Yarvin on the Three Forms of Government

 Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, recently summarized power in the following way: 

There are three political forces: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Every regime is based on one and suppresses the other two.

Democracy is the strongest but least stable force; truly democratic regimes are rare. Oligarchy is the most stable force; it is especially good at suppressing democracy, because it is especially good at pretending to be democracy. The only threats to an oligarchy are either a foreign oligarchy, or a union of democracy and monarchy—in which democratic energy installs a monarch.

It is very easy to show that, when democratic energy is weak, monarchy is the only possible successor of oligarchy. In general and with only clearly limited exceptions, the first job of any new regime is to dismantle and replace the institutions of the old. Like any other serious task, only unity of command can solve this problem.

Gray Mirror

Yarvin basically understands that most democracy is illegitimate, a fact which Plato recognized in the era before Christ, and something that the American founding fathers more or less knew. 

Yarvin understands that Oligarchs manufacture consent via democratic institutions, which gives us an illusion of a mandate from heaven.

Mandates from heaven actually used to be honest: they were said to come from God! Of course, whether or not they did is up for debate, and we would probably insist that it's impossible that all these different mandates did come from God, but what is perhaps the key to this is the mandate of heaven vis a vis understanding that the heaven being referenced is the metaphysics that govern the cosmos. 

That way, we can abstract the principle enough to make it more universally palatable to different religions, and people who are atheists but recognize the power of immutable principles which govern human nature can likewise feel a certain loyalty to these regimes. 

Monarchy is the third form of government being referenced here. I think that we must interpret this as monarchy in the literal appeal to the mandate of heaven in an undemocratic fashion. In this sense, literal monarchy or more republicanized and fashed out forms of it can be scene as being in the same vein. 

Yarvin says another thing that is very interesting:

Therefore, “democratic energy installs a monarch” is a description of all revolutions—at least, all internal revolutions.

The nature of democratic energy is unstable. It is going to throw into power a Lenin or a Washington, and then it will generally begin to dissipate as the regime consolidates itself. 

The revolution dissipates, but the principles endure.  

Chauvin's Defense Relying on Handwritten Notes? Third World Stuff

 One of the more important characteristics of any country that I would consider to be developed would be its ability for the professionals and experts to simply report the truth transparently without any fear of reprisal or blowback. 

Every country, of course, has sacred cows which it tries to protect. This is not really an issue. But when it comes to reporting the facts clearly & concisely of a crime or some other incident that does not need to be inherently political, there can be no effort to make a cover up. 

But take a look at what Chauvin's defense team is relying on:

Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system. 

"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.

Kare11

The documents that should clearly convey this information are too opaque to clearly communicate this information. This, alone, would be just potentially be an error of how the documents themselves are organized, but combined with the fact that one can expect "expert" witnesses and the coroners themselves to firmly put themselves into the pocket of the prosecutor's, the defense is absolutely forced to rely on documents like these. 

You are no longer living in a truly developed country when it is the case that people are too shy to speak the facts in a court case because political interest groups are so invested in their narratives that they seek to win political points through dishonesty. 

Any society which cannot examine individual events objectively has no hope of having a functioning democracy.

27% of People in 1937 Didn't Have Religious Membership

 An interesting paragraph jumped out at me while looking through an article on religiosity: 

The polling giant has been measuring church membership since 1937 when nearly three-quarters of the population (73%) reported membership in a house of worship. For much of that time, membership remained at about 70% but began to decline after 1999. By the late 2000s, membership had dropped to about 62% and has continued to fall.

KTLA 

Many people would focus on the fact that this article talks about membership in houses of worship dropping dramatically, but the fact of the matter is that it is pretty surprising that nearly a third of Americans historically did not see themselves as members of a particular religious tradition. 

This reminds me of polls from the 19th century which showed that a third or more of scientists were atheists, and polls of Parisians from the same time which showed similarly that only 80% of them identified as Christians. Neither the Jewish or Muslim populations of the city would scarcely make up the rest of the 20% to 100, so sizable religionless populations did exist in those times. 

It may very well be the case that a third of Americans have always been somewhat religionless. I am not saying outright atheist, though certainly it would not be too difficult to believe that maybe 1 in 10 Americans were historically atheist as Rodney Stark has implied, but I can imagine that a very large amount of Americans had extremely mild views about God and spirituality. 

The early 20th century was a time when the occult flourished, after all, and the 1950s onwards were full of New Age movements, fixations on things like hypnotism and Freudian psychology. 

Americans tend to be so obsessed with this idea that grandma & grandpa (and great-grandma & great-grandpa) were pious pillars of their community, along with absolutely everyone else in the community, that they forget that there were porn theaters, prostitutes, alcoholics, atheists, literal Communists and Anarchists, practitioners of the occult, etc., thriving in urban areas, and no doubt having presences in towns and villages. 

Rorty & Linguistical Cynicism

While discussing philosophy with a Rorty fan, I came across this very interesting excerpt: 

In Rorty's view, both Dewey's pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools, to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, "have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill at weaving." (TP 48)

Pragmatic evaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires a degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggest that we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability to uncover the truth, would be like claiming to evaluate tools for their ability to help us get what we want—full stop. Is the hammer or the saw or the scissors better—in general? Questions about usefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we give substance to our purposes.

Rorty's pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses the significance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sort of naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptual reduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty's naturalism echoes Nietzsche's perspectivism; a descriptive vocabulary is useful insofar as the patterns it highlights are usefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours. Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no one privileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a critical touchstone for our various descriptive practices.

For Rorty, then, any vocabulary, even that of evolutionary explanation, is a tool for a purpose, and therefore subject to teleological assessment. Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitment to Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suited to further the secularization and democratization of society that Rorty thinks we should aim for. 

Stanford Encyclopedia's article on Rorty.

Rorty. Relaxin'.

Rorty understands language in a very cynical way -- which is not a bad way at all of understanding language. 

I believe it is actually the case that people have always understood the potential for language to be abused. What is a lie, after all, if not an abuse of language? But Rorty's cynicism is deeper than this. It views all language as pragmatic in essence, and thus never actually is entirely honest. 

Perhaps I am being too hard on him, and my interpretation is not entirely correct, but that is not something to be bogged down in when this idea alone is quite interesting.

If the language we use to discuss ideas is ultimately for specific purposes, and not meant to be precise presentations of our real perception of how the world is and what our ideas are, we have to treat the way that anyone talks to us skeptically. We become a part of anyone's agenda when we assent to the way that they are using language. 

Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way. 

I think that, especially in modernity, language has begun to mean this. Our justifications for the Iraq war can be seen as a large ruse to profit off of the highly lucrative oil trade and to serve other geopolitical interests. 

When we see the way that all political groups can shift back and forth on things like free speech and property rights when it suits them, we see that hypocrisy can seem almost unconscious and natural. Thus all of the words & ideals previously presented seem like a bunch of hot air, and to have originally only been uttered to serve a single purpose, and to not really be about the ideas in themselves. 

But I think that people tend to believe what they are saying, even if they renege on these words later, and that there are many people who are incredibly sincere in their beliefs and do not yield. The religious, in particular, have an inclination to uphold their precise descriptions of reality, and all that the Saints wrote and martyrs confessed. 

I think that Rorty's assessment is particularly poignant due to the circumstances in which we 20th & 21st century people live: our governments are "democracies" that consist of oligarchs manufacturing consent via the media, who are always engaged in employing ideas and symbolism to manipulate people. Many of these people are not even necessarily very political or philosophical by nature, but are told that it is their duty to be as such. 

Because the populace is not particularly invested in their own narratives, the elites who rule via the manufacturing of consent are blessed by their fickleness.

You can also see the elites benefiting from the cynical use of language in the marketplace. Advertisements are themselves a form of propagandizing in practice. You can see it also cynically employed in law as well, where great efforts are gone to to follow the 'letter of the law' and the very meaning of language becomes distorted. 

Western liberal democracies have cynical views of language because they are ruled by merchants & lawyers who view language as pragmatic tools. Rorty was undoubtedly able to make this conclusion, and it affected the very way that he views language. 

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.