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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think you and Keith are talking past each other. Mythic formulas do serve to justify systems, and also to justify particular factions either within or without a system, and they aren't necessarily logical or not logical but simply justifications for actions taken. But the ideas and myths do help decide what actions and goals are taken and pursued
One could modify your slogan to "BS BS, therefore I rule *in this way*"-- Thatcher was still propounding free marketeer capitalist ideology even when she denied certain policies had ever been pursued and she probably convinced herself that she had always been against monetarism because the hamster wheel spins in powerful people's heads just like anyone, as you say.
The basic problem with Kahneman's and Haidt's thinking is that they focus excessively on explicit verbalised thought, and in particular on self-modelling, which is especially prone to rationalisation.
Certainly all our thinking is motivated by underlying emotions and desires, but sometimes these motivations work out to promote accurate assessments over inaccurate ones. For example, if you're about to fight a duel to the death, and you are presented with several possible weapons to choose from, you will still be engaged in motivated reasoning, but your chief motivation will be to choose the weapon that is actually most likely to earn you a victory and save your life. This requires a lot of factual assessments about what the fight is likely to be like, and what the respective merits and shortcomings of the different weapons are, which ones are brittle, etc. So right of the bat we may feel assured that there are at least some cases in which underlying emotions direct our reasoning towards factual accuracy rather than away from it.
Political formulas can be generalised to apply to institutions aligned with a regime and not only the regime itself. Here, the job of the institution is to justify its own existence to the regime, ie. explain why the regime benefits from its allegiance. Here, we can draw a crude analogy to social interactions on a much smaller scale, with people's self-concepts working as a kind of "social formula" to justify why others ought to be friends or associates with them. Here, there is a great deal of incentive for rationalization and exaggerating one's own worth, but notice also that the account needs to be plausible to be useful.
As Curtis Yarvin has frequently observed, lies can win no permanent victory over truth. This gives deceptive political formulas a considerable disadvantage, and makes excessively deceptive formulas compel the regime to be Orwellian in nature, being existentially dependent on maintaining a deception. But if you had a regime built on absolute military authority, a fnarglocracy as Yarvin called it, that regime can afford to have a completely factual political formula. You might object that such never happens in history, but there are nevertheless gradations of deceptiveness that are politically relevant. For example, "divine right" or "mandate of heaven" can be interpreted as literally false ideas, but they can also be interpreted metaphorically, and under this interpretation, it may indeed be the case that the regime has the mandate of heaven. In such a case, the regime need not be Orwellian; an insightful, undeluded populace will be more loyal to it rather than less.
Here we see another analogy to "social formulae" - the formula, in order to be practical, needs to be reasonably plausible. The less plausible it is, the more manipulation and mind control is required, and the more the regime will have to be pathologically paranoid. To create a plausible formula however requires a certain ability to recognise reality, if only in order to know what sort of inconvenient facts to rationalise away. This can only be done effectively if you actually know the significance of those inconvenient facts, since otherwise you cannot know them to be inconvenient to your formula. Ergo, the very ability to rationalise in the manner described by Kahneman and Haidt itself presumes that your unconscious cognitive processes are accurately perceiving reality.
In summary, the basic problem with the excessively black-box view of political formulae is that it neglects the practical requirements for the maintenance of a given political formula. These requirements vary in a manner that is strongly dependent on the actual contents of the political formula in question. Sure, there are some commonalities, like the necessity to have some kind of intellectual hegemony, but it matters a lot whether that intellectual hegemony is peddling a completely distorted and pathological worldview, or a saner one accommodating of some clarity of thought, and if it happens to be located somewhere in between these two extremes, the precise location on that gradient is nevertheless important
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The table I posted clearly shows 25%, not 50%.
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.
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?
I think you and Keith are talking past each other. Mythic formulas do serve to justify systems, and also to justify particular factions either within or without a system, and they aren't necessarily logical or not logical but simply justifications for actions taken. But the ideas and myths do help decide what actions and goals are taken and pursued
One could modify your slogan to "BS BS, therefore I rule *in this way*"-- Thatcher was still propounding free marketeer capitalist ideology even when she denied certain policies had ever been pursued and she probably convinced herself that she had always been against monetarism because the hamster wheel spins in powerful people's heads just like anyone, as you say.
The basic problem with Kahneman's and Haidt's thinking is that they focus excessively on explicit verbalised thought, and in particular on self-modelling, which is especially prone to rationalisation.
Certainly all our thinking is motivated by underlying emotions and desires, but sometimes these motivations work out to promote accurate assessments over inaccurate ones. For example, if you're about to fight a duel to the death, and you are presented with several possible weapons to choose from, you will still be engaged in motivated reasoning, but your chief motivation will be to choose the weapon that is actually most likely to earn you a victory and save your life. This requires a lot of factual assessments about what the fight is likely to be like, and what the respective merits and shortcomings of the different weapons are, which ones are brittle, etc. So right of the bat we may feel assured that there are at least some cases in which underlying emotions direct our reasoning towards factual accuracy rather than away from it.
Political formulas can be generalised to apply to institutions aligned with a regime and not only the regime itself. Here, the job of the institution is to justify its own existence to the regime, ie. explain why the regime benefits from its allegiance. Here, we can draw a crude analogy to social interactions on a much smaller scale, with people's self-concepts working as a kind of "social formula" to justify why others ought to be friends or associates with them. Here, there is a great deal of incentive for rationalization and exaggerating one's own worth, but notice also that the account needs to be plausible to be useful.
As Curtis Yarvin has frequently observed, lies can win no permanent victory over truth. This gives deceptive political formulas a considerable disadvantage, and makes excessively deceptive formulas compel the regime to be Orwellian in nature, being existentially dependent on maintaining a deception. But if you had a regime built on absolute military authority, a fnarglocracy as Yarvin called it, that regime can afford to have a completely factual political formula. You might object that such never happens in history, but there are nevertheless gradations of deceptiveness that are politically relevant. For example, "divine right" or "mandate of heaven" can be interpreted as literally false ideas, but they can also be interpreted metaphorically, and under this interpretation, it may indeed be the case that the regime has the mandate of heaven. In such a case, the regime need not be Orwellian; an insightful, undeluded populace will be more loyal to it rather than less.
Here we see another analogy to "social formulae" - the formula, in order to be practical, needs to be reasonably plausible. The less plausible it is, the more manipulation and mind control is required, and the more the regime will have to be pathologically paranoid. To create a plausible formula however requires a certain ability to recognise reality, if only in order to know what sort of inconvenient facts to rationalise away. This can only be done effectively if you actually know the significance of those inconvenient facts, since otherwise you cannot know them to be inconvenient to your formula. Ergo, the very ability to rationalise in the manner described by Kahneman and Haidt itself presumes that your unconscious cognitive processes are accurately perceiving reality.
In summary, the basic problem with the excessively black-box view of political formulae is that it neglects the practical requirements for the maintenance of a given political formula. These requirements vary in a manner that is strongly dependent on the actual contents of the political formula in question. Sure, there are some commonalities, like the necessity to have some kind of intellectual hegemony, but it matters a lot whether that intellectual hegemony is peddling a completely distorted and pathological worldview, or a saner one accommodating of some clarity of thought, and if it happens to be located somewhere in between these two extremes, the precise location on that gradient is nevertheless important