Today Keith Woods wrote a critical reply to my last article on The James Lindsay Debate Club Theory of History. Let’s put aside his personal attacks to get to the meat of it. Woods is a theorycel and therefore he does not like my argument that all political formulas boil down ultimately to ‘BS BS BS BS, therefore I rule’. He prefers a vision of history driven by men pursuing high ideals which then shape and change society. His article is an exercise in searching for true believers with such high ideals and then presenting these as a refutation of my argument. The trouble is that my argument does not assert that those in power are always cynical or that they do not believe their own BS, my argument only asserts and let us repeat:
“Ideas don’t matter, there is only power” is putting the cart before the horse. Power comes from organization, but ideology is the basis of organization in the first place. Genuine fanaticism is an essential characteristic of an organized minority; cynics can be bought off or intimidated.
Men will die for a shared moral vision. Nobody will give their life for a paycheck or power for power’s sake.
This is a chicken and egg question. Who gets into power? Men. What drives men? Ideas. What put those ideas into their head? Power. At some point, though, a man comes along and asserts his will independent of his society's ideas. If you want to seek the headwaters of ideology, it is that.
You can't just assert this, you have to try & explain why this is a justified true belief. Rather than self-contradictory, Fedora-tipping crypto-Marxist atheist gay MuhNeeCheeeyIzm cringe.
The thing is, you can fully agree with AA here about power and yet still be a true believer in a set of ideas. It's simply that those who deserve power reconcile their sentiments with the realities of power.
For instance, clearing our enemies out requires a group with fundamentally dissimilar sentiments (to those of our enemies) reconciling those sentiments not with any existing outgrowth of power, as wielded by our enemies and their sentiments, but with the fundamental nature of the thing itself.
Where I differ from AA is that I believe sincere fanaticism is an infinitely stronger organizing principle, for the purpose of acquiring power, than cynical power-politicking itself. That is my ‘reconciliation with power’ as you put it -- that fanatical minorities tend to out-perform and out-organize groups which are purely operating on lower order motives.
‘Bs bs bs therefore I rule’ doesn’t work if nobody believes the bs, if nobody believes you are legitimate, and legitimacy is an almost purely ideological construction. This is an opening for dissidents to exploit, and it is exploited first by persuading and seducing the minds of men.
Dissident ideas are always present at scale (within non-totalising systems) because no structural paradigm (with its attendent BS) can satisfy all needs and desires. Every paradigm has its blind spots - those needs and desires which it represses, denies, or denigrates. Dissident energy gathers around these spots in much the same way that psychological 'energy' gathers around psychological blind spots. Dissidents are the 'neuroses' of the system.
You become a dissident because certain of your needs aren't being met and you search for the stories that help explain your discontent and, in a wider sense, express what your age is lacking. You don’t generally hear an idea and then become discontent; rather, you feel discontent and then seek a way to rationalise your feelings.
The presence of the dissident group - however fanatical - is not in itself enough to bring about change. The spark of the ‘great man’ is needed to set things alight. If we accept that it is the epiphany of the great man which ultimately catalyses change - and thus makes history - then the specifics of the ideas in question are relatively unimportant. While these ideas may well come to define the particular character - and attendant blind spots - of the new paradigm, they do not bring the paradigm into being.
The rupture of the great man is a timeless process and from the point of view of this process - the process of historical change - particular ideas are unimportant.
Calling it 'BS' is, beyond his Daria showing, primarily a strong rhetorical contradiction to the rationalist view, and secondarily a barb to enemies' (fake and gay) political formulas. But it doesn't mean our 'BS' is literally 'BS', but that it is fundamentally emotional, preferential, distinctly non-rational, and, in fact, fanatical. In fact, it's a justification for us to dismiss rationality, to embrace fanaticism, both in ourselves, and as a means of inducing mass action, in order to gain the power to protect what we care about.
In other words, he's not calling the deep and meaningful things which move a man's soul 'BS', but rather the rational interpretation or justification of political action 'BS'. You're not in contradiction with him at all. Though I guess he's also saying that you have to be realistic or you can't do shit. But that's a given.
Fanaticism is more about your motivation level and not descriptive of organizing methods. Absolutely no one ever argued that being a lukewarm unmotivated potato chip eater would allow you to gain power if you're cynical enough. "People who try harder outperform people who don't". How else could you differentiate between a 'fanatical' minority and a non-fanatical minority?
More to the point, to steelman your argument, perhaps you mean power comes from the uncompromising. Those who do not waver in a set of beliefs. "Genuine fanaticism is an essential characteristic of an organized minority; cynics can be bought off or intimidated". Considering that AA is talking about the Elites for the most part, I don't think it follows that the leadership needs to be uncompromising. The pleb servant class? Sure, you want them to be loyal follower fanatics, it helps a lot. The leadership? Well, reading just about any biography of the backroom dealings and cynical betrayal that just about every leader of WW2 was involved in is enough to make you sick.
Some food for discussion. Most would agree that ideas legitimate authority, and authority legitimates ideas: legitimacy and authority are separate but interdependent. Attempting to collapse legitimacy into sovereignty ambitiously avoids the grime of personality, history, raw contingency, and chance, but it's a tough sell because there are too many counter-examples. There is a difference between what is usually true and what is always true.
Power isn't just a spasm in the void. It is inherently conceptual and creative. When the Normans conquered England, it involved nasty behavior, such as the Harrying of the North, but it wasn't merely nasty behavior. They permanently introduced many words into the language: record, profit, balance, revenue, account, credit, check, and countless others. Such categories alter social consciousness, extend the range of human action, and facilitate control and cohesion. The Dutch empire did something similar, albeit from a distance, inventing concepts like limited liability and sharpening others, such as joint-stock ownership and dividends. Yet, legitimacy has some control over sovereignty; there is a limit to how far and often power can alter a conceptual scheme without unraveling the entire system in a Perestroika event. In other words, there is such a thing as a crisis of legitimacy; history is littered with them. And is debate completely inert? During the Civil War, Charles I made his authority a matter of debate with his debate-club behavior. In this case, debating was not only not ineffectual, it was the direct cause of his beheading. The very act of debating delegitimated his authority! Combustible stuff! We can still follow Hume and understand that reason doesn't have anything to do with this and still agree that historical self-understanding is a powerful force.
Does power select for itself? Is it powering itself in the void, disembodied from powerful people? If you don't steal someone's house in the West Bank, does it follow that someone else will? At the founding of the United States, General Washington did not make himself a dictator. Nor did anyone else. Part of this had to do with, again, philosophical self-understanding. Like many others, Washington read Cato, Cicero, Addison, and, dare I say it? He read Locke. And for institutional reasons that ignored ideology, the British put unenthusiastic Whigs like Cornwallis and Howe in charge of putting down the rebellion. Most Americans expected something much more violent, such as when the Crown dispatched Cumberland the Butcher to crush the Second Jacobite Rebellion a few decades earlier during the War of Austrian Succession. BS, BS, BS, BS, therefore I *don't* rule?
There are plenty of examples of power crippled by ideology, such as America's attempt to create liberal democracies in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Power couldn't grunt itself to victory because of the way it legitimated itself. Hegelian contradictions were at play -- a pretentious way of saying ends and means were at cross purposes. In these specific cases, the Americans were paralyzed by philosophical assumptions about an Englishman residing in the bosom of every human being, striving to be democratic and free, maximizing its happiness and self-interest. But as Nietzsche expressed it, mankind does not strive for happiness -- only the Englishman does that.
Excellent article. It has clarified a few lingering doubts I had about your position. Although I accepted it as being close to the actual truth. It is in my mind the most convincing and compelling explanation of the will to power phenomenon and establishing rule and leadership over a country. The logic of power is the mechanism for eastablishing total control over populations- even in so-called democratic nations where sophisticated persuasion techniques are used to control opinions and assert dominance rather than brute force in the examples you gave.
Persuasion (which is really what argument and marketing and salesmanship and preaching are) start with understanding your audience, their character, their fears, their ideals, their sentiments, their problems, their hopes, and their plans.
That is, a man must “enter another man’s spirit” and to see things from his perception. A man who want to win a commission or power must know his audience and actually care about their concerns because sincerity is something that men can sense by intuition.
Unless the ideas seems to be a solution to their problems, it won’t work. Christianity spread much better in urban deHellenizated Greece and deRomanized Empire because the universal state have thrown many nations together in a normless environment pregnant with opportunities and high social anxiety. These were attracted to Christianity’s organized artificial “family” that provides fellowship and community that was more democratic and more polis-like than most mystery cults which were more like a private club. It doesn’t spread too well in rural Germany or in advanced China and Japan with their high social solidarity. Only when Christianity allowed itself to be transformed by the Germans could it make inroads, leading to the Carolinian Empire.
Men who really wanted power will try one thing after another until something click. Libertarianism could never work because it can appeal only to a tiny group of people. Worst, their disdain for power and martyr-passion for theory weakened them. They never tried to make it work, except in a very few areas like the Free State Project of taking over a state by migration. Even this failed due to poor organization and a lack of strong leadership. Ideas must fit the audience’s inclination in order to win their support and a strong vanguard (oligarchy really) must create a structure to give this audience simple and practical steps to follow to make them cohesive to make it real. And they must show RESULTS in short-term to build their confidence.
For example, the Red Army in China almost collapsed in the southern China because the party leadership were married to the idea that only the industrial workers in the cities can win the Red China. The workers, like the workers in Europe, rejected them because they valued their traditional culture more. Mao argued for focusing on the farmers because they have a real need for change after 100 years of lawless violence and famines and that the control of rural areas would deny the Nationalists raw supplies, starving them until he move in for a kill. So, ideas do have value but they live and die on which will actually work in changing the picture.
Ideas, spirit, drive for power, understanding the audience, and others all have their roles in a matrix, but it is a man who organized men and who is committed to victory by any means and who cares for his men’s welfare that make all the difference.
Thesis: "people get into power, whether by force or fraud, and then tell people what they should think which nearly always coincides with actions they have already taken."
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Your Motte supposes a prescription for ideology to attain victory in a pre-victory state, while the thesis describes actions taken by an already-victor. It makes little comment on how you get there.
Your Bailey describes 'political decision making' which are largely administrative functions of an incumbent already-victor. Is also "all ideology is post hoc..." which is about the origin of an ideology, which the thesis does not talk about.
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As far as the thesis is concerned a meteorite could have killed all your opponents. Then that person would say that whatever they did was the right decision and that right decision granted them victory, even if it was all pure meteor-dodging coincidence. (USA in WW2)
The thesis also would assert that the winner would never describe any action they took as being morally wrong, which we see in the case of USA atomic weapons and firebombing.
To address your motte-bailey more exactly, if AA were taking your argument it would say that openly espousing an ideology of fire bombing and nuking people is what gets you into power. It absolutely is not the case both in reality and in the thesis and would, unless you're Isreali, get you locked up in a mental asylum. I'm not entirely sure how you even derived that Motte at all.
It appears to me that you're arguing past each other. In some ways, you're both right, and in others, not so much.
Some men clearly don't care about ideology and only care about power (e.g. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot). Some men care deeply about ideology and only desire enough power to implement it (e.g. Jefferson). Obviously, ruthless psychopaths that desire power are going to have better success than idealistic ideologues.
As with most human endeavors, it's not this or that, it's this *and* that, and at the same time, everything is on a spectrum. Beware the human need for certainty, because outside of immediate survival issues things are rarely black and white.
Khomeini famously declared 3 or 4 years after the revolution, that if the survival of Islamic Republic demands it, even the laws of Islam may temporarily be suspended by the supreme Faghih, a very pragmatist approach, sensing that there is no point to laws and restrictions if the faithful are to be ousted and possibly be murdered by opposition, which in this particular case given the murderous nature of left opposition in Iran, was all too apt a pronouncement
I find your arguments to be clear and compelling. I hearken back a year or so to when you put out the original video on YouTube detailing Elite theory. Keith responded quickly to it with his takedown and I remember thinking the same thing I thought now reading his argument: either Keith doesn't understand the argument or he's dishonestly misrepresenting it. Seeing his continued use of straw men makes me believe it must be the latter, he seems too intelligent to just not get it. Or, if I'm feeling generous then maybe I could grant that he himself is still very young and idealistic. Regardless, he apparently can't accept that ideology, in and of itself, is not sufficient to create and grow any kind of movement that could either transcend society or overthrow existing political systems without the backing of rich and powerful elites.
True, but neither did AA. Keith seems to believe that Ideology leads and if persuasive enough, power follows. Elite theory says that before ideology can even come into play, one must already be an Elite. Power is passed between Elites, it is never seized by an ideological non-elite. As a shameless plug, I wrote a short essay to explain the disconnect between AA and Keith. https://open.substack.com/pub/odinsmissingeye/p/coming-soon?r=1dhmsb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Keith is the one with the more centrist position, AA simply reduces everything to power which is inherently contradictory. Ultimately, a synergistic combination of the two is the more sensible position that does not deny the transcendental aspect of truth.
I like you both so I think I'm being rational when I state that you are most certainly correct in your analysis and I feel that Keith is arguing with a point that you aren't making.
It seems to me that he's taking your conclusions to places that you don't intend for them to go. This may be because he is a true believer himself.
The thing is, you can fully agree with AA here and yet still be a true believer. Those who deserve power reconcile their sentiments with the realities of power.
Clearing our enemies out requires a different group with fundamentally dissimilar sentiments (to those of our enemies) reconciling those sentiments not with any existing outgrowth of power, as wielded by our enemies and their sentiments, but with the fundamental nature of the thing itself.
True, but neither did AA. Keith seems to believe that Ideology leads and if persuasive enough, power follows. Elite theory says that before ideology can even come into play, one must already be an Elite. Power is passed between Elites, it is never seized by an ideological non-elite.
Human behavior has changed quite a bit over the past thousand years, yet this is too short of a period for genetic mutation to drive the change. Let's posit that power is the ability to enact change: where else would that power be stored, other than ideas? Keep in mind that technology is the material manifestation of ideas.
AA's analysis is correct in so far as any prince must seek power first and foremost or a competitor will overtake him. This is tautological, like natural selection --- the "logic of power" is determined by looking at who holds power and working backwards. If Christians gained power through martyrdom and Mongols through mass murder, what is the logic of power? It's whatever got the job done.
But AA seems to implicitly discount the power ideas themselves hold over men. Truth itself might not always be the most expedient path to power, yet it holds ultimate power.
"Bullshit, therefore I rule" is a tad bit simplistic. Let's try like this:
“Time alone,” declares the philosopher David Hume, “gives solidity to [the rulers’] right; and operating gradually on the minds of men, reconciles them to any authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable.”
Legitimacy, in a word, is longevity.
The longer in the tooth you are as a nation, the more your tainted origins fade from collective memory and the more respectable you become.
I wonder if it all boils down to sparsely educated men or greatly educated men. I'm surprised the more highly motivated word turners don't realize that mental masterbation can make them go blind.
AA, just for the sake of clarity, would an exception to your thesis be a situation where the motivations of those who take power are so self-evident that they don't subsequently need explaining or justifying?
“Ideas don’t matter, there is only power” is putting the cart before the horse. Power comes from organization, but ideology is the basis of organization in the first place. Genuine fanaticism is an essential characteristic of an organized minority; cynics can be bought off or intimidated.
Men will die for a shared moral vision. Nobody will give their life for a paycheck or power for power’s sake.
This is a chicken and egg question. Who gets into power? Men. What drives men? Ideas. What put those ideas into their head? Power. At some point, though, a man comes along and asserts his will independent of his society's ideas. If you want to seek the headwaters of ideology, it is that.
"What put those ideas into their head? Power."
You can't just assert this, you have to try & explain why this is a justified true belief. Rather than self-contradictory, Fedora-tipping crypto-Marxist atheist gay MuhNeeCheeeyIzm cringe.
The thing is, you can fully agree with AA here about power and yet still be a true believer in a set of ideas. It's simply that those who deserve power reconcile their sentiments with the realities of power.
For instance, clearing our enemies out requires a group with fundamentally dissimilar sentiments (to those of our enemies) reconciling those sentiments not with any existing outgrowth of power, as wielded by our enemies and their sentiments, but with the fundamental nature of the thing itself.
Where I differ from AA is that I believe sincere fanaticism is an infinitely stronger organizing principle, for the purpose of acquiring power, than cynical power-politicking itself. That is my ‘reconciliation with power’ as you put it -- that fanatical minorities tend to out-perform and out-organize groups which are purely operating on lower order motives.
‘Bs bs bs therefore I rule’ doesn’t work if nobody believes the bs, if nobody believes you are legitimate, and legitimacy is an almost purely ideological construction. This is an opening for dissidents to exploit, and it is exploited first by persuading and seducing the minds of men.
Dissident ideas are always present at scale (within non-totalising systems) because no structural paradigm (with its attendent BS) can satisfy all needs and desires. Every paradigm has its blind spots - those needs and desires which it represses, denies, or denigrates. Dissident energy gathers around these spots in much the same way that psychological 'energy' gathers around psychological blind spots. Dissidents are the 'neuroses' of the system.
You become a dissident because certain of your needs aren't being met and you search for the stories that help explain your discontent and, in a wider sense, express what your age is lacking. You don’t generally hear an idea and then become discontent; rather, you feel discontent and then seek a way to rationalise your feelings.
The presence of the dissident group - however fanatical - is not in itself enough to bring about change. The spark of the ‘great man’ is needed to set things alight. If we accept that it is the epiphany of the great man which ultimately catalyses change - and thus makes history - then the specifics of the ideas in question are relatively unimportant. While these ideas may well come to define the particular character - and attendant blind spots - of the new paradigm, they do not bring the paradigm into being.
The rupture of the great man is a timeless process and from the point of view of this process - the process of historical change - particular ideas are unimportant.
Calling it 'BS' is, beyond his Daria showing, primarily a strong rhetorical contradiction to the rationalist view, and secondarily a barb to enemies' (fake and gay) political formulas. But it doesn't mean our 'BS' is literally 'BS', but that it is fundamentally emotional, preferential, distinctly non-rational, and, in fact, fanatical. In fact, it's a justification for us to dismiss rationality, to embrace fanaticism, both in ourselves, and as a means of inducing mass action, in order to gain the power to protect what we care about.
In other words, he's not calling the deep and meaningful things which move a man's soul 'BS', but rather the rational interpretation or justification of political action 'BS'. You're not in contradiction with him at all. Though I guess he's also saying that you have to be realistic or you can't do shit. But that's a given.
Fanaticism is more about your motivation level and not descriptive of organizing methods. Absolutely no one ever argued that being a lukewarm unmotivated potato chip eater would allow you to gain power if you're cynical enough. "People who try harder outperform people who don't". How else could you differentiate between a 'fanatical' minority and a non-fanatical minority?
More to the point, to steelman your argument, perhaps you mean power comes from the uncompromising. Those who do not waver in a set of beliefs. "Genuine fanaticism is an essential characteristic of an organized minority; cynics can be bought off or intimidated". Considering that AA is talking about the Elites for the most part, I don't think it follows that the leadership needs to be uncompromising. The pleb servant class? Sure, you want them to be loyal follower fanatics, it helps a lot. The leadership? Well, reading just about any biography of the backroom dealings and cynical betrayal that just about every leader of WW2 was involved in is enough to make you sick.
You fundamentally misunderstand the article and should reread it.
Some food for discussion. Most would agree that ideas legitimate authority, and authority legitimates ideas: legitimacy and authority are separate but interdependent. Attempting to collapse legitimacy into sovereignty ambitiously avoids the grime of personality, history, raw contingency, and chance, but it's a tough sell because there are too many counter-examples. There is a difference between what is usually true and what is always true.
Power isn't just a spasm in the void. It is inherently conceptual and creative. When the Normans conquered England, it involved nasty behavior, such as the Harrying of the North, but it wasn't merely nasty behavior. They permanently introduced many words into the language: record, profit, balance, revenue, account, credit, check, and countless others. Such categories alter social consciousness, extend the range of human action, and facilitate control and cohesion. The Dutch empire did something similar, albeit from a distance, inventing concepts like limited liability and sharpening others, such as joint-stock ownership and dividends. Yet, legitimacy has some control over sovereignty; there is a limit to how far and often power can alter a conceptual scheme without unraveling the entire system in a Perestroika event. In other words, there is such a thing as a crisis of legitimacy; history is littered with them. And is debate completely inert? During the Civil War, Charles I made his authority a matter of debate with his debate-club behavior. In this case, debating was not only not ineffectual, it was the direct cause of his beheading. The very act of debating delegitimated his authority! Combustible stuff! We can still follow Hume and understand that reason doesn't have anything to do with this and still agree that historical self-understanding is a powerful force.
Does power select for itself? Is it powering itself in the void, disembodied from powerful people? If you don't steal someone's house in the West Bank, does it follow that someone else will? At the founding of the United States, General Washington did not make himself a dictator. Nor did anyone else. Part of this had to do with, again, philosophical self-understanding. Like many others, Washington read Cato, Cicero, Addison, and, dare I say it? He read Locke. And for institutional reasons that ignored ideology, the British put unenthusiastic Whigs like Cornwallis and Howe in charge of putting down the rebellion. Most Americans expected something much more violent, such as when the Crown dispatched Cumberland the Butcher to crush the Second Jacobite Rebellion a few decades earlier during the War of Austrian Succession. BS, BS, BS, BS, therefore I *don't* rule?
There are plenty of examples of power crippled by ideology, such as America's attempt to create liberal democracies in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Power couldn't grunt itself to victory because of the way it legitimated itself. Hegelian contradictions were at play -- a pretentious way of saying ends and means were at cross purposes. In these specific cases, the Americans were paralyzed by philosophical assumptions about an Englishman residing in the bosom of every human being, striving to be democratic and free, maximizing its happiness and self-interest. But as Nietzsche expressed it, mankind does not strive for happiness -- only the Englishman does that.
Excellent article. It has clarified a few lingering doubts I had about your position. Although I accepted it as being close to the actual truth. It is in my mind the most convincing and compelling explanation of the will to power phenomenon and establishing rule and leadership over a country. The logic of power is the mechanism for eastablishing total control over populations- even in so-called democratic nations where sophisticated persuasion techniques are used to control opinions and assert dominance rather than brute force in the examples you gave.
Persuasion (which is really what argument and marketing and salesmanship and preaching are) start with understanding your audience, their character, their fears, their ideals, their sentiments, their problems, their hopes, and their plans.
That is, a man must “enter another man’s spirit” and to see things from his perception. A man who want to win a commission or power must know his audience and actually care about their concerns because sincerity is something that men can sense by intuition.
Unless the ideas seems to be a solution to their problems, it won’t work. Christianity spread much better in urban deHellenizated Greece and deRomanized Empire because the universal state have thrown many nations together in a normless environment pregnant with opportunities and high social anxiety. These were attracted to Christianity’s organized artificial “family” that provides fellowship and community that was more democratic and more polis-like than most mystery cults which were more like a private club. It doesn’t spread too well in rural Germany or in advanced China and Japan with their high social solidarity. Only when Christianity allowed itself to be transformed by the Germans could it make inroads, leading to the Carolinian Empire.
Men who really wanted power will try one thing after another until something click. Libertarianism could never work because it can appeal only to a tiny group of people. Worst, their disdain for power and martyr-passion for theory weakened them. They never tried to make it work, except in a very few areas like the Free State Project of taking over a state by migration. Even this failed due to poor organization and a lack of strong leadership. Ideas must fit the audience’s inclination in order to win their support and a strong vanguard (oligarchy really) must create a structure to give this audience simple and practical steps to follow to make them cohesive to make it real. And they must show RESULTS in short-term to build their confidence.
For example, the Red Army in China almost collapsed in the southern China because the party leadership were married to the idea that only the industrial workers in the cities can win the Red China. The workers, like the workers in Europe, rejected them because they valued their traditional culture more. Mao argued for focusing on the farmers because they have a real need for change after 100 years of lawless violence and famines and that the control of rural areas would deny the Nationalists raw supplies, starving them until he move in for a kill. So, ideas do have value but they live and die on which will actually work in changing the picture.
Ideas, spirit, drive for power, understanding the audience, and others all have their roles in a matrix, but it is a man who organized men and who is committed to victory by any means and who cares for his men’s welfare that make all the difference.
I think your unconsciously doing a Motte and Bailey
Motte: ideologies that permit or encourage advantageous action like killing dissidents are more likely to obtain and hold onto power.
Bailey: ideology plays no part in political decision making and all ideology is post hoc rationalization.
How so?
Thesis: "people get into power, whether by force or fraud, and then tell people what they should think which nearly always coincides with actions they have already taken."
---
Your Motte supposes a prescription for ideology to attain victory in a pre-victory state, while the thesis describes actions taken by an already-victor. It makes little comment on how you get there.
Your Bailey describes 'political decision making' which are largely administrative functions of an incumbent already-victor. Is also "all ideology is post hoc..." which is about the origin of an ideology, which the thesis does not talk about.
---
As far as the thesis is concerned a meteorite could have killed all your opponents. Then that person would say that whatever they did was the right decision and that right decision granted them victory, even if it was all pure meteor-dodging coincidence. (USA in WW2)
The thesis also would assert that the winner would never describe any action they took as being morally wrong, which we see in the case of USA atomic weapons and firebombing.
To address your motte-bailey more exactly, if AA were taking your argument it would say that openly espousing an ideology of fire bombing and nuking people is what gets you into power. It absolutely is not the case both in reality and in the thesis and would, unless you're Isreali, get you locked up in a mental asylum. I'm not entirely sure how you even derived that Motte at all.
It appears to me that you're arguing past each other. In some ways, you're both right, and in others, not so much.
Some men clearly don't care about ideology and only care about power (e.g. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot). Some men care deeply about ideology and only desire enough power to implement it (e.g. Jefferson). Obviously, ruthless psychopaths that desire power are going to have better success than idealistic ideologues.
As with most human endeavors, it's not this or that, it's this *and* that, and at the same time, everything is on a spectrum. Beware the human need for certainty, because outside of immediate survival issues things are rarely black and white.
Khomeini famously declared 3 or 4 years after the revolution, that if the survival of Islamic Republic demands it, even the laws of Islam may temporarily be suspended by the supreme Faghih, a very pragmatist approach, sensing that there is no point to laws and restrictions if the faithful are to be ousted and possibly be murdered by opposition, which in this particular case given the murderous nature of left opposition in Iran, was all too apt a pronouncement
I find your arguments to be clear and compelling. I hearken back a year or so to when you put out the original video on YouTube detailing Elite theory. Keith responded quickly to it with his takedown and I remember thinking the same thing I thought now reading his argument: either Keith doesn't understand the argument or he's dishonestly misrepresenting it. Seeing his continued use of straw men makes me believe it must be the latter, he seems too intelligent to just not get it. Or, if I'm feeling generous then maybe I could grant that he himself is still very young and idealistic. Regardless, he apparently can't accept that ideology, in and of itself, is not sufficient to create and grow any kind of movement that could either transcend society or overthrow existing political systems without the backing of rich and powerful elites.
Keith never stated power is not necessary to drive ideology, simply that power is not the ultimate motivating factor.
True, but neither did AA. Keith seems to believe that Ideology leads and if persuasive enough, power follows. Elite theory says that before ideology can even come into play, one must already be an Elite. Power is passed between Elites, it is never seized by an ideological non-elite. As a shameless plug, I wrote a short essay to explain the disconnect between AA and Keith. https://open.substack.com/pub/odinsmissingeye/p/coming-soon?r=1dhmsb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
You: AA did not state: "simply that power is not the ultimate motivating factor".
That it literally the ONLY thing he argues.
Keith is the one with the more centrist position, AA simply reduces everything to power which is inherently contradictory. Ultimately, a synergistic combination of the two is the more sensible position that does not deny the transcendental aspect of truth.
I like you both so I think I'm being rational when I state that you are most certainly correct in your analysis and I feel that Keith is arguing with a point that you aren't making.
It seems to me that he's taking your conclusions to places that you don't intend for them to go. This may be because he is a true believer himself.
The thing is, you can fully agree with AA here and yet still be a true believer. Those who deserve power reconcile their sentiments with the realities of power.
Clearing our enemies out requires a different group with fundamentally dissimilar sentiments (to those of our enemies) reconciling those sentiments not with any existing outgrowth of power, as wielded by our enemies and their sentiments, but with the fundamental nature of the thing itself.
AA I'd love to give you some money cuz you entertain me endlessly but I'm totally broke on the verge of being homeless.
The table I posted clearly shows 25%, not 50%.
Let me fix this. It does not really change the point of the paragraph in any sense.
True, but neither did AA. Keith seems to believe that Ideology leads and if persuasive enough, power follows. Elite theory says that before ideology can even come into play, one must already be an Elite. Power is passed between Elites, it is never seized by an ideological non-elite.
Ideology creates the tinder of dissident groupings. Power - the great man - sets it alight.
Well put. So there’s no hope of Peasant Revolt 2 ?
I wish there was, but it seems rather unlikely.
Human behavior has changed quite a bit over the past thousand years, yet this is too short of a period for genetic mutation to drive the change. Let's posit that power is the ability to enact change: where else would that power be stored, other than ideas? Keep in mind that technology is the material manifestation of ideas.
AA's analysis is correct in so far as any prince must seek power first and foremost or a competitor will overtake him. This is tautological, like natural selection --- the "logic of power" is determined by looking at who holds power and working backwards. If Christians gained power through martyrdom and Mongols through mass murder, what is the logic of power? It's whatever got the job done.
But AA seems to implicitly discount the power ideas themselves hold over men. Truth itself might not always be the most expedient path to power, yet it holds ultimate power.
"Bullshit, therefore I rule" is a tad bit simplistic. Let's try like this:
“Time alone,” declares the philosopher David Hume, “gives solidity to [the rulers’] right; and operating gradually on the minds of men, reconciles them to any authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable.”
Legitimacy, in a word, is longevity.
The longer in the tooth you are as a nation, the more your tainted origins fade from collective memory and the more respectable you become.
Political power is founded partly on oblivion.
I wonder if it all boils down to sparsely educated men or greatly educated men. I'm surprised the more highly motivated word turners don't realize that mental masterbation can make them go blind.
AA, just for the sake of clarity, would an exception to your thesis be a situation where the motivations of those who take power are so self-evident that they don't subsequently need explaining or justifying?