Dominion Capital: I

The use of skills and connections for social domination

This is the forty-fourth piece in

Lorenzo Warby

’s series of essays on the strange and disorienting times in which we live.

This article can be adumbrated thusly: Dominion capital provides a rhetorical framework, a shared language, and a common vision for the messianic saviours of a fallen world.

Meanwhile,

Arnold Kling

responded to Lorenzo’s previous essay over at his place.

The publication schedule and links to all Lorenzo’s essays are available here.

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Note on terminology: I have previously referred to vanguard capital. That there is a major investment fund with this name—and that the Leninist vanguard model is not the only form of such capital—has led me to adopt the term dominion capital.

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The creation and spread of dominion capital is central to many of the social trends and dysfunctions we have been discussing.

Dominion capital is the conjunction of human capital (verbal skills and analytical framings) and social capital (connections and networking). It takes in:

the skills, knowledge, motivation and networking to coordinate entry into organisations and institutions, shifting them so as to serve the status and social-leverage strategies of who possess said capital.

The greatest lie of the Dialectical Faith is that it is about giving power to the proletariat (or the peasantry, or the downtrodden masses, or the poor). No Dialectical Faith regime has done this, nor will it.

The liberatory vision of the Dialectical Faith is a vision of a transformative future and such a transformative vision requires transformative power. Resources have to be allocated and managed to serve the vision. The Dialectical Faith brings to power those able to coordinate transformative actions.

Not only are workers and peasants not coordinating classes of the form required, the Dialectical Faith’s ranking of subjectivity over structure has little appeal for those who have to struggle with physical reality. It appeals most to those immersed in the social and the imagined. Industrial workers and land-owning farmers will forever be disappointments.

This gulf has widened as the operational forms of the Dialectical Faith lean into promoting subjectivity as a moral benchmark of all things. Hence the shift to hyper-norms: norms that trump all other considerations, even the basic structure of things. The UK’s Cass Review represents biological and medical reality—via the NHS—being re-asserted against the trumping subjectivity of Trans. The rage of hyper-norm believers in response has been a thing to behold.

Industrial workers vote for Communist Parties that flatter them rhetorically and promise them protection from the destabilising risks of markets. They also vote for other parties who do the same thing, including bog-standard (but far more functional) social democratic parties. The latter ballots do not demonstrate acceptance of the Dialectical Faith.

Indeed, as parties that used to have solid working-class support are taken over by outlooks and interests that neither flatter nor protect, while increasing sociocultural risks to workers—such as using migration to break up their communities¹ and suppress wages—they have increasingly lost working-class votes to parties that rhetorically flatter them and promise them protection from both destabilising markets and socio-cultural risks.

As part of accruing the transformative social power that the Dialectical Faith demands, human action and speech is not permitted to undermine the transformative vision, nor the structures creating it. The key Inquisitorial tract for the Dialectical Faith—Herbert Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance—de-legitimises alternative views: declaring—as any good Inquisitorial tract does—that error has no rights and it knows how to identify error.

Chloe S on Unsplash

Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was emphatically clear that pursuit of liberatory justice requires the crushing of freedom:

Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice and the more justice, the less freedom.

That which serves the transformative vision—however violent—is to be tolerated, even facilitated. That which frustrates it—even if in the form of silence that does not support the Faith (“silence is violence”)—has to be repressed. As James Lindsay correctly notes, this is not hypocrisy, it is hierarchy. It’s the visionaries of the transformative future expressing their righteous moral dominance.

The Dialectical Faith grants to its followers a moral and cognitive authority denied to all others based on their critical (i.e. Dialectical Faith) consciousness. It provides a rhetorical framework, a shared language, and a common vision for the messianic saviours of a fallen world. It’s primed to create, motivate and coordinate dominion capital.

The Dialectical Faith not only uses—indeed, pathologically inflates—the normative nature that evolved from our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. It also mobilises our religious nature, which comes from being linguistic—so self-conscious—beings aware of their own death.

Truth is not needed for any of this. Indeed, truth can be a hindrance. The Faith, and its operational spin-offs, merely needs to be operationally effective in motivating and coordinating.

A key role of the shaman in forager societies is to manage uncertainty: or, more precisely, awareness of uncertainty. The Dialectical Faith offers a spurious certainty when one embraces its critical consciousness. Embracing The Science—rather than the procedural humility of actual science—is just an updated version of spurious epistemic self-inflation.

With spread of the Dialectical Faith, post-Christian society is being punished—indeed reviled—for not offering a structure of salvation. Hence, secular salvation is sold on the basis that burning society down will mean the golden, transformative future emerges from its ashes.

The Dialectical Faith targets the Christianity-shaped hole in Western civilisation.² This civilisation has become decadent—in the straightforward sense of losing its animating sense of the sacred.³ Resilient social cohesion requires that folk act at crucial moments as devoted and not instrumentally rational agents. The epidemic of institutional cowardice stems from this decadence: from the lack of an order-preserving sense that there are things that simply should not be traded off against.

Such as, for example, sterilising minors.

Core and periphery

The Dialectical Faith is operationally effective as—beyond the core of true believers—there is a much larger periphery of people who buy into the status and social leverage strategies being offered.

The motivational core of the (critical) social justice push for social and institutional power has been evolving versions of Dialectical Faith in a transformational future. The template that Marx originally applied to economic processes has been re-applied again and again to other social domains: sex, sexuality, race, disability, etc … .

This motivated core generates a cluster of prestige opinions—opinions that mark one as being of the good and smart—and luxury beliefs—opinions with entry costs for those lacking relevant social, human and other capital. Opinions and beliefs are based on future-directed, and future-grounded intentions held to be morally ennobling. All use the social justice template for rhetorical, and increasingly institutional, dominance.

Critics have used polling data to claim that “luxury beliefs” have an evidence problem, as polling provides at best weak support for the hypothesis. This, however, misses the point.

Rob Henderson

did not come to the notion of luxury beliefs from polling, but by observation. What struck me with his concept is that I have seen the same dynamics play out among friends and acquaintances.

Rob Henderson invokes Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, but there’s a subtlety to his—and Veblen’s—analysis that people often miss. Yes, there are much more powerful indicators of elite status than beliefs: more powerful to those outside the elite. Both Veblen and Henderson’s observations are concerned with status indicators within the elite. As a British friend observed, Rob Henderson is the American Nancy Mitford.

Hence, luxury beliefs are about signalling in-group status rather than anything more general. Their role is to deny status to non-adherents. The point is to create a Club Virtue of the ostentatiously clever and moral. High-status folk tend to be more motivated to seek status.

Thus, polling is a weak test of the thesis. First, identifying the relevant elite is not just a matter of education and income. Both More in Common’s Hidden Tribes analysis and Rasmussen’s recent analysis of the urbanised elite use more useful polling identifiers than do conventional income-and-education polls. Second, the signals shift quite quickly. As Henderson points out in Troubled, seeing and lauding Hamilton went from a major elite identifier when tickets were around $US400 to very much not when it became accessible to hoi polloi.

Prestige opinions are used to signal moral and cognitive superiority, with a side-serving of spurious claims to risk—all that nonsense about being “subversive” or “stunning and brave”. These opinions are easy to adopt, however, and the more widely shared, the less useful they are as social signals, hence entry costs. These costs include not just keeping up with the constant shifts like new jargon (non-binary, Latinx). There can also be quite strong cohort effects, especially in a situation of elite over-production. There is real pressure to displace (older) incumbents.

Another entry cost is complexity of jargon (e.g. heteronormative). A third is ability to engage in rationalising acrobatics—as an academic friend notes “rationalising ridiculous shit”. Another is that any consequences are shifted onto others.

One reason for regular shifts in signalling is that luxury beliefs can be degraded, if their adverse consequences become too publicly salient for those engaged in such signalling. A lot of elite US university students are now discovering that their pro-Palestine virtue-signal is going to cost them their careers. BLM has become a corrupt joke. The surge in African-American homicides post George Floyd is too ghastly to ignore.

Given the shared incentive to curate information flows, the salience of adverse consequences among outsiders does not count. Rather, that improves a belief’s role as sorting signal. It’s when it blows up all over a group internally that things go awry. This is a notion of propriety that operates to sort, and coordinate, the in-group. Its value is greatest within the epistemic industries (academe, education, media, IT): another reason why polling is often not good evidence.

Around the core faith in the transformational future—via the rhetoric of social justice —a set of status-and-social-leverage strategies has evolved. Morally heroic narratives now part of the identity of the useful periphery have also evolved. Prestige opinions and luxury beliefs become assets to be defended. Indeed, they become ways of signalling loyalty to shared status and social leverage strategies.

This creates a protective social periphery of people who resist any attempt to block, or reverse, the colonising of institutions—and domination of public discourse—for that would mean abandoning a status strategy to which they are committed.

As noted in an excellent essay on Gamergate:

Policing one’s associations and politics is very important to the Social Justice ideology because it is inherently cliquish and seeks to promote its own interests above everyone else’s.

The operational core of this process of colonising institutions has been the development of the skills and connections that constitute dominion capital. Believers in the politics of the transformational future network to promote their status-generating conformities.

They also resist naming their belief system, apart from social justice. It’s presented as unalloyed moral righteousness. Any name risks reducing it to “just another point of view”. The point is precisely that it is no such a thing. It’s meant to be an Olympian viewpoint that judges all other viewpoints and so asserts authority over them.

We now have is the social-deconstruction surge coming out of Dialectical Faith academe blended with the entry-costs-urge of elite in-group status-mongering. Woke capital is but a small step further, especially given the role of elite universities in forming and maintaining the American elite.

That the Dialectical Faith is, and generates, toxic nonsense helps it generate in-group elite status markers. It creates entry costs and sharpens social differentiation between elite and non-elite. It does so—as Henderson documents in Troubled—at severe and increasing social cost. But the believers in the Dialectical Faith seek social dysfunction as part of their social alchemy theory—if you destroy existing society, the transformative future will emerge, like gold out of base metal. Meanwhile, members of the virtue-signalling elite don’t suffer the consequences of social dysfunction among the lower orders.

Well, not directly and not yet.

Advantages and disadvantages

The motivational faith + dominion capital based on future-grounded and justified intentions does have disadvantages for its adherents. It’s about moralised status and power based in performative subjectivity, so prone to purity spirals and callout culture.

As there’s no information from the future, the faith in the transformational future has no reality-test built into it. It does badly in areas that have to confront various physical and biological realities.

But those features are advantages in other milieus. The motivational and operational template propagates well in any field which lacks reality-tests. Errors about the world or making things work don’t land on decision-makers, a form of power without accountability. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between expressed views and actual behaviour—i.e. a lack of character tests—or where there’s strong selection based on approval rather than skill.

This is why the motivational and operational template has propagated itself so readily, and so throughly, through the epistemic industries: academe, education, media, entertainment, online IT. It’s also infected fields which seek to use the epistemic industries for their own advantages: in major corporate bureaucracies.

All this not only uses our evolved normative structures derived from our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. It also uses the ways we have evolved to game those normative structures in our own self-interest.

The moralised, even vicious, self-advancement of the practitioners of dominion capital is, most assuredly, using our evolutionary heritage. They are most definitely strategising adaptation-executors. We are just not required to take them at their own self-presentation.

Especially as—the weaker character and reality tests are—the less cost to propounders errors about the world have, so the greater the efficient self-deception. There’s a significant cognitive load to being deceptive and most people are much more persuasive when they have convinced themselves.

There is a great deal of stupidity-from-arrogance among the status- and social-leverage periphery, as folk who think themselves far too clever to be be manipulated are indeed useful fools who are being manipulated. That so much contemporary “quality” media sells itself by telling its audience they are so moral and clever for consuming its products provides a great deal of reinforcement for these patterns.

Simply blocking framings that enable one to see what is going on does much to frustrate understanding the patterns within and behind contemporary events. These patterns both encourage, and work off, the reality that we live in a civilisation of broken feedbacks. It is even better if one motivates people to curate their own framings and understandings so as to preserve an image of being of the good and smart.

It is precisely in social milieus where the efficient level of self-deception is high that status strategies can succeed most readily—and be selected for most strongly—without the proponents consciously seeing them as status and social leverage strategies, however obvious it may be to outsiders. They are not (consciously) seeking social leverage for themselves, but for their righteous embrace of an imagined future.

We have considerable capacity to be strangers to ourselves. That is a large reason why wisdom traditions exist.

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References

Books

Douglas Allen, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Books, 2012.

Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class, Forum, 2024.

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke Inc,: Inside the Social Justice Scam, Swift, 2021.

Stephen Smith, Pagans & Christian in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2018.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Penguin, 2023.

Articles, papers, book chapters, podcasts

Anderson, C., Hildreth, J. A. D., & Sharps, D. L., ‘The Possession of High Status Strengthens the Status Motive.’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (2020) 46(12), 1712-1723.

Scott Atran, ‘“Devoted Actor” versus “Rational Actor” Models for Understanding World Conflict,’ Briefing to the National Security Council, White House, Washington, DC, September 14, 2006. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6801978.pdf

Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, ‘Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution,’ Science, Vol. 317, 24 August 2007, 1039-1040.

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98.

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233.

Ryan Grim, ‘The Elephant in the Zoom,’ The Intercept, June 14 2022.

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://ssrn.com/abstract=980844.

Rob Henderson, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update,’ Quillette, 16 Nov 2019.

Jacob Mchangama, ‘The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws: A tenacious Soviet legacy,’ Hoover Institute, December 1, 2011. https://www.hoover.org/research/sordid-origin-hate-speech-laws.

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

Manvir Singh, ‘The cultural evolution of shamanism,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2017 July 6;41:e66.

Manvir Singh, Richard Wrangham & Luke Glowacki, ‘Self-Interest and the Design of Rules,’ Human Nature, August 2017.

Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta, ‘Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior,’ Evolutionary Anthropology, 12:264–274 (2003).

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021,  100-136.

J. Watanabe, J. and B. Smuts, ‘Explaining religion without explaining it away: Trust, truth, and the evolution of cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport’s “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” American Anthropologist, 1999, 101:98-112.

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25.

1. In other words, break up their locality-based social capital.

2. There is not a God-shaped hole in Western civilisation—it’s perfectly possible to have a resilience-promoting religious structure that is not monotheist. There is, however, a Christianity-shaped hole in Western countries.

3. The sacred is that against which trade-offs are anathematised, except for perhaps against other sacred values. The profane is the realm in which trade-offs are readily accepted.