Well, tackling Nietzsche at all takes some moxie. Figuring out what is good and what isn't will always be a matter of dispute; smart as he was, he simply wasn't right about everything. He did not achieve the revaluation of all values. It is also why you see him being regarded fondly in wildly divergent intellectual spheres and still treated as a pariah amongst the conventional.
Why 'Guernsey'? All I can think of is pieces that cause leftieloons to have a cow, but since Bari and Co. are STILL very much crazed lefties... Cream possibly, but rather obscure whatever. Nevermind; a high calibre piece as per. I might comment further when I feel better; decidedly under the weather today.
I enjoy reading these essays. But that joy is undermined by having to slog through an unnecessarily long preface.
Now I don't intend for my first comment here to come off as impolite, but it is unpleasant to have to go through a bunch of extra text just to get to the meat of the essay.
I’ve got mine, slam shut the door behind me. Keep out the riff raff!
“Western societies are now burdened by institutional overhang from the Emancipation Sequence.”
The mistake was trying to share power. You can share rights under law (dangerous but possible) you cannot share power. This is the madness of Emancipation in any sequence.
Power must be earned, and by risk and proof of commitment- which was always a matter of risking life until Women got the vote. Blacks in America got full equality because of the 20th century’s wars, not Civil Rights.
Civil Rights was a TV show.
But power was shared with those who risking nothing understood nothing... and we’ve represented ourselves into the Polish Diet without the Hussars...
Actually no one’s in charge under any terms. Not here 🇺🇸.
Also - the Sequentially Emancipated can’t run or operate ANYTHING, for you see you wish to have the benefits of what White Men built be it machines, laws, safety, governance, the High Trust society... without the Heterosexual Patriarchal White Males. As it happens NONE of the Emancipated- with the one and done exception of White Male Homosexuals (no children, see?) can run, govern, operate, law, police any of it; because above all there’s no trust.
The last person anyone in Asia would trust of course is their siblings, which rules out the Wright Brothers.
No women can’t with extraordinarily rare exceptions do men’s work- I mean mentally, not physically. Nor can women be trusted as men.
Nor is intelligence without trust or the ability to be a man and speak the true answer a substitute for we who may be passing or we who may yet rally.
You cannot share power as it turns out, perhaps rights, absolutely not power.
The issue of technical incompetence at ANYTHING follows... “I’m not technical..let me bridge a (male) colleague..”
^^That’s The World’s Biggest and most important Clearing House .^^^.
You want our world we run things, merit will be hand picked up, which is how WE did it.
Our secret is Trust, a secret the rest of you will never understand.
You want “Emancipation” in sequence? The sequence was just demonstrated yet again 10.7.
Now that’s it.
That’s all they’ve got to offer.
That’s the “Global South’s” offer, it’s not ever been anything else.
The attack on Gaza was completely in line with decolonization. The same thing happened everywhere in Asia and Africa. Now it’s happening in our countries because of open borders.
And over time the electronic toys will stop working, the networks of power and communications and water first, every reiteration of this in history and certainly “decolonization” has similar results. China? Not without us.
The Chinese can’t get a team together, no trust.
The Japanese would be different if they weren’t dying out.
Even then...
If you want our world we’re not just in it, but in our lands in charge. If not... we perish like Japan perhaps... or perhaps not us... perhaps something else entirely.
But calling this sequence “Overhang” is absurd.
That’s “I got mine, shut the door.”
You shut it, we can’t, we’re not allowed. You wanted the seat at the table, earn it.
The answer is not to be found in representative anything, but in men who do things taking charge...
And they can be in America at least- and few other places- men of any “race”* provided they prove loyalty to the nation first.
Women are welcome- to help.
Now if you don’t like candor, I won’t apologize, but I’ll offer that it’s an election year, you’ll not want for the opposite of candor.
*race never worked in America, even before we got here, it’s an artificial 19th century cope for Anglo guilt. Genetics tears away what flimsy threads it had...
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Well written and well researched, it is utterly depressing just how dysfunctional everything has become and how much any attempts to moderate and remedy all of society's problems are resisted. But one should keep on living, and persist in the face of what is happening no matter what.
Not as such, because it is my inferences from looking at the patterns across the various regions that produced non-autocratic regimes (that we have reasonable detail on).
“The addition of diversity officers... selects against good character.”
Explicitly so. Consider, for instance, the condemnation of the “bourgeois virtues” (honesty, perseverance, punctuality, thrift, tolerance, hard work, civility) as examples of whiteness and white supremacy. Consider the bullying of minority students who do well in school because they’re “acting white.”
Before the Civil War, most Southern states had laws against teaching slaves how to read. Slave owners understood that knowledge is power. If nothing else, they didn’t want literate slaves who could pass notes between plantations and potentially coordinate revolts.
Today, it’s not slave owners keeping blacks from learning, but other blacks. They understand that victimhood, rather than knowledge, is the way to power in today’s dysfunctional world.
“Equal rights also failed to generate equal outcomes, which has given motivating appeal—and coordinating power—to Hermetic claims of special knowledge about “invisible systems” of oppression.”
Exactly. Progressives had a free hand to build America’s welfare state and the results were disastrous. Before LBJ’s Great Society programs went into effect, the poverty rate had been steadily declining among all ethnicities. Some $25 trillion later, the poverty rate remains about where it was when the programs began. The bottom quintile’s employment rate dropped from about two-thirds to one-third. Fatherlessness, along with its attendant ills (increased dropout rates, drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, crime, suicide), has exploded.
Rather than admitting that their policies are counterproductive, the Left has doubled down with predictable results in “blue” cities and states. To explain their unbroken record of failure, the Left now declares that the United States is far more racist and evil than even they had imagined. The failure of their reforms is proof that the country can’t be reformed and must be burned to the ground and replaced.
It's clear a lot of people who supported and campaigned for civil rights--at least in the US--thought the removal of legal impediments and equality of opportunity would lead to equality of outcomes between groups.
A lot of the current nonsense represents a deeply stupid attempt to reckon with the reality that it hasn't.
I don’t think that the dysfunction is a consequence of the establishment and enforcement of equal rights. I think the problem stems from imposing unequal rights in an attempt to manufacture equal outcomes - transferring wealth, granting special privileges, and alleviating select minority groups of the need to bear the consequences of their own actions.
The only way to make people equal is to equally immiserate them. As the comment is made about '1984' -- it isn't a how-to book, the same has to be said about 'Harrison Bergeron'. Cautionary tales seem to be much too subtle for modern minds.
Wokeness is a parasite that will die once it achieves its goal of killing the classical liberal system that is its host. The Left either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand that they can't survive the revolution they so ardently desire. One thing that masks this fact is that their policies, while making things generally worse, improve the statistics of blue cities and states in the short run. As taxes and regulations make life more difficult for lower and middle-income citizens, people on the margin are forced further and further away. This migration tends to increase the mean wealth, income, and educational test scores of the remnant. The Left points to these statistics as proof that their policies work and work well. In the long run, however, no polity can survive the exodus of the those who keep the infrastructure working – the “little people” who take out the garbage and keep the lights on.
It occurs to me that the Emancipation Sequence is itself a problem, not merely that it didn't know when to stop. After all, no good thing ever knows when it ceases to be a good thing. Once good, always good - right? Perfectly Manichean.
It is also the logical extension of Enlightenment principles. There is in reality a vast difference between saying you and I are equal, and saying you and I are equal before the law. In the latter formulation, we are seen as equals not by each other, but by all parties but ourselves, and because we are in a conflict of some type that the law is to resolve. That is a very circumspect equality. The Declaration of Independence does not say we are equal in that small regard, and like the rhetorical sleight of hand blaming George III for acts of Parliament, it isn't entirely honest. The Emancipation Sequence suffers from that same defect - it cannot offer true equality between people but that is what it promises.
Small wonder then that we should come to a time where the returns have diminished to the point of being negative rather than merely approaching zero.
Well again, this is a subtlety when grasping nuance has become a lost art. Equality has become a fetish - which fits with our other atavistic behaviors. Defenders of the old liberalism - and they are on the defense - can't rely on the average person to mentally do things above average. If there is a trick to pull here, it is going to be figuring out how to transcend the current beliefs (in such a way that what was old will seem new - and hence better, even though it isn't).
Can someone help? I cannot open essays 42 onwards. They’re not linked on my screen. Id really like to read the rest and discover Lorenzo’s Action Plan.
They haven't been published yet! I publish them on average about once a week. There will be a new one next week, as well as a Chatham House zoom call, for which you are now eligible!
This Substack grew organically without a lot of planning. I only turned on paid subscriptions a year ago and only got serious about it in September last year, so if you're confused, it's probably my fault!
"pity for real or perceived suffering"
Oh does Nietzsche apply a blowtorch to that.
https://www.glibertarians.com/2023/12/nietzsche-and-thoughts-on-suffering/
Well, tackling Nietzsche at all takes some moxie. Figuring out what is good and what isn't will always be a matter of dispute; smart as he was, he simply wasn't right about everything. He did not achieve the revaluation of all values. It is also why you see him being regarded fondly in wildly divergent intellectual spheres and still treated as a pariah amongst the conventional.
Why 'Guernsey'? All I can think of is pieces that cause leftieloons to have a cow, but since Bari and Co. are STILL very much crazed lefties... Cream possibly, but rather obscure whatever. Nevermind; a high calibre piece as per. I might comment further when I feel better; decidedly under the weather today.
Best wishes on feeling better.
We definitely need to bring back “have a cow”; it’s been a minute since I’ve heard that..
I enjoy reading these essays. But that joy is undermined by having to slog through an unnecessarily long preface.
Now I don't intend for my first comment here to come off as impolite, but it is unpleasant to have to go through a bunch of extra text just to get to the meat of the essay.
That is mainly for newcomers and it is italicised to separate it out.
Overhang?
I’ve got mine, slam shut the door behind me. Keep out the riff raff!
“Western societies are now burdened by institutional overhang from the Emancipation Sequence.”
The mistake was trying to share power. You can share rights under law (dangerous but possible) you cannot share power. This is the madness of Emancipation in any sequence.
Power must be earned, and by risk and proof of commitment- which was always a matter of risking life until Women got the vote. Blacks in America got full equality because of the 20th century’s wars, not Civil Rights.
Civil Rights was a TV show.
But power was shared with those who risking nothing understood nothing... and we’ve represented ourselves into the Polish Diet without the Hussars...
Actually no one’s in charge under any terms. Not here 🇺🇸.
Also - the Sequentially Emancipated can’t run or operate ANYTHING, for you see you wish to have the benefits of what White Men built be it machines, laws, safety, governance, the High Trust society... without the Heterosexual Patriarchal White Males. As it happens NONE of the Emancipated- with the one and done exception of White Male Homosexuals (no children, see?) can run, govern, operate, law, police any of it; because above all there’s no trust.
The last person anyone in Asia would trust of course is their siblings, which rules out the Wright Brothers.
No women can’t with extraordinarily rare exceptions do men’s work- I mean mentally, not physically. Nor can women be trusted as men.
Nor is intelligence without trust or the ability to be a man and speak the true answer a substitute for we who may be passing or we who may yet rally.
You cannot share power as it turns out, perhaps rights, absolutely not power.
The issue of technical incompetence at ANYTHING follows... “I’m not technical..let me bridge a (male) colleague..”
^^That’s The World’s Biggest and most important Clearing House .^^^.
Enjoy Retirement.
🤣
Yes.
It’s a choice.
Not ala carte menu.
Choose.
You want our world we run things, merit will be hand picked up, which is how WE did it.
Our secret is Trust, a secret the rest of you will never understand.
You want “Emancipation” in sequence? The sequence was just demonstrated yet again 10.7.
Now that’s it.
That’s all they’ve got to offer.
That’s the “Global South’s” offer, it’s not ever been anything else.
The attack on Gaza was completely in line with decolonization. The same thing happened everywhere in Asia and Africa. Now it’s happening in our countries because of open borders.
And over time the electronic toys will stop working, the networks of power and communications and water first, every reiteration of this in history and certainly “decolonization” has similar results. China? Not without us.
The Chinese can’t get a team together, no trust.
The Japanese would be different if they weren’t dying out.
Even then...
If you want our world we’re not just in it, but in our lands in charge. If not... we perish like Japan perhaps... or perhaps not us... perhaps something else entirely.
But calling this sequence “Overhang” is absurd.
That’s “I got mine, shut the door.”
You shut it, we can’t, we’re not allowed. You wanted the seat at the table, earn it.
You took our chair?
Well, keep it.
Good points. Few understand this.
I absolutely love Warby’s essays. There are a lot of great Substacks that are informative, but these are truly educational.
The answer is not to be found in representative anything, but in men who do things taking charge...
And they can be in America at least- and few other places- men of any “race”* provided they prove loyalty to the nation first.
Women are welcome- to help.
Now if you don’t like candor, I won’t apologize, but I’ll offer that it’s an election year, you’ll not want for the opposite of candor.
*race never worked in America, even before we got here, it’s an artificial 19th century cope for Anglo guilt. Genetics tears away what flimsy threads it had...
Race was tied to eugenics and what a misfortune it was for it to get decoupled.
The world we live in now is actively trying to eliminate whites who don’t have Ivy League degrees. So let’s work from reality, not wishful thinking.
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”' -- Robert Heinlein
This is true
Well written and well researched, it is utterly depressing just how dysfunctional everything has become and how much any attempts to moderate and remedy all of society's problems are resisted. But one should keep on living, and persist in the face of what is happening no matter what.
Is there further reading on the 3 causes of non-autocratic state failure?
Not as such, because it is my inferences from looking at the patterns across the various regions that produced non-autocratic regimes (that we have reasonable detail on).
I discuss the anti-resilient features of bureaucracy here. It has a moderately comprehensive “good start” bibliography. https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/downward-resilience
Brilliant stuff
“The addition of diversity officers... selects against good character.”
Explicitly so. Consider, for instance, the condemnation of the “bourgeois virtues” (honesty, perseverance, punctuality, thrift, tolerance, hard work, civility) as examples of whiteness and white supremacy. Consider the bullying of minority students who do well in school because they’re “acting white.”
Before the Civil War, most Southern states had laws against teaching slaves how to read. Slave owners understood that knowledge is power. If nothing else, they didn’t want literate slaves who could pass notes between plantations and potentially coordinate revolts.
Today, it’s not slave owners keeping blacks from learning, but other blacks. They understand that victimhood, rather than knowledge, is the way to power in today’s dysfunctional world.
“Equal rights also failed to generate equal outcomes, which has given motivating appeal—and coordinating power—to Hermetic claims of special knowledge about “invisible systems” of oppression.”
Exactly. Progressives had a free hand to build America’s welfare state and the results were disastrous. Before LBJ’s Great Society programs went into effect, the poverty rate had been steadily declining among all ethnicities. Some $25 trillion later, the poverty rate remains about where it was when the programs began. The bottom quintile’s employment rate dropped from about two-thirds to one-third. Fatherlessness, along with its attendant ills (increased dropout rates, drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, crime, suicide), has exploded.
Rather than admitting that their policies are counterproductive, the Left has doubled down with predictable results in “blue” cities and states. To explain their unbroken record of failure, the Left now declares that the United States is far more racist and evil than even they had imagined. The failure of their reforms is proof that the country can’t be reformed and must be burned to the ground and replaced.
It's clear a lot of people who supported and campaigned for civil rights--at least in the US--thought the removal of legal impediments and equality of opportunity would lead to equality of outcomes between groups.
A lot of the current nonsense represents a deeply stupid attempt to reckon with the reality that it hasn't.
I don’t think that the dysfunction is a consequence of the establishment and enforcement of equal rights. I think the problem stems from imposing unequal rights in an attempt to manufacture equal outcomes - transferring wealth, granting special privileges, and alleviating select minority groups of the need to bear the consequences of their own actions.
The only way to make people equal is to equally immiserate them. As the comment is made about '1984' -- it isn't a how-to book, the same has to be said about 'Harrison Bergeron'. Cautionary tales seem to be much too subtle for modern minds.
According to a recent FEE article, “By 2019, 96% of Venezuelans were living in poverty, and 79% were living in extreme poverty...” Equality achieved!
https://fee.org/articles/will-america-choose-javier-milei-or-hugo-chavez/
Wokeness is a parasite that will die once it achieves its goal of killing the classical liberal system that is its host. The Left either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand that they can't survive the revolution they so ardently desire. One thing that masks this fact is that their policies, while making things generally worse, improve the statistics of blue cities and states in the short run. As taxes and regulations make life more difficult for lower and middle-income citizens, people on the margin are forced further and further away. This migration tends to increase the mean wealth, income, and educational test scores of the remnant. The Left points to these statistics as proof that their policies work and work well. In the long run, however, no polity can survive the exodus of the those who keep the infrastructure working – the “little people” who take out the garbage and keep the lights on.
It occurs to me that the Emancipation Sequence is itself a problem, not merely that it didn't know when to stop. After all, no good thing ever knows when it ceases to be a good thing. Once good, always good - right? Perfectly Manichean.
It is also the logical extension of Enlightenment principles. There is in reality a vast difference between saying you and I are equal, and saying you and I are equal before the law. In the latter formulation, we are seen as equals not by each other, but by all parties but ourselves, and because we are in a conflict of some type that the law is to resolve. That is a very circumspect equality. The Declaration of Independence does not say we are equal in that small regard, and like the rhetorical sleight of hand blaming George III for acts of Parliament, it isn't entirely honest. The Emancipation Sequence suffers from that same defect - it cannot offer true equality between people but that is what it promises.
Small wonder then that we should come to a time where the returns have diminished to the point of being negative rather than merely approaching zero.
Yes, equality in process is very different even from equality of opportunity (sorry, your family is going to matter) let alone equality of outcome.
Well again, this is a subtlety when grasping nuance has become a lost art. Equality has become a fetish - which fits with our other atavistic behaviors. Defenders of the old liberalism - and they are on the defense - can't rely on the average person to mentally do things above average. If there is a trick to pull here, it is going to be figuring out how to transcend the current beliefs (in such a way that what was old will seem new - and hence better, even though it isn't).
Helen - Lorenzo
Desire for power well known.
Recalls this ancient example . . .
“ Give the word that these two sons of mine may sit down, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your Kingdom .’’
Yep, this family wants political power.
What did the teacher (king) respond?
“The greatest among you should be your slave.’’
Closer to a business model. Serve the people. They don’t serve you.
I’m serving people, giving my life for them.
Not a popular doctrine.
Religious, political, scientific, academic authority wants to require others to serve them.
Not what this famous teacher required.
Thanks
Clay
Can someone help? I cannot open essays 42 onwards. They’re not linked on my screen. Id really like to read the rest and discover Lorenzo’s Action Plan.
They haven't been published yet! I publish them on average about once a week. There will be a new one next week, as well as a Chatham House zoom call, for which you are now eligible!
Thank you. Bit of a duh!
This Substack grew organically without a lot of planning. I only turned on paid subscriptions a year ago and only got serious about it in September last year, so if you're confused, it's probably my fault!