live free or live resentfully

I’ve seen Him in a hundred camps They’ve built an altar in the damps And where the chill of evening passes through ya I’ve read his righteous sentence in The lights that flare both bright and dim His day comes, glory glory hallelujah! Hallelujah, hallelujah Hallelujah, hallelu..uu uu uu…ujah

I read a Gospel writ in steel God sees how you with sinners deal And as you do to them, His grace will do ya Let hero born of woman crush The serpent hidden in the brush God’s marching, glory glory hallelujah! Hallelujah, hallelujah Hallelujah, hallelu..uu uu uu…ujah

He’s sounded forth the trumpet call That never knows retreat at all And from His judgment seat He’s gonna view ya Be swift my soul his call to meet Be jubilant, my legs and feet God’s marching, glory glory hallelujah! Hallelujah, hallelujah Hallelujah, hallelu..uu uu uu…ujah

The baffled king composing Hallelujah! The baffled king composing Hallelujah! The baffled king composing Hallelujah! He just kept playing on!

Your faith in God was strong and yet you felt you needed proof You saw the moonbeams dancing as she bathed upon the roof She tied you to a kitchen chair, she cut your hair, and - oof! She drew it from your lips!

From your lips the Hallelujah! From your lips the Hallelujah! From your lips the Hallelujah! She drew it from your lips!

You say that I have tried to take the Name of God in vain But really to be honest I don’t even know the Name A blaze of light in every word, I guess they’re all the same. It doesn’t matter which!

The holy or the broken Hallelujah! The holy or the broken Hallelujah! The holy or the broken Hallelujah! It doesn’t matter which!

It might not have been much, but still I tried to do my best And even though it all went wrong, I feel that I’ve been blessed And if I meet the Lord of Song when I am laid to rest That’s all I’ll have to say!

Let’s call the thing this represents ‘the System’, which includes not only formal institutions but networks of informal social pressure. Obviously, there is such a thing that creates pressures towards more or less these major elements. In school you are socialized, through a formal job you contribute to society and through family you perpetuate the cycle. The System, in turn offers reasonable predictability and the means of your survival and comfort.

There are two main issues with this particular representation.

First, there really is only a handful of things that make a person’s life meaningful, and almost all fall under broad notions of ‘family’ or ‘work’. I mean, try to imagine what that bold individualist who gets off the conveyor belt was going to do instead. How many worthy options are there, really?

But more importantly, there’s this notion that the System would eliminate anyone who deviates, which is illustrative of a curious inversion that tends to happen in this sort of thinking. The System, by and large, does not eliminate those who deviate. It’s actually remarkably flexible in that sense. Instead, to the extent that you deviate, you step out of the system’s protective bubble and become responsible for pursuing survival, comfort and meaning at your own risk.

Is anyone going to stop you if you fuck off to become a beach bum? Is there some credible impediment to your moving to a cabin in the woods? Is anyone forcing you to get a job, get married, have kids? “There’s social pressure!” What, you’re an uncompromising iconoclast who can’t stand a few disapproving stares from your aunt at Thanksgiving dinner? “The System coerces me into having a job by withholding the things I need to survive if I don’t!” Yeah, no shit, numbnuts. The means of your survival depends on other people doing their jobs (though, again, no one’s stopping you from fucking off to the woods and hunting your own food). But note how the gif gets it exactly backwards: the complaint here is not that the System will kill you if you step out of line, it’s that the System will fail to provide for you. The implicit argument speaks in favor of expanding the System, giving it more power over your life, not less.

(content warning: horror)

The Wikipedia article on kallkiantzaroi is a gift that keeps on giving:

Q: What are kallikantzaroi? A: According to Greek folklore, they are  malevolent black Christmas goblins.

Q: Christmas goblins? A: Yes. 353 days out of the year, they live deep underground, sawing at the world tree, so that it will collapse and destroy the world. But on the twelve days of Christmas they are given power to walk upon the surface. They forget about the tree, run out, cause mayhem, and kill people. Then on Epiphany (January 6th), they are banished from the sunlight and return to the black depths beneath the earth. They find the world-tree has recovered in their absence and are forced to spend another year trying to saw it down.

Q: Where do kallikantzaroi come from? A: Babies born between December 25 and January 6, when they reach adulthood, will turn into kallikantzaroi. At some point, on a black night during the Christmas season, the transformation will happen, they will shift into their new form, and try to kill their family and friends.

Q: Wait, I was born between December 25 and January 6! How do I avoid this terrible fate? A: Your mother should have placed garlic in your hair, then singed your toenails in fire until they were black.

Q: What if she didn’t? A: I hope you like black depths beneath the earth and sawing.

Q: How can I protect my house against kallikantzaroi during the Christmas season? A: Place a collander on your doorstep. The kallikantzaroi will try to count the number of holes in your collander. But because three is a holy number and they are demons born of black magic, they will not be able to count past two, and they will have to keep trying again and again until they give up and go away.

Q: What if I encounter a kallikantzaros when travelling outside the home? A: The kallikantzaros will ask you seemingly ordinary questions. To survive, you must include the word “black” in your answer to every question.

Q: Really? That’s it? A: Yes. By some sort of contractual obligation, if you always include the word “black” in your answer to every question you are asked, the kallikantzaros must let you survive.

Q: Can I just say a regular answer and add something like “and in case you’re a kallikantzaros, black”? A: This will prevent you from getting killed but is widely considered a black mark on your aesthetics. Try to put a little bit of effort into it.

I’m mostly against doing this.

First, I might be wrong about Trump. But even if I’m right, there were many other people who were aggressive and unpopular during their own time but who as far as I can tell ended up being a net positive to their movements. FDR and Reagan seem like good examples here. I don’t think anyone is very good at predicting who will be in this category and who will be in the more Trump-ish category.

Second, even if Trump has caused a 5 pp shift away from populist attitudes and this was predictable beforehand, I think you would have to weight this against all the other potential effects of him being in power. Before his election, it wasn’t really clear if he was restrained enough not to start a great power war. Now that he’s demonstrated a tendency to concentrate on tweeting and not personally make major foreign policy decisions I’m a little less concerned; maybe there are people who could have predicted this beforehand, but I couldn’t. Progressives should also be concerned about his two Supreme Court appointments, his climate policy, et cetera. Even if I’m 100% right that Trump caused populism to lose support in a way other people wouldn’t, and even if this change is lasting, it has to be balanced against both his expected and his real downsides.

Third, making decisions like this creates weird incentives; if some candidates know you’re supporting the worst person with an ideology, in order to discredit that ideology, they will try to get worse.

I think these are important enough points that I would be very reluctant to try to make something like this happen strategically.

For a counterpoint, Nick Land believes the winning conservative strategy is to try to never win the presidency, then blame the (liberal) president for everything - see http://www.xenosystems.net/popcorn-activism/ . I think this could work, but only because Nick doesn’t really care about policy in a normal way and is just trying to maximize conservative popularity and/or lulz.

So it’s not actually as problematic to kick away the ladder of religion once you’ve climbed it and reached the quasi-utilitarian heights of modernity as some would have you believe. But things become trickier when human nature is no longer held constant. Genetic engineering, cyborg brain implants, AI all raise ethical questions that can’t be answered simply by asking questions about what sort of society works best for humans. You’re now outside those bounds. You can, in a Yudkowsky style, argue that the development of post-humanity should be approached with the aim of further refining our current values, which is fine insofar as it goes, although it’s almost impossible to imagine that our current values don’t radically underdetermine the possible paths we could take. And human values are inconsistent, so you can’t avoid judgment calls when deciding between them. But it’s perhaps at least not totally wrong.

It becomes even trickier if you come to the conclusion that (some) human values are fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the universe. Not just in terms of their correctness, but in terms of their implications for the long-term survival of humanity as well. Perhaps not all values can be reworked in the way that I described natural rights being reworked above. Some values may just be Bad, assuming you value consistency and/or sustainability. And if it’s impossible to be a human being who is both fully informed about the nature of the world and happy about it, then the same could well be true of posthuman beings as well, at least if there is no radical rupture between our values and theirs. And if these beliefs are so incorrect, surely they have to go sooner or later. “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” (I’m obviously treating truth as some sort of meta-value which can constrain other values.)

Now you could argue that the wholescale removal of basic human ethical beliefs is still compatible with Yudkowsky’s idea of refining human nature, and you’d be right, but at the very least the emphasis has changed substantially enough to warrant notice. The arbiter of what post-humanity should be is less humanity today and more the brute nature of reality. But, importantly, reality probably underdetermines the space of workable ethical systems even more than human nature does, so if you’re tossing out huge chunks of our intuitions, that doesn’t mean that there will be an obvious replacement waiting in the wings. Far from it. And even if you’re only throwing out, say, our intuitions about population ethics, that could open up a gap big enough to radically alter the future development of all other values. Yudkowsky himself is obviously aware that even a small missing piece of the moral puzzle can lead to dystopia. I don’t know if all the alternative futures are awful, but I’d bet a bunch of them would consider each other to be hellish dystopias, at the very least.

Highlighting this point, because it’s important…

…and reminding everyone that we don’t have to be at the point of wrestling with transhumanist technologies in order to be facing down this exact kind of problem.  We are facing it down right now.

To a certain extent, political ideologies and philosophies-of-morality are designed to (a) perceive the boundaries of human nature, and (b) react to those perceptions by creating societies that are good for humans-as-they-are.  But only to a certain extent.  Political ideologies and philosophies-of-morality are also designed to change people, to fit people’s utility functions to circumstances, to bring people’s values in line.  

Tradcons don’t actually want to force women, kicking and screaming, into the kitchen and the nursery; they mostly want to teach women to value being helpmeets and mothers.  Identitarian leftists want to teach people to be less repulsed by various kinds of alien-ness, and simultaneously to be more repulsed by racism and bigotry.  Paul Graham wants people to want to keep their identities small.  It’s all about values-shifting, and you it’s not entirely helpful to respond with “people aren’t always like that,” because the goal is to make people be like that. 

As knowledge has become so specialized, many people would rather ignore or criticize highly evolved specialist discourses rather than admit they simply cannot understand them. This allows specialists to emerge as genuine masters who come to dominate others through this particular dimension of objective superiority, whereas honest admissions of ignorance and uncertainty would be an empirically and normatively sophisticated basis for unifying the large mass of normal people into a living project transcending capitalism (i.e. mass movement). The crucial political insight here is that self-aware stupidity is far more scientifically correct and powerful than misleading performances of intelligence. The overwhelming majority of public performances of intelligence understate the significant uncertainty around even most true claims, as this brings material and psychological rewards, and little cost to the individual, especially as social media allow us to mute opposition. But when we all pretend we’re equally up to speed on the objective dynamics characterizing contemporary society, this simulation enforces and obfuscates the unfair distribution of intellectual legitimacy based on cultural capital.

We either attune to the disinterested objective truths of being or else the vicissitudes of capital attune us to an infinite future of hell. Insist upon the ultimate human equality of our ultimately shared, cosmic worthlessness (you are welcome to call this dignity, but you’d have to believe in god). Otherwise, feigning equality where it does not exist will always be a servomechanism of capital. It is a tactic of cultural capital accumulation through brute force, which is not excused by its being also weak and unsuccessful. The reality we have to process is that the hierarchy of intellectual command today is not a gradually distributed pyramid (an image that incorrectly flatters most people by suggesting they are only a little below the top while also being above many others). It is better visualized as one small group in a hot-air balloon, with computers drilled into their skulls, drifting away from almost everybody existing, all of whom are equally lost, confused, and helpless. As I will try to show, this is not sad but rather an ecstatic realization.

An activist who sounds convincing in a meeting might be 90% wrong about how the world works, but they are convincing simply because within their milieu they have an above average stock of cultural capital (verbal fluidity, education, seniority, etc.). The problem is not that this is “unfair” or “counterproductive” (common euphemisms), the problem is far more drastic: in a frighteningly literal way, that activist is a flesh-robot programmed and installed by capital, to serve the overall stability and growth of a system in which capital is the only possible adjudicator. By under-reporting our honest ignorance and uncertainty, we misleadingly command from others a kind of pathetic, sterile respect rooted in little more than their own comparatively worse illnesses, whereas an honest reporting of our own helpless stupidity is generative of energies for collective search (“most people are as stupid as I am, so my chance of figuring out what to do is as good as anyone else’s”); sincere irreverence and non-conformity leading to the breakdown of bourgeois repression (“all these people who want me to be a normal servomechanism of capital are dumb and powerless”); an increase in risk-tolerance through a decrease in false hope (“I used to be cautious because I thought I had a chance of surviving, but now that I see none of us will survive at present, I might as well try to do something I find interesting, which, ironically, makes me feel like maybe there is a chance…).” If we all admitted that, compared to specialists, most people are equal in their absolute incompetence, we might just be able to do something they can’t.

Remember those human-computers I asked you to imagine floating off into outer space, leaving us behind? If such cyborg intelligences designed the optimal virus to ensure the spread of capitalism, and then released it upon the earth, it would have to look eerily like the modern left-wing project: an exploitative drive to symbolically out-exploit the dominant exploiters, which convincingly presents itself as opposition to exploitation, not only spreading the culture of exploitation but super-charging it, as the competitive proliferation of obfuscation reaches a density that no human being could possibly penetrate in one lifetime. Not to mention that the already dominant exploiters also possess economies of scale in the production of obfuscation, dooming the left to lose even at the level of moral one-upmanship. It is the left that initiates an arms race of increasing stupidity, on top of the arms race of exploitation, without in any way decreasing the spread or intensity of exploitation, indeed pushing it deeper and deeper into instinctual intersubjective dynamics (the soul). If capitalism is a series of injuries inflicted on the weak, the history of anti-capitalism hitherto is a series of insults added to each injury, sold to the injured as preventative medicine.

To speak of left-wing activists as possessed by a capitalist virus sent here by a super-intelligence from the future might sound like science fiction, but hasn’t the average perspective always rejected radical political theory as science fiction? That this diagnosis will sound to many like science fiction becomes objective data that it might just be correct, an authentic realization about how the world works and what is happening, beyond what is conceivable within the ideological boundaries of what is defined as reasonable. I believe the inevitable next move of any coherent revolutionary anti-capitalism will be to accept this as an objective characterization of our history on this planet, and to update our beliefs and activities accordingly. Ultimately, only time will tell.

At first, these realizations may be depressing, but depressingly true realizations are the price of entry to the ecstasy of moving from lost to found. When the lost find themselves in the radical equality of honest and absolute helplessness, my hypothesis is that we will be uniquely capable of moves that are psychologically and sociologically prohibited to those who currently command their specialized sectors of the global cybernetic apparatus. Ultimately, they are the most enslaved by this system, that’s why the system selected and promoted them. We are those who were unfit to be slaves of this system (anyone silly enough to still be reading this blog post on the internet is, by definition, included in this “we”), that’s why we are being left to rot at the bottom of its garbage disposal. But one of the primary reasons this is so oppressive is simply because we are obsessed with the excruciating and exhausting work of pretending the situation is otherwise. For those willing to acknowledge where they really are, new and unexpected winds begin to blow, the room to maneuver suddenly appears tremendous, and communication once again becomes possible, as if for the first time.

It is only the fearful and defensive will to decelerate that makes acceleration so brutal and insufferable; genuine submission to unconditional acceleration appears the only pathway to a sensible and durable calm, if only the white noise of unbiased chaos. Nothing about this prohibits creative, collective emancipatory projects to establish equal freedom and abundance for all, after the acceptance and integration of objective realities.