#spandrell

This incidentally is a human universal. All languages I know have “I just don’t get it!” as a short-hand for ingroup allegiance signaling.

Which leads me to this article by Scott Alexander. He elaborates on an idea by one of his ingroup about their being two ways of looking at things, “mistake theory” and “conflict theory”. Mistake theory claims that political opposition comes from a different understanding of issues: if people had the same amount of knowledge and proper theories to explain it, they would necessarily agree. Conflict theory states that people disagree because their interests conflict, the conflict is zero-sum so there’s no reason to agree, the only question is how to resolve the conflict.

I was speechless. I am quite used to Mr. Alexander and his crowd missing the point on purpose, but this was just too much. Mistake theory and Conflict theory are not parallel things. “Mistake theory” is just the natural, tribalist way of thinking. It assumes an ingroup, it assumes the ingroup has a codified way of thinking about things, and it interprets all disagreement as a lack of understanding of the obviously objective and universal truths of the ingroup religion. There is a reason why liberals call “ignorant” all those who disagree with them. Christians used to be rather more charitable on this front and asked for “faith”, which they also assumed was difficult to achieve.

There’s an old saying, that Paris would be lovely without the Parisians. I don’t actually agree with that. They can be a bit arrogant, sure, but on the whole I find Parisian men quite civil and Parisian women classy and sexy. So I hope they stay.

There is one place though where that saying absolutely fits. Hong Kong. HK is a very cool city. It is a first world city built on a landscape of high tropical mountains, and you can see how the force of modern industry has made humans conquer the environment, fitting skyscrapers into the mountain bedrock and open-air escalators to reach them with ease.

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So what’s going on in Hong Kong? A massive riot sponsored and organized by the United States Government, that’s what’s happening. What we call a “color revolution”. Funds by USG’s National Endowment for Democracy have been revealed, US diplomatic staff have been found organizing the rioters, and the whole mass of Western journalists (i.e. half the Cathedral) have been pushing the most egregious propaganda for weeks. There’s nothing special, nothing unique about this. Color revolutions aren’t new. This isn’t the first one, and won’t be the last one. The day Germany grows a pair and starts to push back against US meddling in European politics, rest assured that Berlin will burn for weeks under a massive Antifa riot lionized by the US press.

That said, the US isn’t that powerful. Not that generous; the money USG is sending around isn’t enough to motivate every single rioter to get out of home. USG isn’t stupid and it only pulls the trigger in places where the powder is already plentiful and ready to burn. It needs a fifth column of people willing to burn it all, a place where people hate the status quo so much they’d rather sell their country to USG. Hong Kong is indeed such a place.

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How did that happen? To put it briefly, Hong Kongers think they are a superior people to the rest of China, and to the bottom of their hearts hate being ruled by Beijing. This isn’t about Communism or muh Freedom or muh Human Rights. This is a basic, deep problem of self-perceived social status. As I’ve said again and again, 90% of human concerns are about social status. Hong Kongers think China is low-status and hate every association with it. On the flip side, Hong Kongers think that Japan is high status. Also England. Well, the Anglosphere as a whole. So they revel in associating with it. Hong Kongers will spend 2,000 dollars to get on a plane on a Friday evening to fly 5 hours to Japan and spend the weekend there eating lame high-carb food and buying cosmetics that don’t really work just to be able to go back and say they’ve been to Japan again. That’s on Hong Kong where work hours are long and leisure time very precious. But that’s just part of the culture.

Why do HK people think China is so low status? Well because for a long time, and for a critical time period in Hong Kong history, the time period where Hong Kong’s population stabilised and its culture took form, China was indeed a poor shithole of peasants who shat in the street and were ruled by a bunch of retarded communists. Societies are just an aggregation of people, and people are dumb and stubborn. Memories taken as a child get fixed as culture, and are almost impossible to update after adulthood. Hong Kong collectively grew up being somewhat understandably disgusted by China’s backwardness. That all that is 40 years in the past and Chinese living standards in most cities are by now higher than in Hong Kong just doesn’t register to them. They just won’t admit it, the same way old men never admit their experiences just aren’t relevant anymore. Things never change if that change results in lower status to oneself. That’s how human brains operate. Scale that to a whole society and it can be brutal.

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Hong Kong exists because the Hong Kong economy exists, and that exists because as China went communist, Hong Kong was the only sizeable place with a decent commercially-minded government and a land border with China. Hong Kong was the middleman for making business in China, and as China opened up and developed, the economic rationale for Hong Kong slowly eroded. Again, starting salaries for college grads in Hong Kong are already lower than in the richest cities in China. Hong Kongers aren’t superior anymore, by any metric. The city is decaying, little by little, and there’s nothing unnatural about that. Urban economies rise and fall, that’s just a normal result of economic cycles. Happens all the time in every country.

In normal circumstances when a city’s economy starts to falter, young people just pack up and leave for growing cities. But HKers won’t do that. They may leave the country, move to the Anglosphere if they have a chance (not to Japan, that’s only suitable for LARPing in the weekends, the language is too hard), but the vast majority of HKers would hang themselves in the nearest lamp post before considering the logical option of just packing up and moving to Dongguan. Why? Because China is low status, and they are high status. Why? Because it has always been like that, Mommy and Granny told them so. So they will stay, and complain endlessly about why HK isn’t as rich as they believe they’re entitled to be. A life is not worth living if you can’t live in a 50sqm apartment and hire a Filipina to clean it because you’re too busy commuting to your corporate lawyer secretary job.

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It’s quite the sight to see to what insane lengths Hong Kongers go to slander China and make it public that they just won’t be associated with it. This in a city where the majority of population moved from China barely 50 years ago! See this Hong Kong “scholar” arguing that China is a cannibalistic culture, where eating human meat was just part of the usual savagery of life. Nothing to do with Hong Kong themselves, of course; the light of British enlightenment and bastardized Christianity (you really gotta check out local Christians for yourself, it’s hilarious) has purified them of all that yellow savagery.

But the Hong Kong riots have a deeper lesson than just how evil people can become when they want to, how a basic sense of honesty and decency go down the drain when a movement is allowed to be captured by its left-wing of sociopathic status maximizers. The deeper lesson here is about the Patchwork, this old libertarian concept about competitive governance inherited by neoreaction. The idea that bad government is the result of a lack of competition, that countries today are overall too large, and an ideal world would have city-state sized countries experimenting with different types of government and culture, and having them compete to develop the most effective ways of managing human affairs.

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A patchwork city who is underperforming economically compared to some neighbouring city isn’t just going to copy whatever government structures or cultural practices of a richer neighbour. Most likely it will just come up with some lame rationalization about how their backwardness is actually just a sign of their superior status, and before changing a iota of its own habits, will rather go to war with the richer city for having the audacity of not accepting the poor city’s cultural superiority. That’s just what humans do. That’s exactly what all the Greek polis did until they were invaded and thrown to the dustbin of history by Macedon and Rome.

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Do the nations of the earth have a right to preserve their own culture? Many antiglobalists would instinctually answer “yes”. But the proper answer to that question is that there’s no such thing as “rights”. Some cultures are good, some cultures are bad; some nations make sense, some nations just don’t have the means to subsist, and so won’t, and should be allowed to dissolve, instead of insisting on keeping everything alive artificially, making the world a ethnic group zoo where every single distinct culture which existed at the end of World War 2 must be preserved as part of the American project to freeze everything at the moment where its power was at its peak.

What is a “nation” anyway? What is a “people”? The usual attributes are easy to spot: common language and folklore, self-perceived status as a unit distinct to its neighbors. But all those attributes didn’t come out of thin air. They evolved over time, and they evolved because they worked in their particular historical environment. If perceiving yourself as a distinct nation implied your annihilation after a few weeks, like, say, in the case of a Mongol subtribe under the rule of the Khans, or a small fief close to the Kingdom of France, well odds are you aren’t going to perceive yourself as a distinct nation, because the moment you do you get invaded and destroyed. If national status gets you money, women, and lionized in the international press as a Champion of Liberty, well odds are that the among the most impressionable people on earth, i.e. young men and women, who the West has the retarded habit of assembling daily in these places we call Universities, are going to feel like a nation very very fast.

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Is China going to destroy Hong Kong the way France destroyed all its regional cultures? Not outright, that’s not how the Communist Party of China does things. The CPC are real believers in materialism. They really think that Uyghurs for example go into Islamism because their poor, and the day they’re lifted out of poverty (through education, of course. The blind belief in Education is the one thing that the West learned from Confucians and then re-exported as one of the main tenets of Progressivism) they’ll just become deracinated hedonists like everyone else. The propaganda line about Hong Kong right now is that a lack of economic opportunity for young Hong Kongese, in addition to outright mobilization by the United States of the worst thugs and lowlifes in the city, is behind the riots. Which is completely missing the point. No amount of money is going to change the deeply engrained feeling of status superiority of the HKese towards China. It would only make it worse. The same way that more money would make Muslims even more arrogant and violent towards outsiders. The comparison with Muslims really is apt. Two million Hong Kong citizens demonstrated against the extradition bill. It doesn’t mean that two million people participated in the violent riots, the beatings of police and dissenting citizens, the physical wrecking of roads, the blockage of the airport. But they won’t condemn it either. “These kids are just too hot headed but their heart is in the right place”. The sort of thing that your average Muslim says about Al Qaeda.

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Debt is a huge issue, a big part of what’s wrong with the fabric of modernity, a big factor of what’s driving modern civilization into collapse. And yet it has remained largely underdiscussed in these circles. Moldbug, who to the end still remained something of a libertarian, did have a keen interest in finance, and after the great crisis of 2008 made a series of long posts on financial crises and how to design a properly sound banking system. His “favorite topic” he even called it. Well it’s certainly not my favorite topic, nor I’m sure it’s Mr. Land’s, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating issue, and more importantly, a critical one.

Again, my approach to all intellectual issues is to think about its history, and the one thing that strikes one when thinking about debt is how easy-going the ancients were about them. Sovereign bankruptcies were routine, and nothing really happened. But most importantly, debt jubilees were *very* common. Mr. Land here seems to think it’s a horrible idea, and he may be right, but I can’t be faulted for liking something that Chinese emperors did every few years as part of general amnesties. New emperor? Cancel the people’s debt. Emperor has a change of mood and sets a new regnal era? Cancel the debt. Cute imperial baby is born? Out with the debt. Some Emperors had general amnesties almost every year. It’s interesting to note that the Song Dynasty, famous for its fabulous wealth, commercial mindset and urban culture, and thus a polity which you would expect to have more care about enforcing contracts, had over 200 debt jubilees over its 318 year history. That’s one every eighteen months.

Again, you could say that the one thing that ensured the Great Divergence, the Rise of the West, the Industrial Revolutions and basically everything that’s nice and productive about the modern world (and there’s plenty of that, I do like fast transport, air conditioning and modern hygiene, thank you very much), was the establishment of the Sanctity of Contracts as an important part of Western culture. There’s certainly something to that. A non-negligible part of reactionary authors will spit on Libertarianism a dozen times a day, but they will stay give you a 2 hour speech in praise of the Joint Stock Corporation as the fundamental basis of the modern economy and Western Civilization as we know it. By that line of reasoning, the only reason we ever got away of the Malthusian trap was when we stopped forgiving damn debtors and we used state authority to enforce commercial contracts.

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Why did the kings and emperors of yore issue decree debt jubilees so often? Why at all? Not just to get debt out of their own shoulders, obviously, they had the power to do that and just that, and do not relieve the commoners from their own debt obligations. And yet they did that, all the time: have commoners be free of paying back their debts. Again this sounds outrageous to our modern sensibilities, and yet it was routinely done for millennia, and everybody thought it perfectly natural. Part of that is because anything the Sovereign did was perfectly natural. The whole point of being king is that you get to do things like issue debt jubilees and screw the merchants royally. Pun intended. There’s such a thing as different sorts of power, and economic power, the power that arises from having massive amounts of wealth, is very real. And yet, all that power is good for nothing in front of the King’s authority, who on a whim can wipe out all your claims of debt collection. The merchants cry, and the indebted peasants rejoice. That’s just good politics for the king: gains him popular favor, and signals his power.

But was that all? Just the King, sticking it to the merchants because he can? The whole frequency of the measure seems to hint there’s something more going on. Maybe debt jubilees were an actual tool of governance. A good tool, a necessary tool, in order to achieve some positive outcome. Surely in terms of political stability, the most immediate concern of kings. And maybe something more. Maybe debt relief just actually fixes something in society, corrects some imbalances which lead to not just more safety for the king, but actually a better society, in terms of economics, natality and just general happiness and prosperity.

If you have read Peter Turchin’s book War and Peace and War, and if you haven’t you should stop right here and just go read it right now (if you have time for my blog you really should be going and read that book), you might recall Chapter 10, which Turchin titled “The Matthew Principle”. That’s a rather forced coinage from a quote of the evangelist. The idea is basically that the rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer. That’s a historical reality and there’s plenty of evidence for it in premodern times, those very times I’m referring to as having frequent amnesties and debt jubilees, canceling everybody’s debt and starting over, screwing with creditors every few years.

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Turchin, who may be right or wrong but is nonetheless a great writer, describes his argument with a very easy example. In any competition, he notes, the poor are at a disadvantage against the rich, having fewer resources, and so overtime tend to lose ground. Think of land, the almost only source of wealth in civilized societies until very recently. Assume an initially completely equal distribution of land. And that’s, by the way, not an absurdity. There’s actually a very good example in China’s Tang Dynasty, which adopted an “equal-field” system. All land was owned by the state, which allotted equal sized fields to individual peasant families.

What happened afterwards? Concentration. Little by little, some peasants were thriftier, others more prone to spend. Some were luckier, some more unfortunate with weather, or disease, or family issues. Some peasants started mortgaging away their fields to other peasants who again, due to thrift or luck had money available to spend. Those latter peasants then ended up with more land. Rince and repeat the process for several decades, and you get some very rich guys and a lot of landless vagrants. Keep the process going for even longer and you’d get even more inequality.

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But that seldom happened, as eventually some ambitious man always found a way of organizing those landless vagrants into a rebel army and started a big fat war. Chinese dynasties tended to all last exactly 250 years, with a big rebellion in the middle. Two secular cycles. And the Chinese historians always agree in the culprit. 土地兼并, land concentration. Every single time. Europe had less obvious closure but also plenty of wars to stir things up. And eventually, of course, the Age of Revolutions.

Things are of course different now in our incredibly diversified economies; even landless peasants or the equivalent today can work their way up some corporate ladder or find some new economic niche and start a successful business. But the fact that poor people, on average, are at a disadvantage in resource competition against the rich. The rich just have less to lose. As Half Sigma, unsuccessful candid Jew always says, talk of “risk-taking entrepreneurs” is just bullshit. Rich people have enough money stashed away to live comfortably all their lives. They are investing their spare wealth, and yes, there’s always a risk there. But big deal. They’re covered.

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Back to the beginning of the post, you can now see what debt jubilees were meant to achieve. Interestingly, Turchin’s book doesn’t mention the word “jubilee” even once. He probably didn’t think them important, as economic inequality historically did grow anyway. But surely periodic legal debt relief made the process slower. Eased societal contradictions to a more manageable level for the court. But it was never enough, it was barely a stopgap to the inexorable trend. But at least it served to lower the gas boiling the frog.