A view on Moldbug from the other Red side

I mentioned in my previous post that I encountered an analysis of American politics about which I wanted a response from people who had lived under communism, such as my parents. That American analysis, a summary more like, is an hour long video and deserves a critique on its own terms (SOON(TM)). This is not that critique, it's simply a view from a different part of history that I thought would be interesting.

Since the video is rather long, I'll try to summarize the main points first, so that we know what we compare against. There are a few general historical and philosophical ideas in it, but for now the pertinent ones are more tightly concerned with the USA and how it is run.

The video's author, The Distributist, in summarizing Moldbug, claims political power in America has a strong informal component: it is not so much the governing party that really is in charge. Politics is downstream from culture, and culture is shaped by elites working in journalism, in universities, in film and so on. These elites do NOT operate in a conspiracy, nevertheless a consensus between them emerges about what is a correct idea. The exact mechanism of this emergence is somewhat underspecified, but it is influenced by shifting social factors such as technological progress.

The front-end of this informal power are the political parties: the Democrats, who are aligned with this emergent cultural consensus, and the Republicans, who for reasons of temperament or electoral constituency are not. The result is, in the analysis, an effectively single-party system composed of an "inner party" and a controlled opposition that slows things down but ultimately concedes to the cultural consensus.

Brief aside: the video does not mention Trump, because the blog posts it summarizes were written in 2007-2009. Feel free to treat Trump as an exception if you will; he certainly isn't playing the game like a McCain or a Romney would. Then again, I remember extreme Democrat anguish at the prospect of a Romney presidency back when that was a thing that could have happened, so I would urge some salt when entertaining opinions of Trumpian exceptionalism.

Anyway, what is dangerous in a political situation as described in the video is a tendency of the cultural consensus to divorce itself from reality, to the detriment of societal cohesion -- in other words, the society becomes "low-trust" and atomized -- and to the country itself eventually. The exact cause of this divorce is a left-wing, "anti-nomian" drive to relax societal rules and strictures, made desirable by human beings' natural desire for comfort and enabled by technological progress. This state of affairs however is deemed long-term unsustainable. Eventually, the underlying problems boil over, and collapse occurs.

I stress again, the video, while it does make some arguments that are intended as generally applicable, really only sets itself as discussing America, or possibly "The West". As such, it is important, for its narrative, to deprogram the listener, to make them understand that a democratic society as embodied by Western democracies is not really open, that public opinion is formed and political pressure exerted in a centralized fashion, even if the West does not operate in a totalitarian mode.

Now then, let's talk about Communist-era Eastern Europe.

--:--

I was somewhat surprised to learn from my parents that by the time the 80s started, Communism had relaxed its whip hand somewhat. Perhaps this was a result of Gorbachev's rapprochement of the West, or also, very likely, because any opposing political narrative that might have operated in Eastern Europe had been utterly crushed in the Stalinist purges of the 30s in Russia, and the 50s and 60s in the states that became its satellites then. It would not have been fun to be a dissident then, as that would result in torture, imprisonment, gulags, death and other such niceties associated with communist oppression.

In the 80s however, for speaking something contrary to the party line someone might find themselves sent to a position in some backwater town, or kept in house arrest, or out of a job -- by no means pleasant consequences, and you never knew when the party might decide it had spared the rod enough. Still, not quite the same as a Stalinist unpersoning.

However relaxed the whip hand though, the Party was very much in control of the culture. Politics may be downstream from culture in America, but the Soviets sent that river going the other way. My mother, being a highschool philosophy teacher, remembers being instructed to teach students against such dangerous ideas such as multi-party politics, and in general all teachers and professors would have to make sure to be ideologically correct. Officially, censorship wasn't done anymore in the 80s, but everyone knew this to be bullshit.

And when a sports commentator said something so apparently innocuous as suggesting that our country's football players should also play abroad some time to get better, he quickly found himself fired. Moldbug might, maybe correctly, say that the direction of US politics is decided in the press and academia, but in the Warsaw pact, the press and academia especially better follow the party line or else.

Depending on what you've heard of the Eastern bloc, you might be surprised to know there were political elections. But there was a curious thing about them.

Suppose there was an election for a representative of a city sector in the local council. You'd have a choice between a forty-year old male engineer, and another man who was about forty and worked in some engineering job. Or, maybe in the neighboring sector, your options were a thirty year old female teacher, and another teacher, a woman about thirty years old. You could, with some effort, tell the two candidates apart. Maybe.

It was a very clear system, in its way. Everyone knew where the power was, and the power was with the Party, though it was unhealthy to out that in a People's Republic, the people had no power.

And here's another thing that was different in the Eastern European context from the analysis of the US that I see in the video. Let us agree with Moldbug and The Distributist that politically left-wing means "anti-nomian", aiming towards the dissolution of rules and emancipation from strictures. I think we can also agree that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were left-wing. 

However, Communism was anything but anti-nomian. It was, in fact, very "pro-nomian" indeed.

Here's a sample of what was criminalized, at various times and places but often right up until the fall of Communism: adultery, abortion, homosexuality. Trans-rights? I don't think they're a thing in China at the moment, and I strongly suspect they wouldn't have been in any Communist country, had its regime survived the 80s. I chose these examples because I know The Distributist is Catholic, and when he speaks of societal stricture relaxation, he means these kinds of departures from traditional norms. Well, those traditional norms were very much in force under Communism, even as religion was persecuted.

Right until today, countries from Eastern Europe have a reputation for being more "conservative" than their Western EU partners. They don't want immigrants, certainly not Muslim ones. Bad opinions on homosexuality are not the professional and social death sentence they would be in Berkeley; Hungary even banned gender studies departments. This is not some reaction against excessive relaxation under Communism, rather it's what survives of the strongly pro-nomian Communist tradition. Sure, the Soviet Union was infamous in the West for its response to complaints of human rights violations -- "but you Americans lynch black people". Everyone knew this was not the USSR showing genuine support for any kind of Civil Rights movement. The only reason black people weren't lynched in the USSR is because black people were thin on the ground in Mother Russia.

--:-:--

Still, now that the differences are out of the way, some similarities emerge. The first is a bit of a paradox, perhaps: the political regime may have been pro-nomian, but the society was low trust.

My father told me that workers in neighboring factories would have agreements with each other. You might have, say, workers from a battery factory carrying out t-shirts, while workers from the textiles over the fence would carry out batteries. The guardsmen of the battery factory were only told to prevent workers from leaving with batteries, you see.

Yeah, I have a feeling the guards were in on this system too. Probably made some cash on the side.

One time, there was this rule that only certain number plates were allowed on the road one day, and the other numbers the next. As it happened, one day my father had nowhere to go but a neighbor did, so they swapped number plates so the neighbor could use his car in a day when, technically, he shouldn't have.

This, and other instances of rule-bending, or outright breaking, might make you compare the society of Communism to a class of rowdy children having each other's backs against a way too strict teacher. Don't picture anything too jolly though. There is such a thing as venal sins, such as absconding with an extra t-shirt, and a graver sin of putting wrongthink into words. Back then, perhaps, you could trust a neighbor, but even then, you don't want to be heard complaining. Someone might listen, and tell on the teacher, and nobody wanted even the relaxed Communist whip of the 80s to fall on their own backs.

So, about some things, people just couldn't speak plainly. Here's a typical joke from the era: these new blocks of flats, they're made of a very modern material called micro-concrete. What's micro-concrete you ask? Well, 90% concrete, and 10% microphones.

I mean, nothing wrong has been said. Everyone knew the secret police might be listening, the secret police knew people knew, and besides, what's the problem in saying the secret police is doing its job? Plausible deniability, for saying what you really wanted to say, that you could not be honest.

 --:-:-:--

What then of the collapse that Moldbug, and The Distributist, fear could happen when a cultural consensus, lulled by its own power, disappears up its own ass? Well, that's pretty much what happened in Eastern Europe. Of course, the collapse wasn't sudden. The cracks were there from the beginning, it just took a while for the whole edifice to burst.

From very early on it was clear the Communist regime was not going to let reality stay in the way of its designs. Among the many disasters of soviet scientific agriculture, I'll give the example of Lysenkoism. This was, allegedly, a scientific theory that rejected natural selection and heredity ("bourgeois pseudosciences") in the favor of a resurrected Lamarckism and the idea that, through adaptation to an environment, individual organisms could inflict significant changes unto themselves.

I suppose it's a matter of nuance; maybe that idea seems reasonable to you. It did not seem reasonable to my father when he was a child and had to learn it in school. He asked, how would an acorn become a willow if you planted it in a swamp? If anything, it's still going to come out an oak.

Funnily enough, he doesn't say he met with any consequences for that. Young children, at least, were allowed to be stupid before they learnt the correct things to say.

But oaks indeed don't turn into willows, and the nature of things is what it is. We can speculate now why Lysenkoism was popular in Stalin's Russia. Perhaps it was ideologically aligned to the idea of a New Man, of a new nature more aligned to Communism. Or, just as likely, it was all simply a cynical political game of Lysenko earning favor with Stalin at the expense of his rivals. Ideology or political game, who cares. Reality would not stand in the way in any case.

A similar thing happened with cybernetics, though here I'm even less sure why. In any case, by deeming it a "bourgeois pseudo-science", the Soviet Union, and the states in its orbit, doomed themselves to always lag behind America in terms of microelectronics and computer technology. 

In some sense, maybe that was a good thing. My father speculates that, where Russian engineers surpassed their American counterparts such as in the development of the first supercavitation torpedo or the multicombustion engine RD170, it was because they didn't have computerized simulations to reach to and had to build more prototypes. This let them push beyond what models would otherwise have told them. On the net though, missing out on the computer revolution can't have helped. If the mythical Russian Hackers remain the bane of Democrat nightmares still, this has less to do with Russians ever being good at building computers, and more with Russian mathematicians remaining world-class all throughout Communist times.

The above is just to give you a taste of what happens when science becomes political. They might seem the complaints of a geek, but I'll argue in my next Moldbug-inspired post why they are in fact more fundamental than they at first might seem.

 Ultimately though, a more proximate cause of the failure of Communism was it could not achieve prosperity. Its planned economy was utterly surpassed by the free market of the West, which is now taken as proof that planned economies just don't work. At least, it's a good data point in support of that statement.

I for one don't quite know that this evidence is sufficient. Communism might be good for ants, the saying goes, and maybe a well run planned economy is possible -- just not with people in charge. I can imagine that, in principle, with enough data, correct algorithms and computation, one might plan an economy fairly well. But that's not what actually happened when decisions were made. All of a sudden more or less hidden variables were thrown in the mix, such as buttressing the Dear Leader's ego by achieving the highest steel production in the world, or to have a bigger hydroelectric plant than the neighbor. It doesn't matter that the steel won't be needed and thus won't generate revenue. It doesn't matter what resources are lost, for little return, into megalomaniacal constructions. Are you willing to say so to Dear Leader's face?

And it was this, more than anything else, that caused the civilizational collapse we saw in the late 80s/early 90s. In more or less the way Moldbug and The Distributist described it, a ruling elite, unchallenged, became so enamored by itself and its ideas that it brought ruin on its nations, and sometimes personal ruin on itself.

--:-:-:-:--

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I suppose a tempting lesson to take from Communism's collapse is that we need to keep ourselves honest in our political ideologies. We need to take reality as it is into account and rule our nations accordingly.

But perhaps a truer, and more depressing lesson is that we cannot keep ourselves honest. Are you sure all your ideas are correct? If you were king of the world, would you really let them be challenged? Would your successor? Being wrong, or rather, being told you are wrong is unpleasant. Why should you put up with that, when you rule the world? Especially when your ideas work, or seem to, and failure will happen many years away, maybe even once you're dead?

Still, though perfect virtue is impossible and death inevitable, what else can we do, but try to follow the path we see as true? Futile though it is, long term, all we can hope for is to keep ourselves honest. 

Enjoy the safety of the village. Do not forget the forest beyond its walls.