sorting out in real time, there are leftists taking the cock of the progressive establishment and groaning in pleasure like Naomi Klein, Chomsky, and Amy Goodman, and leftists who are right on the edge of red pilling or are fully red pilled like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Cindy Sheehan, and Tim Pool.
As an ex-leftist, I find it fascinating to watch this play out in real time and see who chooses for good, and who for evil and to what extent.
It is definitely possible to red pill. I was probably always a little right leaning but my early life social circumstances placed me at least nominally in the political left. Over time, as I’ve aged and made a habit to more often touch grass, I’ve drifted ever rightward, even if it seems impossible to determine which right clan I belong to.
Emissary led thinking tends to burn itself out over time, because entropy. You can’t fight Mother Nature forever.
I still don’t belong to The Sand Wars, Patriot Act right, or the right that venerates Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), he of the vaccine act and amnesty for illegals 🤷🏻♀️
So in my early political years, yeah, I voted left 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
But I don’t think I ever belonged there, I was always that outsider that got side👁d 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
Real life is a hell of a drug.
Like, white women, don't have kids, have abortions, so we can flood the country with patriarchal brown men?
For instance.
I unblocked Neo Liberal Fedudalism if he could in return unblock me at least for the space of this conversation I would appreciate it, as that was a profound comment.
He has unblocked you.
To me the schizophrenic aspect of Western liberalism is the misplaced characterisation - by both progressives and conservatives - of progressivism as a mentality that is nice-and-kind-but-naive-and-unrealistic. Whereas it is in reality an essentially mean-spirited mentality born of resentfulness, self-pity and more-virtuous/sophisticated-than-thou vanities. It is absolutely vital to any anti-progressive return to sanity that conservatism finally gets that through its collective head. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Yo, Mr Raven would like you to unblock him as he thinks this comment was awesome and would like to chat.
Sure, done…
Excellent.
Thank you I appreciate it.
Wholesome Chungus moment.
Rick was my dissertation advisor, in case anyone is taking a survey 😊
my compliments to the author on the brilliant essay
It's funny you bring up Bateson, I actually mentioned Bateson earlier in the comments or maybe a retstack of the article as a lefty with holistic interdisciplinary thought, synchronicity and vibe is a thing.
This is a very nice essay; quite thought-provoking. On the left-right spectrum and NETTR, I would see it as the essence of the "right" to hold their heritage precious, while the "left" wants to destroy it in order to make the world a more righteous place. This makes them bipolar enemies, as the internet graphs suggest.
But the spectrum graph, showing limitless extremism to right and left, with sensible "moderates" at the origin, is nonsense. The graph can be considered a controlling framework invented by corrupt people who play the system to their own advantage by posing as the sensible middle themselves while fanning the natural enmity between the two sides. Often, it is the self-described "centrists" who are the real extremists.
In fact, there is no spectrum. On the "right," we immediately find that we vary radically on what exact heritage it is we want to protect, whether it be race, ethnicity, religion, culture, nation, law, or
environment, and which ones, since we all have different childhoods. So long as we are facing an aggressive "left" that wants to destroy it all, we are united comrades, but if we ever actually took power, we would instantly be in civil war with each other over those very issues. The "left" is more united, because they hold none of these things dear, and are glad to blow up all of it provided it will distress the other side.
On the "right" is a diversity of schools, each trying to preserve a different part of their heritage. No one of them is intrinsically further "right" than another ideologically. The only other measure of don't-wanna-go-there extremism is how low and violent one is willing to be to achieve one's ends. That, though, is the great moral question, and it applies to the "left" and the "centre" just as much as it does to the "right."
Excellent comment. I'm not totally sold that the right is purely backward-looking, but it undoubtedly inhabits temporality in a fundamentally different fashion from the left. The past is alive for the right, here with us now, a legacy that we hold in custodianship for the future. For the left there is no past. It's an eternal Year Zero.
As I told Kruptos, this topic is deserving of a full essay all on its own.
I think nothing needs to be done about the Leftists themselves, although it is wise for us to protect ourselves as best we can from the effects of the Left. But, left to their own devices, the very nature of their utopian outlook is destructive. And they of course destroy themselves.
I think the instincts on the Right to preserve - to literally conserve - help a lot here. Repositories of knowledge tend to be respected. A right-leaning Wikipedia would be respected, whereas the Left view it as another tool to further their aims. That is consistent with your thesis, that the left-brain mentality outlined by McGilchrist is incapable of managing reality. It will burn down its own house to meet some immediate goal.
This break with reality and its corollary, the quest for cosmic justice, means it is only a matter of time before reality hits. From our point of view they seem increasingly unhinged. But I think that is inevitable as their utopian goals cannot work. Once everything looks like San Francisco the moderate types will yearn for law and order.
The problem of course is the whole "everything looking like San Francisco" part. The left will certainly burn its house down, but it's also our house.
I think that is to some extent inevitable. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent it. But the total capture of institutions makes that challenging. I don't see a good clean solution or a reset option.
Maybe isolated accelerationism in some sense. If we see enough Lampedusa type images, the raw reality of mass immigration, it may help jolt people into awareness of the policies behind it. Perhaps enough isolated examples of destruction in limited areas can be used to illustrate the whole.
The migrant crisis in 2016 was a huge wakeup call for me, so yes, this can certainly happen.
Same for me.
It's not my house LOL I fled to the woods, no traffic lights in my county.
But on a more serious note yes the decadence is everywhere, I ran into a meth camp out in the woods by a trout stream carelessly trashing the place and I called in the Forest Service to have them removed, something I never would have dreamed of 10 years ago as a Mises camp guy, so yes realignments are happening, and at the risk of over left braining it, our models of the world evolve, particularly on places like Substack with a high signal to noise ratio.
Wow! Beautifully written essay. You teach us something new while also entertaining us. Thank you.
All I know is I used to identify as center left. The goalposts moved & I found myself center right. My principals remain the same: antiwar & conserve the environment.
I would argue genuine conservatives would adopt both those positions. I especially believe traditional conservatives would do a superb job preserving the environment.
The left is full of people who love to strut their stuff about how much they care about the environment and are going to make everything "sustainable" and "renewable" to save the planet from Gorebull Warning, but they can't keep the cities they control free of the just the most filthy kinds of human behavioral pathologies.
Yes, I write about that on here extensively, it is a fundamentally conservative principle like not eating your seed corn due to glutinous unconstrained desire. The neo-con establishment GOP are at the end of the day just more progressives who eat their own seed corn.
Restraint is a feature of those from the Global North, although not evenly distributed around the globe. But within our populations there is much variety.
I am sure you are aware of the marshmallow test, which does a decent job of predicting life success.
Yep, and dare I say the un p.c. ability to notice the pattern of the current hegemony of fat black chicks with high time preference and literally zero self control.
What interesting is this shall I say vibrant urban youth driven culture for all it's neo-Marxist whining about capitalism serves consoomerism to a T. The actual corporate capitalists love consoomers who can't control their urges.
Indeed. It is cultivated and encouraged. Although much of it is driven by cheap credit, and those days are over.
Or plan for any action, including simple behaviors.
Much of our demise is driven by ignorance, and the antidote is reality.
You may be familiar with the white liberal ladies who go forth to other parts of the world to prove how racist the rest of us are then are promptly abused and murdered in some uncivilized territory. Westerners who trash the Anglosphere countries as exploitative or broken are naive. Alas they will learn the hard way.
A great example of how the Overton Window functions!
I agree with that last bit about getting centered, in nature. But it seems to me the crux is, we have to start getting comfortable using the power we are so busy talking and theorzing about.
A willingness to pursue power, and above all a comfort in wielding power. Confronting the absurdities head on. Men are not women etc.
I sometime ago resolved never to call a man a woman. I confront absurdity at every opportunity. Wielding real power is a much greater challenge I am still hesitant about.
It can be as simple as backing meaningful conventions. Marriage is to raise kids, for example. Shaming those who believe at the first sign of mild discomfort you leave to find yourself, lol.
I'm thinking of the kind of power that, many coming together, brings down a pathological Federal Gov and Institutional State.
Of course, explicit power. But we also have to build the foundations of a stable society. Conservative people have a better chance of raising stable kids who can continue the work. The Leftie women castrate their sons and alienate their daughters, so will not be the future. I think that matters too.
Absolutely. Foundations first
A small yet very important thing that everyone and anyone can do, is refuse to comply, participate and acquiesce to (using the schizophrenia-metaphor, or simile or whatever) the psychotic's descripton of reality.
Next level is always pitching in to help out, when you notice someone saying no to the psyhcotics, no matter who they are. Example: the local school board wants to have 10-year olds learning how to perform fellatio and stimulate the prostate, and the bible-thumpers, floorlickers and licecaps are the first ones to protest - join in! Doesn't matter if you find others of their idea or practices abhorrent - by joining in you achieve a chance to create common ground and accord, and sow spite among your opponents.
Right, enough of Captain Obvious (my son actually calls me that, the uppity boy!).
About the left - right thing: it's wrong. Can't put it simpler than that. Seating arrangements from the French Revolution does not an ideological slide-rule make.
Example: is lowered taxes on wages left or right? Lowered taxes is traditionally right, but then only for the well-to-do and major corporations. What if we change the taxation of labour so that the first [insert amount here] per family is untaxed, and only tax what someone earns on top of that?
Would that be left or right? What about having a tax code set up so a single minimum wage income, full time, is enough to support two adults and three children, and a dog?
Left? Not present-day left, no way. They're all about subsidies and welfare. Right? No hay José, the right's never changed one single thing to benefit the poor - especially the workingpoor - unless forced to.
Politics ain't binary, man. It's all vectors and stuff.
>licecaps
>floorlickers
Thank you for adding these to my arsenal.
Regarding the left-right binary: indeed, on a policy level, you're exactly correct, and I was saying precisely this throughout the essay. It isn't a single axis or spectrum. It's more like a hyperdimensional idea-space, with axes describing a multitude of principle component values. Yet within this space we invariably see humans sorting themselves into two groups. Hence my suggestion of thinking of it in terms of brain hemispheres. The hemispheres are quite real; any given neuron belongs to one or the other; but it's meaningless to try and say which neuron in a given hemisphere is more left or right.
Suggestion for movie:
"Cube V - Hypercube of schizoid politics"
Tagline: "You opened the box. They came."
What is fascinating about the brain is, if not enough neurons fire then I'm not typing this, yet until they do fire I haven't yet thought what to type.
"We have such things to show you."
I often find that I don't know exactly what I'm going to write until I actually write it. In many ways it's a little bit like a text prediction algo a la ChatGPT. One word triggers another, and on the cascade goes.
Forgive my unhipness but who are licecaps and floor lickers? I'll go search, will I find anything?
Religious slurs against moslems and jews. I'm being fair and inclusive; can't call christians the pejorative "bible thumpers" and then not call out their borthers and sisters in the cult of the god of Abraham with smilar denigrating terms, that'd be discriminatory.
They call non-Abrahamites all kinds of nasty things and used to murder them, so they'll just have to lump it.
Groan I wish I hadn't searched. :-)
This was really excellent! A lot of helpful insights brought together! This is the kind of essay that raises interesting question and gets productive conversations started!
On the subject of what to do, I have many more questions than answers, but any viable solution must involve accountability for not only decision makers, but also for the theorists on whose models decision makers rely. No more Paul Krugman's continuing to sound off authoritatively on economic policies decade after decade of getting it wrong and still be treated like they're any kind of legitimate expert; no more warmongering neo-con-artists migrating from one administration to the next and one political affiliation to the other, getting us into disastrous wars under false pretenses. Skin in the game for anyone involved with creating or enforcing national policies. That's the downside of a wealthy civilization: the policy-makers have so much insulation from the costs of their bad decision-making that they can delay the day of reckoning until the costs are catastrophic. But those costs are the reality check that keep the Left Hemisphere's model-based strategems from getting too badly out of control. When those costs are removed or externalized, there's nothing left to course-correct.
I don't want anyone starting a war who isn't personally willing to pick up a weapon. We haven't had leaders who lead from the front for two centuries now, and those two centuries of cowardice are why our wars are so terrible.
1000% correct! That's also probably why today's leaders are happy to see the statues of great men torn down: it means fewer reminders of their own cowardice, as they lead from the rear, insulated from the costs of their decisions by many layers of bureaucracy.
That makes perfect sense.
I think Blackadder summed it up. The generals are right behind you. About 35 miles behind you.
There's a certain logic to it, though. Imagine you're a US or EU soldier stationed in Mali or the Khyber or somewhere, and your commander supposed to be inspiring and set an example is Joe Biden or Angela Merkel.
Mind you, I'm very much for the idea that anyone voting for war (of aggression, not defending the home country) is automatically volunteering to go in the front line, over the top in the first wave.
Biden or Harris would be shot by their own troops, so perhaps not the worst suggestion, lol.
Everyone who votes for war has their name put in a hat. Ten percent of them are chosen by lot to be present at the frontlines.
Great point. I am certain I am a better shot than ANY neo-con, I'd bet money on it, and I am out of practice, lol
"the idea being that criticism is fine, but we should not tolerate using the left or its tools, such as cancellation, to solve our own ideological conflicts. All of these are worth reading in full."
It's worth reading Taleb's "Skin in the Game" - especially the section of the the intolerant minority
We have to know what we will not do or accept. Which means that there have to be those we will not hire, will not befriend, etc.
The prosaic version is "there's a difference between an open mind and a hole in the head"
Absolutely fascinating piece. I can tell that I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.
I'm glad you found it to be so.
Well done, and loved the final message.
To do the famous "yes, but" without the intention of criticism (as you said, good thought is explorative, and critique often comes from being triggered more than anything else and is therefore pointless): there seems to be a pathway from right wing thought to left brain hemisphere madness as well. It can start with the lament to "focus more on practical solutions", "we need to finally do something about it" etc. and end in rigid systems (models) for how society should be. This is the opposite of accepting organic thought and development based on a wide-angle and long-term view of reality. Think rigid theocracy, technocratic right-wing authoritarianism and the like. Classic ponerology, in other words, where real grievances are exploited by bad actors. In fact, the RH/LH distinction seems to be a useful way of looking at these things and recognizing them, too.
I 100% agree. In fact I had at the back of my mind that in many ways the countercultural switch of the last decade or so implies something exactly along these lines. Whichever side finds itself in the dominant position will then face precisely the temptations of power that lead to rigidly dogmatic authoritarianism, and the side out of power will be forced into a more contemplative mode in which it identifies the excesses and shortcomings of the powerful. As the critiques become more compelling, and the flaws in the regime harder to ignore, the ideas advanced by the 'right hemisphere' of society naturally emerge into ascendance ... and then the cycle repeats.
Exactly, exactly. An interesting case is when society descends into chaos, as in the Weimar republic. Here you can see LH and RH thought in battle, both on the left and the right, and sometimes even in the mind of one thinker!
The problem with this sort of thinking is that it's exactly this sort of broad tolerance which allowed the left to rise to power in the first place. If there isn't a hard a firm check to stop it, such as in a benignly tolerant state of intellectual openness, whichever side is naturally most inclined to grasp for power is likely to get it. That's the left.
Yep. That's the fundamental dilemma, both politically and neuropsychologically.
A fascinating thesis. And it definitely describes the rightwing Substacks I have been reading -- and how I don't quite fit in, as my writings are more action oriented than descriptive.
But my right brain provides me with data points which don't seem to fit. I have memories of Progressives with bumper stickers that read "Just Breathe." My memories of academia were that the hard sciences had more right wingers, and that those who studied art, music, and literature tended to be on the political left.
And then there were my Libertarian Party days. LOTs of left brained autists there! Lots of refugees from the libertarian movement in this right wing corner of Substack. While the Reason crowd and many still active in the LP are spiritually leftists, there are plenty of Austrian School types who have gone full Alt Right. But the Austrian School types can be just as left brained as Objectivists. Question the axioms of praxeology or the Zero Aggression Principle and get Cancelled.
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But maybe a realignment is taking place. Go back 50 years and it was the Religious Right that was into censorship and it was the non communist Left that was edgy and taking humorous looks at inconvenient truths. Look at the early years of Saturday Night Live, for example. Today, the Babylon Bee is edgier than Saturday Night Live.
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Or maybe we are seeing the fruit of an education system which puts too much emphasis on reasoning and no longer puts much emphasis on memorizing facts or reading primary sources. Our problem may be that the political Left is out of its right mind...
I think you might be running with the "creative right brain/logical left brain" concept, which isn't actually accurate. Both creativity and logic call upon the faculties of both hemispheres, and there's nothing to say that eg artists can't be more left-brain dominant. Indeed, McGilchrist points to many of the artistic movements of the 20C with their disconnected, highly abstract forms reminiscent of images made by schizophrenics as evidence for left brain hyperdominance.
Instead, it's more that the right brain is for experiencing reality, the left brain for modeling and instrumentalizing it. It actually follows from this that you'd expect top scientists to make extensive use of their right hemispheres.
Agreed regarding academic visual art, as well as the composition side of academic music. But last I checked universities still teach musical performance using traditional standards.
But the art that New Age Progressives like is definitely right brain art. And Whole Foods Markets are decadent gourmet grocery stores with a veneer of serving causes in order to avoid the guilt.
And there are tree hugging Leftists who actually get out among the trees...
Or maybe we are seeing the fruit of an education system which puts too much emphasis on reasoning and no longer puts much emphasis on memorizing facts or reading primary sources.
This is an excellent point. We have essentially removed the grammar stage and are attempting to jump right to logic and rhetoric. We are trying to get people to think (a noble goal) but denying them their intellectual foundations. No wonder everyone is so neurotic.
I argued some years ago that we've started teaching the trivium in reverse.
We start off with rhetoric in primary and secondary school; these are all the correct conclusions which educated people believe. From there, we teach a bit of logic in undergrad. "Go source secondary information, and assemble it to prove the conclusions you learned about in High School." And then, should the student go on to PhD, finally do they start learning and/or researching new facts - but only about their extremely narrow domain.
The Alt Hypothesis had a video a long ways back where he discussed ana spect of this phenomemon. I forget what term her used - it was pithy - but his point was that everybody at university will believe the officially promoted conclusion, aside from the experts, who are more likely to align with dissidents. EG: everybody knows that IQ is fake, aside from the psychology department who reluctantly admit it's the best measuring stick they have. Everybody knows we live in a democracy, aside from the PolSci profs who talk about the Iron Triangle. The Spartans were gay - unless you talk to a Classics prof.
Overproduction of elites through universities, combined with the reversed trivium, results in far too many midwits who are highly trained at arguing, while holding the same basic opinions as a high school student.
I've read a couple of books by mainstream academics recently - pop sociology, basically. The authors share a common Marxist slant to their views, including an obsession over a fine-grained analysis of Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative.
And in every instance, this preoccupation is completely worthless at understanding the modern world. Who fucking cares if Milo Yannopoulis is right but not conservative, or Dr. Nobody-Ass Professor has a critique of liberalism from the left?
It's irrelevant to the grueling experience of living through the process of culture death. Functionally, the right recognizes this process, while the left seems to want to pretend that Amazon and Netflix and Pfizer are sufficient antidotes to depravity and depression.
More generally, I've noticed that as soon as Marxist terminology enters a conversation, that conversation becomes instantly incomprehensible. It's a dialect of the Black Tongue of Mordor, and it serves as a mimetic weapon to annihilate thought.
As a lifelong inhabitant of the corpus callosum, I really got a lot out of this excellent essay. Also, I had to look up “spandrel” (with one “L,” incidentally). Well done!
Whoops! I was misled by the spelling of Spandrell's pseudonym, the infamous originator of the Bioleninism model.
<Go for an aimless ramble in nature.>
Excellent advice. And great read, as always. The kind of read I don’t mind waiting for so no rush, make sure YOU work in plenty of time ‘out of doors.’ It will keep you grounded.
I am going to do a brief thought experiment here if I may.
I think a perhaps a more useful idea than right or left is establishment and anti-establishment. This gets at conundrums the "right" often struggles with like neo-cons self identifying as "conservative" or "right wing," while in essence behaving like progressives who want to impose their flawed abstract left brain model on the world. Neo-cons are the establishment and the dissident right is anti-establishment which is why most of us correctly oppose neo-cons even though they self identify as "right." Woke and the WEF are the establishment again trying to impose their abstract left brain managerial models on the world. However a few on the left the Glenn Greenwalds and Jimmy Dores oppose the WEF establishment, and while their thought may not be to your taste, most here would surely admit they are better more sincere people than Max Boot and Bill Krystal?
I have a two part essay here on this topic. I can link to them below but I would like to get John's permission first before doing so. May I link to my essays on the topic for those who may interested in more reflections along these lines?
Link away!
Thanks. Here are my essays on the American anti-establishment tradition and how the establishment has a linear forward spatial metaphor for time, while then anti-establishment BOTH the beats and John Birch society embraced a cyclical view of time
Part I https://whispertrees.substack.com/p/cultural-renewal-in-a-dying-empire?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
and
Part II https://whispertrees.substack.com/p/cultural-renewal-in-a-dying-empire-634?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
This two are also relevant to this discussion:
https://whispertrees.substack.com/p/dare-to-be-inefficient?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
https://whispertrees.substack.com/p/the-hippies-were-not-leftists-and?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
"...the dissident right is anti-establishment..."
This is an untruth the dissident right clutches to its bosom with passion. Nothing is more establishment in nature than conservative Christianity, which seems to be the foundation, pillars and whole house of the dissident right. This is human nature; it ain't so surprising that any group wants its own principles and culture to prevail against all others. The classical liberalism that so many conservative Christians convince themselves they believe in is something in real life they absolutely loathe.
By establishment I mean the east coast urban American centers of wealth and power that developed in the 19thcentury, the suites in the suites, who became the professional managerial class.
Admittedly the word has some ambiguity, but do me the favor of reading the first essay I wrote above before just reacting. I am working hard myself on be less reactive to people's comments, so I get it, but we aren't enemies, I am a Christian rural person.
I understood perfectly what you meant, but nevertheless I expressed an underlying truth. And I ain't never thought myself to be your enemy though you've previously reacted with great fury to some of my Notes. Never mind.
All religions are instruments of conformity and policing of mind, an established order and with a horror of actual dissent. That's why all of them split into sects just as soon as their dogmas are codified into holy writness.
And any group belief becomes a religion, a cult. Conservatives and progressives are mirror images. This is just human nature. Very few people have the intellectual self-control to tolerate real divergence of belief in people they must interact with in daily life. That's why villages develop different micro-cultures and dialects from the village a day's walk down the road. That's why it's hard to govern a nation as big as America, which drew immigrants from everywhere. Why were conservatives sleeping on the job when the rhetoric changed from "melting pot" to "gorgeous mosaic?"
If you oppose woke which it seems you do, you do get the fully secular open market place of ideas of classical liberalism, is just woke with extra steps, don't you? You are not stupid, so surely you can see why that must be true? Without some foundational principle like religious belief everything is fluid and dissolves into flux and chaos. We know this even from deep mathematical principles like Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
I belong to no school of thought, to no dogma, to no political party. In every aspect of life I go with what seems right to me, what seems just, what seems plausible, what my instincts tell me. I've always been bad at tribal adhesion. It's true though that I'm as American as they come, and as culturally an expression of that rootless cosmopolitanness as can be found anywhere. Stuff gets into the marrow of one's bones, you can't really ever get it out.
Yes, it's true that every society must organize itself by foundational principles and conformity to them. That's why dissidence from hierarchal diktats is as old as fire, and why there's no cure for human nature. That's why people flee communities of the faithful--whatever the faith is, and I use "faith" expansively here--because they can't fit themselves to the cloth others cut for them.
Human civilization goes in cycles, one must be grateful if one gets to live in a good one and pretty miserable if one is watching the downturn in real time.
Americans are pretty lucky though; we have foundational documents crafted by people who seem to have been uniquely wise at the moment it was necessary to be. If more conservatives had had the wit to truly recognize what liberty encompasses and not have dissipated their energies in the wrong battles, we might have slowed the long cycle of history just a little bit.
Rootless cosmopolitan classical liberalism is an ideology whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. It is pretentious to claim you "belong to no school of thought," we all have an ideology ie basic presumptions we make that guide our actions and beliefs. Without out some ideology we would have total paralysis of action and our lives would fall into chaos and ruin.
I think it's more useful to look at John Stewart Mill's "On Liberty," and why it is the best most clear argument in favor of liberty and why it fails.
First the good part, it's true all societies at least in the their ruling elite class need to constantly debate and refine their ideas or stagnate. Restrictions on speech in the elite class that lead to detachment from reality are utterly toxic as we see in woke cancel culture.
The problem is destroying bedrock moral foundations does not work as well for non elite people who lack the self control of low time preference. If you have high time preference and do not reflect much before acting then an open market place of ideas is disastrous it means you may choose to trans off your dick, become a drug addict, and choose to inflate the money supply through printing money because some of it goes in your bank account but you are too ignorant to know that inflation eats it and then some.
I talk more about all this here.
https://whispertrees.substack.com/p/unpopular-wisdom?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Yes most classical liberals are in fact machine age progressives.