Worshipping the Future
Worshipping the Future
The spiralling catastrophe of transformative politics
This is a series of essays dissecting the social mechanisms that have led to the strange and disorienting times in which we live. Helen commissioned them from (Lorenzo Warby) when it became clear that this Substack was going to be much more popular than expected.
Helen is a retired corporate lawyer so is in the position to maintain a free Substack without financial impost. If there is sufficient interest in the essays, she will explore print publication in book form, either through a mainstream publisher or an outfit like Unbounders.
Each essay will be published on a weekly basis.
Below this introduction is a publication schedule, although there may be some minor variations as responds to comments, clarifications, and criticisms. Remember, too, that Lorenzo is on Twitter @LorenzoFrom. I’m on the Bird Site @_HelenDale
Both of us will tweet each essay as it’s published. At the end of each essay, you’ll find a detailed bibliography and suggestions for further reading. Helen will also link each essay here as it’s published, so this (pinned) post serves as a “one-stop-shop” for interested readers.
While I’d love you to subscribe, do be aware this substack will always be kept free for everyone.
Of course, in addition to Lorenzo’s writing, Helen will also continue to write her own substack pieces regularly.
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There are endless critiques of ideas currently labelled “woke”. It can be fun, even informative, to trace the intellectual history of those ideas. To dissect their limitations, failings and falsities. This despite the fact that those to whom it is applied reject it, yet other folk can readily understand what is meant.
What is, again and again, lacking in critical explorations, no matter how clever, insightful, funny or witty they may be, is any serious sense of what we should do in response. The critiques neither contain nor imply any useful response, any useful action plan.
Relatedly, the sense of the underlying mechanisms that led to where we are is thin, weak, or absent. Key elements about how woke ideas became so socially pervasive are neither understood nor explained. Hence the critiques do not lead to any useful response.
If you do not understand mechanisms of how and the why, it is hard to develop, even articulate, how to do better. Moreover, without useful and substantive explication of the underlying mechanisms, it’s all too easy to fall prey to conspiratorial thinking.
We Homo sapiens love stories, we love narratives. If we do not have an accurate and understandable analysis of how things happen, it is easy to tell each other emotionally satisfying stories.
Conspiracies make emotionally satisfying stories: think grand tales of powerful malign villains and our own heroic rejection of them and their purposes.
So, this series of essays explores underlying mechanisms of how and why. They will then lead into, and conclude with, an action plan.
The basic thesis is that we are dealing far less with a set of ideas—these keep evolving and shifting—than a set of status-and-social-leverage strategies. Seeing the proponents as holding to a set of ideals with which compromise is possible—so they can be mollified by various concessions—feeds the strategy.
It is only if the status and social leverage strategies are rendered dysfunctional that processes of “wokification” can be halted or reversed. These essays will explore those strategies, and the mechanisms that make them effective, allowing readers to see how to respond usefully.
Essay 1: Social justice as social leverage
Is social justice advancing our evolution or gaming it?
Essay 2: Why does anyone believe in Marxism?
How to (murderously) not understand commerce.
Surplus drives history: states create surplus.
Essay 4: The paradox of polities
The state protects against social predators and is the most dangerous of social predators.
Essay 5: The deep appeal of Marxism
Imagining the future has power: past and present both pale in comparison
Essay 6: Updating the template
The ever-evolving template of transformational politics, from Marxism to the current thing
Essay 7: The Pravda media model
Informing you of the acceptable
Essay 8: Consciousness and coherence
We are far too conscious of being conscious
Essay 9: Self-deceptive rationalising moralisers
We game ourselves to better game others
Networking and signalling do not a conspiracy make
Essay 11: Choosing pseudo-realities
Sovereign choosers and other self-deceptions of Theory: I
Sovereign choosers and other self-deceptions of Theory: II
Essay 13: In the absence of reality-testing, bullshit wins
Too common or too costly—truth is a weak social signal
Essay 14: Feminisation has consequences: I
The evolutionary novelty of largely abandoning presumptive sex roles.
Essay 15: Feminisation has consequences: II
Women are not a finer form of Homo sapien
Essay 16: Feminisation has consequences: III
Shifting away from solidarity
Essay 17: A better future versus the transformational future
Degrading the bargaining politics of human flourishing: I
Essay 18: A common humanity or bust
Degrading the bargaining politics of human flourishing: II
Essay 19: Diversity Inclusion Equity as bureaucratic pathology
The functionality of dysfunction.
Essay 20: The social-imperial state
You pay an organisation to do what makes its resources go up: I
Essay 21: Creating social dysfunction
You pay an organisation to do what makes its resources go up: II
Essay 22: Beneficiaries of dysfunction
You pay an organisation to do what makes its resources go up: III
Essay 23: Migration as social-imperial project: I
You pay an organisation to do what makes its resources go up: IV
Essay 24: Migration as social-imperial project: II
You pay an organisation to do what makes its resources go up: V
Gaining leverage by replicating religion’s social role
Essay 26: A crusading clerisy: II
The status and social leverage strategies of a socially imperial class.
When denying reality is a great strategy.
Extending the feminist revolt against biology.
Normative flux and the end of a civilisational cycle.
Essay 30: Negating Achievement
Sucking joy and hope out of human history and taking humanity from stories
Essay 31: The Fourfold Attack on Democracy
Frustrating bargaining, bypassing voters, denigrating the citizenry, delegitimising what democracy has made.
Essay 32: The revolt of the Somewheres: I
National populism as a response to Anywhere arrogance.
Essay 33: The Revolt of the Somewheres: II
The politics of the institutionally alienated and culturally repressed.
Essay 34: Trapped by Philosophy’s worst features
Critical Constructivism—popularised as “wokery”—cuts off any route to what works
Essay 35: Trapped within Theory
The toxic consequences of worshipping the splendour in your head.
Essay 36: The Postcolonial trash needs to be taken out
Few famous books are as wretched as The Wretched of the Earth.
Essay 37: Winning through social dysfunction
A civilisation of broken feedbacks generates expanding social dysfunction: I
Essay 38: Making it a matter of who whom?
A civilisation of broken feedbacks generating expanding social dysfunction: II
A civilisation of broken feedbacks generating expanding social dysfunction: III.
Essay 40: Creating insular information bubbles
A civilisation of broken feedbacks generates expanding social dysfunction: IV.
Essay 41: The Bureaucratisation of Dysfunction
A civilisation of broken feedbacks generating expanding social dysfunction: V.
Essay 42: The progressive revolt against equality: I
Understanding the Dialectical Faith.
Essay 43: The progressive revolt against equality: II
Grading and balkanising the demos.
The use of skills and connections for social domination.
Essay 45: Dominion capital: II
The use of skills and connections for discourse domination.
Essay 46: Dominion capital: III
The use of skills and connections for cultural domination.
Essay 47: Dominion capital: IV
The use of skills and connections for institutional domination.
Essay 48: Corroding order by denying order
The disaster of the equalitarian thesis.
Essay 49: Capacity without character
Not selecting for success.
Essay 50: Delusions of technocracy
Theory creates destructive illusions of knowing.
Essay 51: Lack of character, avoiding reality, selecting for approval
The moral and intellectual decay of the universities.
Essay 52: An imperial ideology of aggression and cruelty
Destroying lives, reputations, careers, businesses.
Essay 53: Colonising metabolic decline
Nutrition guidelines as social dysfunction and bureaucratic aggrandisement.
Essay 54: Marxism as original sinning
The poisoned well from which so much intellectual decay arises.
Essay 55: The rise of skin-suit institutions
Being increasingly (mis)ruled by the flayed shells of once vibrant institutions.
Action plan
Derailing the transformational-future “social justice” status-and-social-leverage strategy.
 | A guest post by
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I know this is blasphemy and defeatism, and it won't stop me enjoying the exploration of ideas so kindly furnished, but I sometimes wonder whether the intellectual demolition of fashionable attitudes is no more than an interesting exercise and diversion for those of us with enquiring minds and a respect for truth. For it is - as we all well know - all but impossible to win an argument on its merits. No matter how logical, how amply provided with evidence, how orderly the thought, people with no understanding, no respect and no desire for truth will mob together and continue to behave badly, overcome by their emotions and sense of false righteousness, ad infinitum eternitamque
¡Por Dios, chico!
Let me carve a month out of my schedule to devote to this monster of a thesis ;-)
I look forward to every sentence.