… the (short) play:
A: We’ve got nothing against you personally. We don’t even know you. It’s just that we’re more comfortable restricting club membership to upper-income straight white male English-speaking Protestants.
B: Then you’re not very good Protestants!
A: Damn! You’re right …
Walter Russell Mead picks up on a highly-significant political pattern:
What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.
Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.
Fred Reed, on the media Balkanization tide:
Though I have spent a lifetime in journalism, I do not read a newspaper, not the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal. Nor do I have television service.
Why? Because, having worked in that restaurant, I know better than to eat there. The foregoing media are quasi-governmental organs, predictably predictable and predictably dishonest. The truth is not in them.
Within the news racket, this isn’t news. More interesting is that a large part of the intelligent population agrees. We now have a press of two tiers, the establishment media and the net, with sharply differing narratives. The internet is now primary. The bright get their news from around the web and then read the New York Times to see how the paper of record will prevaricate. People increasingly judge the media by the web, not the web by the media.
He gets it. Now how to speed it up? http://t.co/MqSiovevV0
— NIO (@NIOReaction) December 8, 2014
ADDED: Another dimension of media agony. This also relevant.
ADDED: Mass media is over.
Joel Kotkin on the Cathedral Clerisy:
In “The New Class Conflict,” I describe this alliance as the New Clerisy, which encompasses the media, the academy and the expanding regulatory bureaucracy. This Clerisy already dominates American intellectual and cultural life and increasingly has taken virtual control of key governmental functions, as well as the educations of our young people. […] Although usually somewhat progressive by inclination, the Clerisy actually functions much like the old First Estate in France – the clergy – helping determine the theology, morals and ideals of the broader population. […] Against such established and accumulated power, even a strong November showing by the GOP may have surprisingly little effect. Indeed, even with a Republican in the White House, the Clerisy’s ability to shape perceptions, educate the young and control key regulatory agencies will not much diminish. The elevation of the Clerisy to unprecedented influence may prove this president’s most important “gift” to posterity.
Kotkin throws in some misdirection, towards “Daniel Bell [who 40 years ago] predicted … [the rise to] ‘pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.'” You can judge the credibility of this intellectual genealogy for yourself.
(Link and title stolen from Stirner.)
This is a reliable guide to approved thinking within China’s Communist Party:
Blindly copying Western-style democracy can only bring disaster, an influential Chinese Communist Party journal wrote in its latest edition following more than a week of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Citing enduring violence and turmoil in countries like Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, which have tried to adopt such a system of government, the fortnightly magazine Qiushi said that Western democracy did not suit all countries.
“The West always brags that its own democracy is a ‘universal value’, and denies there is any other form of democracy,” said Qiushi, which means “seeking truth”, in the issue distributed over the weekend.
“Western democracy has innate internal flaws and certainly is not a ‘universal value'; its blind copying can only lead to disaster,” Qiushi added.
It shouldn’t be disappointing to hear such pious invocations of an “other form of democracy”, but only coldly confirming of the worst. It’s all clearly stated.
In the present global order, the Cathedral has no serious external enemies, but only awkward students, who refuse to learn the one and only imaginable lesson in exactly the way, and at exactly the speed, expected of them. The idea that democracy as such, and intrinsically, is fundamentally inconsistent with sustainable social order (as explained by Hoppe, acknowledged by Thiel, and thematized by Moldbug), finds no official representation, anywhere in the world. Even the North Koreans think they’re democrats. At the ideological level, the calamity has already happened, universally.
Towards an analysis of the Social Justice Industrial Complex:
To perceive the group dynamics at work which is the Complex is first to distinguish between those forms of cooperation which are and are not taking place. Is there some evil mastermind pulling the strings from the shadows? No. The impetus in this case is nothing but the aggregation of personal interests aligned to a collective interest. The actions taken by these individuals are spontaneous, in the sense that the actions taken by soldiers on the battlefield are spontaneous, but behind this spontaneity the order is derived of the motivation which we variously call ideology, purpose, or religion. There is less agency at work in the camp of the Social Justice Industrial Complex than might be presumed from a precursory glance, reflecting that human tendency towards over-attribution of agency. No less, though, are we able to dismiss the notion of an agenda taking place; it is no grand conspiracy, but rather, very small conspiracies united by a vision of utopia which sees all present social structures as oppressions to be destroyed, the far side of which shall inevitably emerge their egalitarian eschaton.
(The focus upon the “tendency in human nature to over-attribute agency” is an excellent starting point, building immunity against some of the most toxic inclinations to radical ideological error into its foundations. If this is aspiring to the status of an authoritative position, it certainly deserves to be nodded through so far.)
ADDED: A brief vacation into the conspiratorial mind.
ADDED: Xenosystems is tempted to propose a (non-exclusive) definition of NRx as the systematic dismantling of conspiracy theorizing — in all its richness — into the tradition of spontaneous order.
Autophagy is spiraling into its cultural moment right now. The Ouroboros is our sign. It’s cybernetic mythology, self-referential looping, and auto-consuming process. There is no end to the ways the theme could be currently pursued.
Simultaneously most comic, tragic, and prominent is the reflexive perception that contemporary hegemonic power is being devoured by the media. In other words, the Cathedral is undergoing accelerated auto-cannibalization. The news is eating itself.
The Hill reports:
“I can see why a lot of folks are troubled,” Obama told a group of donors gathered at a Democratic National Committee barbecue in Purchase, N.Y. […] But the president said that current foreign policy crises across the world are not comparable to the challenges the U.S. faced during the Cold War. […] Acknowledging “the barbarity” of Islamist militants and Russia “reasserting the notion that might means right,” Obama, though, dismissed the notion that he was facing unprecedented challenges. […] “The world’s always been messy … we’re just noticing now in part because of social media,” he said, according to a White House pool report. […] “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart” …
So the world’s supreme talking head is trying to talk us out of taking the Apocalypse Show seriously. Don’t listen to us, you’ll find it far too upsetting. If this is getting repetitive, it’s due to the pattern. Catatonia is the final prescription. We’ve clearly passed beyond irony into something altogether more twisted. The intriguing syndrome labeled Horror autotoxicus seems to be ready for political-economic application.
The Cathedralist War on Trolling is limbering up fast. Just a few days ago, we had this. (Paraphrased: to resist the Cathedral is trolling). Now the follow up (“Trolls are like terrorist cells” — literally).
The Duck does the integration:
1) disagreeing with progressivism is trolling
2) trolling is terrorism
therefore 3) disagreeing with progressivism is terrorism
— Duck Enlightenment (@jokeocracy) August 20, 2014
That escalated quickly.
They’re everywhere and even if one gets eliminated, there’s two more to take its place (that also applies to HYDRA). But I feel like this is the point we’re at now. That’s sad and terrible, but it’s the truth. I used to think turning comments off was *the* solution, and while I do think comments have become useless, and largely a hotbed for hate and racism, turning them off is only going to drive the poison to even more public forums like Twitter and Facebook, where a hateful or factually corrupt tweet or status update can spread like a disease across the globe and turn supposed rational human beings into muckrakers of misinformation, hate, and other dark things.
A wave of excellent posts at Nydwracu’s place recently. At the crest is this, a critique of the capitalist thing as an Unfriendly Institutional Intelligence (UFII). I’d been meaning to run something off the article initially cited, which is fascinating. As Nydwracu shows, its implications extend much further than its foregrounded argument.
As already briefly tweet-sparred, I’m skeptical about the description of Capitalism as an institution (or set of institutions), since any sociological category is inadequate to its mechanism in profundity. Capital, like fire, is something humans do, but that does not make it reducible to the ways humans do it. In its ultimate cybernetic diagram, Capitalism is a cosmic occurrence, and only very derivatively an anthropological fact. (This is not, of course, to deny that capitalism is destined to have been by far the most important anthropological fact). As a cause, human thedes can be interesting. As a cognitive horizon, they are simply weakness. It isn’t always — or even very often — about us.
Like Capitalism, the Cathedral is a self-organizing, distributed intelligence with emergent post-anthropomorphic features. Unlike Capitalism, it has no intrinsic competence at self-resourcing, and thus relapses continually into to compromise, contradiction, and exhortation. The Cathedral has a complex spiritual message it is inextricably bound to, but Capitalism has only one terminal law: anything that can feed itself gets to live. The pre-adaptation to rough times that comes with this goes without saying (and is usually left unsaid). Unlike the Cathedral, Capitalism doesn’t chat to us much at all. It’s message channels, meaning those communication circuits not dedicated to machine code, consist of tradable ad space. To devote them to preaching would look bad on a balance sheet somewhere.
(Much more on this as the war heats up.)
Note-1: ‘Feeding itself’ includes funding its self-protection. This is a cost-point that is almost certain to grow.
Note-2: Capitalist message channels are, of course, open to preaching that pays. The essential point is that, in contradistinction to the Cathedral, such second-party messaging or first-party PR is irreducibly cynical. When an emergent AI talks to you about morality, you’d be a dupe to weep.
It’s a simplification to conceive the Cathedral as a media apparatus. As simplifications go, however, one could do far worse. Media are essential to the Cathedral, even if by no means casually synonymous with it.
It is surely noteworthy that ‘the media’ have become singular, in much the same way as ‘the United States’ have done. ‘They’ have turned into a thing, and one that is still far from being confidently understood. Even when subjectively identifying with a residual plurality, they cannot but identify themselves with a unitary effectiveness.
While it would be asking far too much to expect the Cathedral to identify itself as a central causal factor in a world going insane, it gets close. NYmag expresses deep concern about the consequences of the news machine:
A terrifying jihadist group is conquering and butchering its way across big swaths of Iraq and Syria. Planes are falling out of the sky on what seems like a weekly basis. Civilians are being killed in massive numbers in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Others are falling prey to Ebola in West Africa. The world, in short, is falling apart. […] That’s how it feels, at least, to those of us who sit at a blessed remove from the death and destruction, but who are watching every bloody moment of it via cable news and social media. It raises an important question: In an age when we can mainline bad news 24/7 if we so choose, what’s the psychological impact of all this exposure to tragedy at a distance?
Drawing upon the work of Mary McNaughton-Cassill (a University of Texas–San Antonio professor at the “leading researcher on the connection between media consumption and stress”), it describes a process of “negative-information overload” driven by market-incentivized sensationalism, compounded by social media revolution, and prone to poorly-understood tangles of psycho-media feedback. Since a story of this kind consists primarily of the Cathedral talking to itself, with everyone else listening in, we quickly learn that the ‘problem’ cashes out into pessimistic disengagement from electoral politics and progressive voluntarism. According to McNaughton-Cassill, negative news bombardment produces “this malaise: ‘Everything’s kinda bad’ and ‘Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help’ and ‘I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.’”