Many years ago, both Lorenzo and I were on the receiving end of cancellations. The one directed at Lorenzo succeeded, and he was driven out of public life. The one directed at me failed, making me more popular than ever.
Much of the difference, in my view, turned on my social class and access to connections, and I tried over a number of years to figure out how to reintroduce Lorenzo to public life and commentary. This included him writing for a blog I ran, and promoting his blog using my big Twitter account. Neither of those succeeded.
Substack, however, has worked. I have been able to use my reach to get his work out to a wider audience, and my connections to get it noticed by Substack and Liberty Fund.
More brilliance here - Selecting for conformity - removing character as a selection issue is an evolutionary process that makes our world an ever shittier place
I enjoyed this but is wanders around a bit too much IMHO. I think it's worthwhile to place wokeism in the line of religion and beliefs. I suspect societies that become too woke may lead to less science as did Islam where anybody creative must be shunned for their inability to perceive truth as defined by a group. OTOH, while the Sauds supported all those schools to appease opposition they clearly seek to use their natural wealth to become even more wealthy, not quite in line with fundamental Islam. In the US the current administration seems intent on doing the opposite by adopting the religion of climate and some wokery.
Looking forward to more thought provoking articles.
Both Lorenzo and I think it's very important to prove one's case, at least to the civil standard. We also both think it's very hard to prove any theoretical claim outside the sciences. One can only prove by examples and analogy.
Hence our tendency to pile up detailed historical and statistical evidence for our claims.
[On a personal level, I agree with David Hume that formal logic doesn't actually do much, despite winning the set theory and logic prize as an undergraduate.]
The current Administration is carrying out current government policy - Top Priority Trading Democracy- which is everyone gets everything they want IF they’ve proven they want it enough (violence and mobs, rioting, etc, its democracy you know, and this is the truth).
Whatever you want the most you get, others the same.
The current administration is carrying out its Left wing D portion for its constituency of *current American Government Policy:
Everyone gets everything they want. So yes the useless college grads get Woke HR jobs. Reparations for everyone who isn’t white, administrated by Whites who went to the prestige schools and Karens of course.
Seriously the Reparations are running wild, it’s Helicopter money for the masses.
But so are the Republicans. SCOTUS is giving up everything before Brown vs Board of Education (desegregate schools). The Corporations are getting the CHIPS act and we’re building factories and chip foundries left and right. The workers are going back to work in factories.
Meanwhile DOD gets the Industrial Base back, putting the missing “I” back in MIC (military Industrial Complex).
No give on student loans but F them little 💩s (in fairness they are) and F em join the army.
Not everyone is a winner but it’s Helicopter money for all and Papist ✝️ Court Bulls for the old time religious....but not too worry Trannies get the kids via school and social workers (I’m not joking), and this upsets mommy, but she wanted schools open and so they are!
This is Top Priority Trading democracy where everyone gets whatever they want the most, just prove it in the streets and overrun Capitol Hills ... and sorry THIS IS REAL DEMOCRACY always was...
The history of the House of Saud and the Wahhabists is particular, and was cynically entered into by both for their own benefits. The cleansing of Islam that is the core of Wahhabi doctrine turns two blind eyes at their benefactor.
Don't pay too much attention to the current administration, as the permanent governing apparatus doesn't. The federal bureaucracy only looks at ANY administration as a temporary problem - and they are actually quite right about that.
From note 2: "Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) is more hostile to Christianity."
The irony of course, is that wokery is fundamentally Christian in its values. Christians believed in equality, but it was equality of souls, equality before God. Christians did not believe (as nobody believes) that people are equal in life, nor that they can be made equal. Woke is what happens when the instinct of equality, cultivated over two thousand years, loses its belief in God. Nietzsche warned of this very thing over 100 years ago. Yet Nietzsche appears to have had little effect on the culture of atheists and secularists.
Yes, exactly...I think this is the core point. Historian Tom Holland emphasizes it as well:
"Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine. Because unlike the French Revolution, unlike the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral/ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching the idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed….
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity."
As I pointed out in my podcast with Louise Perry (and will do in more detail with Douglas on Friday ... we discuss Nietzsche's borrowings from classical sources directly), this argument is 100 per cent correct. It's the reason Hitler is the modern world's folk-devil, despite Stalin and Mao killing many more people both as individuals and as a job lot.
"The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak"
The association with the Nazis is quite possibly why Nietzsche has been ignored and shunned by so many atheists and liberals. But Nietzsche did not preach a return to the Roman values, more like a synthesis 'Caesar with the heart of Jesus'.
Nietzsche had a bad reputation post-war for his sister tying his work to Nazism, but his image was later rehabilitated by various academics. The Brett Anderson link is a really great link and writer, thanks for sharing, I will be reading some of his other posts.
"the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed"
Which oddly enough is not found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the ubermensch is not interested in or motivated by the domination of others. I believe Nietzsche considered this work to be his most important and complete (quite unlike The Will to Power).
Zarathustra was published between 1883 and 1885. It's his most famous work, but I think his discussion of master and slave morality is more important, which was covered in "On the Genealogy of Morality" (1887): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality
This is correct. Genealogy of Morals is the one that most accurately represents a number of classical writers and ideas, even when they are not named directly.
Jul 13, 2023·edited Jul 13, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby
I was speaking to Nietzsche's self assessment. It seems that the worst interpretations of him stem from The Will to Power, and the attempt to wring answers out of what to Nietzsche were questions (or challenges), such as the revaluation of all values and the emergence of the superman.
I guess it's about how one defines the "weak". That works for communists too who starved to death tens of millions of peasants despite formally identifying them as members of the "weak"
It's relevant to Tom Holland's comments because one of the distinctive aspects of both Judaism and early Christianity was their opposition to infanticide. The Romans preferred abortion to infanticide (less risky; they had fairly effective abortifacients, one of which they rendered extinct from overuse), but their law explicitly approved of infanticide, especially of the disabled and ugly.
The values and M.O. are not just Christian in general, but Puritan/Calvinist specifically. The woke are as terrified at the thought of not being The Elect as was any 18th century Reform Congregationalist.
Marxism is rather obviously Judeao-Xtianity with the awkard "God" bit dropped. See Acts 5 1-11 "... and a great fear fell over the whole church."
Xtianity: "Gives us all your money, or we'll murder you." Marxism: "Gives us all your money, or we'll murder you."
Xtianity was invented because Judaiasm wasn't working; Protestantism was invented because Catholicism wasn't working; Marxism was invented because Protestantism wasn't working; Critical Theory because Marxism wasn't working...
Right on down to 'Woke'.
Same playbook for the same metaphysical utopian gobbledy gook. Can we stop playing into these dolts hands? Marxism isn't 'spheshul' or different to be bracketed off as somehow 'different'. Before WWII Communism; Fascism; and Nazism were recognised as 'Left': all socialisms, just with different specifics for their hate.
Then an evil magic was worked.
Let's just stop it, eh? 'Cos you KNOW they'll just spin off another bullshit when this latest iteration goes to the wall as we see through otherwise.
NS Lyons quotes Lasch (paraphrasing) on the postmodern “belief” that “reality is a social construct”.
So, setting aside the issue of God, to the extent that “woke” is postmodernist and holds that “belief”, it is a quasi religious, dogmatic cult that is as conformist and anti-rational (ILLIBERAL) as traditional mythic-renunciate religion.
There are a number of social scientists (Musa Al-Gharbi, Keith Preston) that have pointed out that “woke” is the quasi religion of one of three factions of the power elites, the globalist tech oligarchs (virtual property owners), who are in an unholy alliance with finance capitalism, against manufacturing capitalism (physical property owners).
So, the left-vs-right narrative has yielded to virtual-vs-physical. “Woke” virtuals intend to reduce the traditional working classes to the status of peasants under neo-feudalism (Kotkin) , subverting “classically liberal” Constitutional order.
In other words, the globalist $billionaire funded “woke” “left” does indeed want to subjugate the working and lower middle class3s, destroying democracy and western civilization.
And that is possible because the legacy sense-making system, modern rationalism, WEIRD, is failing because it is fragile to techno-economic disruption of its hierarchies of curated expertise. Network information flows around legacy hierarchies, leading to an InfoGlut and loss of social trust.
Without high-social-trust, western civilization collapses into the tribalistic , totalitarian (ILLIBERAL) modes of social order.
The other aspect of belief-determining-worthiness is that (except through honest interaction) what a subject actually believes cannot be determined by another. Requiring a priesthood whose purpose is to define and shape belief - what to believe but also how to believe.
This colonization of the mind results in someone who never really knows what they believe; they have submitted their thinking to an authority which is reinforced by regimented discourse, rituals and signaling. Horrifying.
The equation of right beliefs with moral virtue that permeates PEPism seems to me to mirror the protestant doctrine of sola fide. In both cases it is not what you do that matters, merely what you think ... which can be verified by others only on the basis of what you say.
Considering that PEPism arose in a cultural milieu originally shaped by protestants, this might not be surprising; that said, I don't know if the Puritans believed this as well as the Lutherans.
Good Calvinists, so yes, sola fide folks. I do not regard it as coincidental that New England is the main centre of the wokification of the academy and media.
“The loyalty and coordination advantages of adherence to a common belief system is why autocracies reliant on mining wealth (silver, oil, etc) for revenue have tended to be overtly religious.”
Would you please clarify the connection between extractive industries and religion? Why is religious belief a reliable indicator of loyalty and why is loyalty more important in, say, the petroleum industry than in pharmaceuticals?
Certainly, people working in extractive industries should be immune to the woke “religion.” No miner will live very long if he believes that explosives and heavy earth moving equipment are nothing more than disembodied words relating only to other words rather than to physical things. The on-the-job life of an underground miner is an endless series of reality tests.
The regime sits on top of this flow of goodies, which do not require bargaining with the wider society to extract. Religious adherence — commitment to the rituals, to distinctive beliefs — provides a costly signal of loyalty, so of eligibility to be a recipient of regime largesse.
Helen does a lot of other writing and her audience provides me with a larger audience. So I am very appreciative of her generosity.
Many years ago, both Lorenzo and I were on the receiving end of cancellations. The one directed at Lorenzo succeeded, and he was driven out of public life. The one directed at me failed, making me more popular than ever.
Much of the difference, in my view, turned on my social class and access to connections, and I tried over a number of years to figure out how to reintroduce Lorenzo to public life and commentary. This included him writing for a blog I ran, and promoting his blog using my big Twitter account. Neither of those succeeded.
Substack, however, has worked. I have been able to use my reach to get his work out to a wider audience, and my connections to get it noticed by Substack and Liberty Fund.
More brilliance here - Selecting for conformity - removing character as a selection issue is an evolutionary process that makes our world an ever shittier place
I don't think so - what you are primarily seeking is reliability - that is a constant
Willingness to defend your reputation at the risk of your own life is hardly conformity.
http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/dueling7.pdf
Ability to endure public abuse, pain, to stick at something under trying conditions, is also hardly conformity.
https://www.science.org/content/article/it-wasnt-just-greece-archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas
I enjoyed this but is wanders around a bit too much IMHO. I think it's worthwhile to place wokeism in the line of religion and beliefs. I suspect societies that become too woke may lead to less science as did Islam where anybody creative must be shunned for their inability to perceive truth as defined by a group. OTOH, while the Sauds supported all those schools to appease opposition they clearly seek to use their natural wealth to become even more wealthy, not quite in line with fundamental Islam. In the US the current administration seems intent on doing the opposite by adopting the religion of climate and some wokery.
Looking forward to more thought provoking articles.
Both Lorenzo and I think it's very important to prove one's case, at least to the civil standard. We also both think it's very hard to prove any theoretical claim outside the sciences. One can only prove by examples and analogy.
Hence our tendency to pile up detailed historical and statistical evidence for our claims.
[On a personal level, I agree with David Hume that formal logic doesn't actually do much, despite winning the set theory and logic prize as an undergraduate.]
The current Administration is carrying out current government policy - Top Priority Trading Democracy- which is everyone gets everything they want IF they’ve proven they want it enough (violence and mobs, rioting, etc, its democracy you know, and this is the truth).
Whatever you want the most you get, others the same.
The current administration is carrying out its Left wing D portion for its constituency of *current American Government Policy:
Everyone gets everything they want. So yes the useless college grads get Woke HR jobs. Reparations for everyone who isn’t white, administrated by Whites who went to the prestige schools and Karens of course.
Seriously the Reparations are running wild, it’s Helicopter money for the masses.
But so are the Republicans. SCOTUS is giving up everything before Brown vs Board of Education (desegregate schools). The Corporations are getting the CHIPS act and we’re building factories and chip foundries left and right. The workers are going back to work in factories.
Meanwhile DOD gets the Industrial Base back, putting the missing “I” back in MIC (military Industrial Complex).
No give on student loans but F them little 💩s (in fairness they are) and F em join the army.
Not everyone is a winner but it’s Helicopter money for all and Papist ✝️ Court Bulls for the old time religious....but not too worry Trannies get the kids via school and social workers (I’m not joking), and this upsets mommy, but she wanted schools open and so they are!
This is Top Priority Trading democracy where everyone gets whatever they want the most, just prove it in the streets and overrun Capitol Hills ... and sorry THIS IS REAL DEMOCRACY always was...
Short version of above; The American Capitol now governs as Silas Gaunt in “Needful Things.”
Everyone gets what they want the most, in the process they all turn on each other, allowing the Masters to stay on top.
This is neither original nor enlightened rule but ancient and proven formula for power.
The history of the House of Saud and the Wahhabists is particular, and was cynically entered into by both for their own benefits. The cleansing of Islam that is the core of Wahhabi doctrine turns two blind eyes at their benefactor.
Don't pay too much attention to the current administration, as the permanent governing apparatus doesn't. The federal bureaucracy only looks at ANY administration as a temporary problem - and they are actually quite right about that.
From note 2: "Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) is more hostile to Christianity."
The irony of course, is that wokery is fundamentally Christian in its values. Christians believed in equality, but it was equality of souls, equality before God. Christians did not believe (as nobody believes) that people are equal in life, nor that they can be made equal. Woke is what happens when the instinct of equality, cultivated over two thousand years, loses its belief in God. Nietzsche warned of this very thing over 100 years ago. Yet Nietzsche appears to have had little effect on the culture of atheists and secularists.
A point Douglas Murray and I discuss in our forthcoming podcast.
I look forward to that!
Yes, exactly...I think this is the core point. Historian Tom Holland emphasizes it as well:
"Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine. Because unlike the French Revolution, unlike the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral/ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching the idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed….
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity."
As I pointed out in my podcast with Louise Perry (and will do in more detail with Douglas on Friday ... we discuss Nietzsche's borrowings from classical sources directly), this argument is 100 per cent correct. It's the reason Hitler is the modern world's folk-devil, despite Stalin and Mao killing many more people both as individuals and as a job lot.
"The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak"
The association with the Nazis is quite possibly why Nietzsche has been ignored and shunned by so many atheists and liberals. But Nietzsche did not preach a return to the Roman values, more like a synthesis 'Caesar with the heart of Jesus'.
Here is an article on a similar topic by an author I really like, if you are interested: https://brettandersen.substack.com/p/theelect
Nietzsche had a bad reputation post-war for his sister tying his work to Nazism, but his image was later rehabilitated by various academics. The Brett Anderson link is a really great link and writer, thanks for sharing, I will be reading some of his other posts.
"the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed"
Which oddly enough is not found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the ubermensch is not interested in or motivated by the domination of others. I believe Nietzsche considered this work to be his most important and complete (quite unlike The Will to Power).
Zarathustra was published between 1883 and 1885. It's his most famous work, but I think his discussion of master and slave morality is more important, which was covered in "On the Genealogy of Morality" (1887): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality
This is correct. Genealogy of Morals is the one that most accurately represents a number of classical writers and ideas, even when they are not named directly.
I was speaking to Nietzsche's self assessment. It seems that the worst interpretations of him stem from The Will to Power, and the attempt to wring answers out of what to Nietzsche were questions (or challenges), such as the revaluation of all values and the emergence of the superman.
The NSDAP cared for the weak, as long they were germans. The idea of national socialists being some sort of social darwinists is a fabrication.
The only people gassed on German soil were the disabled, famously Lebensunwertes Leben-- "life unworthy of life".
I guess it's about how one defines the "weak". That works for communists too who starved to death tens of millions of peasants despite formally identifying them as members of the "weak"
It's relevant to Tom Holland's comments because one of the distinctive aspects of both Judaism and early Christianity was their opposition to infanticide. The Romans preferred abortion to infanticide (less risky; they had fairly effective abortifacients, one of which they rendered extinct from overuse), but their law explicitly approved of infanticide, especially of the disabled and ugly.
The values and M.O. are not just Christian in general, but Puritan/Calvinist specifically. The woke are as terrified at the thought of not being The Elect as was any 18th century Reform Congregationalist.
Marxism is rather obviously Judeao-Xtianity with the awkard "God" bit dropped. See Acts 5 1-11 "... and a great fear fell over the whole church."
Xtianity: "Gives us all your money, or we'll murder you." Marxism: "Gives us all your money, or we'll murder you."
Xtianity was invented because Judaiasm wasn't working; Protestantism was invented because Catholicism wasn't working; Marxism was invented because Protestantism wasn't working; Critical Theory because Marxism wasn't working...
Right on down to 'Woke'.
Same playbook for the same metaphysical utopian gobbledy gook. Can we stop playing into these dolts hands? Marxism isn't 'spheshul' or different to be bracketed off as somehow 'different'. Before WWII Communism; Fascism; and Nazism were recognised as 'Left': all socialisms, just with different specifics for their hate.
Then an evil magic was worked.
Let's just stop it, eh? 'Cos you KNOW they'll just spin off another bullshit when this latest iteration goes to the wall as we see through otherwise.
Yet another great article, thanks.
NS Lyons quotes Lasch (paraphrasing) on the postmodern “belief” that “reality is a social construct”.
So, setting aside the issue of God, to the extent that “woke” is postmodernist and holds that “belief”, it is a quasi religious, dogmatic cult that is as conformist and anti-rational (ILLIBERAL) as traditional mythic-renunciate religion.
There are a number of social scientists (Musa Al-Gharbi, Keith Preston) that have pointed out that “woke” is the quasi religion of one of three factions of the power elites, the globalist tech oligarchs (virtual property owners), who are in an unholy alliance with finance capitalism, against manufacturing capitalism (physical property owners).
So, the left-vs-right narrative has yielded to virtual-vs-physical. “Woke” virtuals intend to reduce the traditional working classes to the status of peasants under neo-feudalism (Kotkin) , subverting “classically liberal” Constitutional order.
In other words, the globalist $billionaire funded “woke” “left” does indeed want to subjugate the working and lower middle class3s, destroying democracy and western civilization.
And that is possible because the legacy sense-making system, modern rationalism, WEIRD, is failing because it is fragile to techno-economic disruption of its hierarchies of curated expertise. Network information flows around legacy hierarchies, leading to an InfoGlut and loss of social trust.
Without high-social-trust, western civilization collapses into the tribalistic , totalitarian (ILLIBERAL) modes of social order.
The other aspect of belief-determining-worthiness is that (except through honest interaction) what a subject actually believes cannot be determined by another. Requiring a priesthood whose purpose is to define and shape belief - what to believe but also how to believe.
This colonization of the mind results in someone who never really knows what they believe; they have submitted their thinking to an authority which is reinforced by regimented discourse, rituals and signaling. Horrifying.
The equation of right beliefs with moral virtue that permeates PEPism seems to me to mirror the protestant doctrine of sola fide. In both cases it is not what you do that matters, merely what you think ... which can be verified by others only on the basis of what you say.
Considering that PEPism arose in a cultural milieu originally shaped by protestants, this might not be surprising; that said, I don't know if the Puritans believed this as well as the Lutherans.
Good Calvinists, so yes, sola fide folks. I do not regard it as coincidental that New England is the main centre of the wokification of the academy and media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics#Regional_and_disciplinary_variations
Consistent with the hypothesis, then.
“The loyalty and coordination advantages of adherence to a common belief system is why autocracies reliant on mining wealth (silver, oil, etc) for revenue have tended to be overtly religious.”
Would you please clarify the connection between extractive industries and religion? Why is religious belief a reliable indicator of loyalty and why is loyalty more important in, say, the petroleum industry than in pharmaceuticals?
Certainly, people working in extractive industries should be immune to the woke “religion.” No miner will live very long if he believes that explosives and heavy earth moving equipment are nothing more than disembodied words relating only to other words rather than to physical things. The on-the-job life of an underground miner is an endless series of reality tests.
It is not the industry, it is the regime. Yes, miners tend to very un-woke in the modern world because reality tests abound in the industry.
https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11
The regime sits on top of this flow of goodies, which do not require bargaining with the wider society to extract. Religious adherence — commitment to the rituals, to distinctive beliefs — provides a costly signal of loyalty, so of eligibility to be a recipient of regime largesse.