Category Archives: Politics

The thing about design

ANT, Design, Philosophy, Politics

Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:

Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc. But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is.

So little design writing pays attention to the social reality on both sides of design — design-in-the-making and design-in-use.

Whenever designers wax political, they fall in line with politics-as-usual. They talk about all the ways design should serve the political goals shared by all good people, opposed by bad people.

It is as if they have never designed.

It is as if they have never aligned any diverse group of people around a goal before.

It would be so much better if, when politics comes up, people would wax designerly,

We do not need to politicize design. We need to designize politics.

Dysapparitions of material

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.

I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).

I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.

And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.

Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?

Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?

Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?

Now what?

Materialists are the incels of philosophy.

They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.

She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.

She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.

Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.

The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.

“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”

“If you really loved me, you would…”

Marxism is a collective abuser.

Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.

The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.

And he is making that disappointment her problem.

The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.

A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.

He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.

If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.

But she isn’t.

And now she will pay for it.

See what she made him do?

Ethos, ethics, mutuality

Autobiography, Design, Judaism, Politics

The highest achievements of humanity stand upon mutuality. Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ethics belong to an ethos. Ethics are the participatory norms of those who belong to some particular ethos.

When enemies of an ethos demand ethical consistency from those belonging to an ethos, even as they attempt to undermine, weaken or destroy that ethos, they use an ethic against itself.

Imagine a horde of hooligans flooding the tennis courts of Wimbledon. When the players, referees and spectators try to drive them out of the stadium, the hooligans howl accusations of hypocrisy. “If you really loved tennis, you would adhere to the rules of tennis, and drive us out with better and better tennis playing! See? You are no better than us. You are hooligans, too!”

The rest of the world agrees, but takes it further: The tennis crowd is even worse than hooligans. We expect more from elite athletes and connoisseurs of such a refined sport. Hooligans are just noble savages, doing what hooligans do. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to tell them where they can and can’t be, and what they can and can’t do? Tennis players, though, are like us, and we expect them to live up to our high moral and intellectual standards. Maybe even higher! When tennis players use their rackets as weapons, that is truly a betrayal of the ideals of tennis — and to our own.

So Wimbledon is condemned by the officials of the Olympics, and sports officials around the world. Social media goes crazy over pictures of the brutality of the eviction and on and on. Wimbledon is boycotted. Before long, tennis courts and vandalized, tennis players are threatened, assaulted and abused. Soon nobody even wants to wear tennis shoes in public anymore.

The entire world of tennis suffers because of the brutality of Wimbledon security guards. And the fact that tennis players think Wimbledon is above criticism only makes it worse.

I have no idea at all why I got so intense about this analogy.

I suppose it is because this to me is real. Very real.

Maybe it is because I am a designer who is entirely dependent on how people around me participate in the projects I work on.

When we initiate a projects, we attempt to initiate our client collaborators into a new way of working, and establish a design ethos around the project. If we succeed, we can do great work.

But if we fail at this — if our project participants refuse to participate in design processes — we are no longer able to play the game of design. We might be able to flex and contort and pivot and get some kind of work done, but we are no longer doing what we agreed to do. And this is fine if we are good at doing all these other kinds of work. If we are excellent logistics managers, business analysts, process engineers and so on, this is unpleasant but doable.

But if we are designers who approach everything as design, and this is how we cope with practical matters, we are deprived of what is needed not only to flourish but to cope at all.

And to be told, “just design harder and harder, better and better” is a demoralizing insult.

Just play tennis better and better, be extra, extra punctilious about playing by the rules, and eventually the hooligans will see what we are doing, and choose to clear off the courts. Then they might eventually even learn to love our sport. We must have enough faith in our way that we keep playing even when our courts are crowded with people who loathe tennis and tennis players.

Design is not only a set of design techniques, or a design method for effective use of techniques in concert, or a design theory upon which method is grounded, or a design praxis of reflective practice and applied theory, or a tacit design way resulting from a life of deep design praxis. It is all of these, of course, but more than that design is an ethos, which depends on a set of design ethics.

Whenever I hear designers talk about design ethics it always goes directly toward the same set of environmental and social justice concerns. I have yet to hear designs discuss the behavioral norms required for design to happen at all.

And then designers wonder why we seem unable to get the conditions we need to do the work we do.

Our work is almost automatically rejected out of hand by industrious builders with no tolerance for non-rigorous intuitive fluff. They need to very efficiently show progress toward building the next undesirable, unusable unintuitive thing in their backlog.

Design is only possible where a design ethos (at least temporarily) prevails.

Liberalism only works within a liberal ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ecological credit and debt

Politics

One thing I can say for environmentalists — they seem to sense humankind’s debt to the natural order far more immediately than their opponents do.

I’m tempted to make an analogy. Just as conservatives fear economic collapse because (stereotypical) liberals think they (allegedly) can keep spending and spending and running up more and more debt, environmentalists see this same problem with ecology.

A liberal environmentalist might say to a (stereotypical) conservative, you can’t keep overdrawing on our natural resources this way and expect that ecological debt to accrue faster than it can be repaid. The ecology can extend us some credit, in the form of resilience and adaptation, but there is a limit, and when that credit limit is exceeded, expect collapse.

This is a very rough analogy meant only to indicate a trajectory of potential understanding. It is a newborn intuition. If someone wants to analyze it to bits — kill it in the cradle — destroying it will be like stealing candy from a baby. But I sense that it has some potential to mature and become a stronger line of argument. Or maybe it will grow up to make appeals to common understanding on ecology and economy.

Service design as a way

Design, Politics

A good service designer should be an observant connoisseur of services. This is not easy. The best designed services are unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, appearing only at carefully choreographed moments of “service evidence”. The best part of a service goes entirely unnoticed and unappreciated.

Services are most noticeable when they break down — when they are not good.

This is why, when people ask me what service design is I answer with a question: “When is the last time you were truly infuriated with an organization?”

Everyone has a story. Five to five hundred minutes later, when the story subsides, I say: “My job is to prevent that from happening.”

Answering the question “When is the last time you received truly good invisible service from an organization?” is a question only true service designers can answer with the same energy.

It almost takes prolonged exposure to absence of a service to appreciate its invisible presence.

So many little things must go well to notice little infuriating things that don’t.

We live in blessed obliviousness to innumerable luxuries, noticing only the flaws.

Not to get political, but if we ever succeed in dismantling “the system”, we will discover innumerable services we never knew were sustaining our lives and our very selves, in ways we never detected or even suspected.

Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Polycentrism

Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.

As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.

Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule.  A patch, if you will.

Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.

It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.

And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…

Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.

They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.

When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.

You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.

They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.

Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.

They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.

According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.

Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.

Unlike us.

Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.

Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.

Respect acknowledges that when we look at another  and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.

Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.

Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.

Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.

So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.

Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.

Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.

Conscience warfare

Autobiography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.

That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.

On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”

This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.

But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.

My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.

Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.

And all this is only for private thought.

I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.

My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.

My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.

Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.

For many “the personal is political”.

But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.

The personal should not be political.

And the political should not be personal.

Conflating them destroys both.

And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.

I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.

I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.

I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.

Eternal effigicide victims

History, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Jew-haters, antisemites, anti-Zionists have diverging reasons for hating what they conceptualize variously in religious, racial, historical, political, ideological terms.

The ontology shifts about according to the faith and doctrine of the ones doing the hating. But the emotion — angst expressed as hate — and the target of the hate is constant: Am Yisrael, the People of Israel. It is Am Yisrael and our perpetually evolving, disrupting, regenerating, self-transcending tradition, dedicated to the ever-expanding transcendent One beyond being.

Am Yisrael is the radical other who stands in for the radical Otherness of the transcendent. When it is impossible to annihilate reality and reality’s transcendent ground, but one needs to vent infinite hatred somewhere, however impotently, the best lightning rod for discharging one’s angst is whoever loves what one hates.

And when effigicide is directed at Jews, it is rarely confined to Jews for long, for the simple reason that Jews are not the only people who offend ideoidolators.

Effigicide is the violent expression of angst toward the supraformal absolute directed at someone with living form.

Ancientspeak

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Orwell famously invented the idea of an artificial language semantically engineered to destroy the possibility of thought beyond a set ideological horizon.

For a Newspeaker, any notion with potential to interfere with total cooperation with Ingsoc would be mentally inconceivable. Such an idea would require no suppression. Not only would it be impossible to communicate to other people, it could not form as an intelligible concept in the first place — even a concept requiring rejection and condemnation.

As I have said before, realia we can intuit as relevant, but which we cannot conceive and understand within our overall understanding (our metaphysic) induces perplexity and intolerable dread. Such realia stands at the outer edges of intelligibility and threatens the shimmering migraine mirage membrane separating us from infinite annihilation.

Within this membrane of intelligibility is everything — the totality of the known and knowable universe.

Beyond the membrane of intelligibility is unspeakable evil, toward which one feels inexpressible angst, hatred and terror. Such angst is radically objectless (as Heidegger noted in Being and Time) — and this lack of object itself creates yet more angst, because the very concept of angst stands beyond the membrane of intelligibility. Such angst always finds an object, into which it can discharge itself and find temporary relief. Ingsoc wisely provided such objects and occasions for discharge (Two Minutes Hate). Emmanuel Goldstein (an all-purpose political villain) or some enemy state or another were provided as lightning rods to direct this hate along politically useful channels, producing a sort of cathartic post-coital devotion in its exhaustion.

A Newspeaker indoctrinated in Ingsoc would live inside an intentionally, systematically narrowed horizon of intelligibility, surrounded by intense, pervasive evil, which was conveniently embodied by enemies, who stood in for any reality or idea unthinkable in Newspeak. Who isn’t precisely with us, is absolutely against us. Docility within. Hostility without. Two sides of the same totalitarian existence.

Of course, the above account blends Orwell’s thought with my own.

I’m presenting it Newspeak as an antithesis of an opposite ideal, that everts every feature of Newspeak.

The angst of transcendence is interpreted not as inexpressible evil deserving infinite hatred but as ineffable goodness inviting and emanating infinite love. The language is not centrally engineered but organically developed polycentrically across a community of radically non-uniform unique individuals among whom wisdom is distributed.

Of course, whoever speaks and things and exists in this language would be a special target of totalitarian hatred. It wouldn’t be discharged in a mere Two Minutes Hate. You’d need something closer to a Two-Thousand Years Hate.

Despite the risks, though — and these do exist even in an intellectually expansive free society like ours where young people are trained to think critically and unanimously embrace the value of diversity (“diversity is conformity”) — I would very much love to learn such a language.

The justest kid

Fables, myths & parables, Politics

A group of kids gathered in a playground after school every day to play and wrestle and do kid stuff.

The two strongest kids were bitter rivals. They fought almost every day.

One day the slightly stronger of the two kids had an epiphany.

He was tired of wasting his strength fighting his rival. It was not only pointless and destructive; it was immoral.

From now on he would use his strength responsibly — against strength itself. He would impose a regime of justice in the playground, where nobody could be stronger than any other.

So the strongest kid announced to the weaker kids that he would no longer be the strongest kid. From now on he would give his strength away. Whenever the weaker kids found themselves in a power disparity, his strength would be theirs. He would jump in and help the weaker kid prevail over the stronger one.

The former strongest kid, having renounced strength, would now be known as the justest kid.

The weaker kids loved this idea, and immediately rose up against the second-strongest kid. With the help of the justest kid, they beat his ass, and brought him down to their level.

And whenever the second-strongest kid — or whichever of the kids who became a little more powerful than the others — tried to attack the justest kid, they all viewed this as what it truly was: an attack on justice itself.

Indeed, wherever things became even slightly unequal or hinted at injustice, the justest kid stepped in and gave away his strength, and with the enthusiastic cooperation of the other kids, quickly reestablished perfect equality and justice.

And the justest kid’s plan worked.

Everywhere he looked, he saw only justice and equality.

And the kids discovered that they too loved equality and justice, and preferred it greatly over the brutal and abusive struggle for power that formerly dominated their playground.

They had reasons, too

Ethics, History, Judaism, Politics

People also thought they had good reasons for hating Jewish people in 1933. And in 1821. And in 1894.

The reasons change.

The name for it can only be used once before it must be abandoned in disgrace, and a new one coined.

But the target is constant.

The justifications always look reasonable, or at least convincing from the inside, but they are obviously distorted when seen from outside that fact-bending, standard-doubling field.

The cycles start hot with resentment and hate intoxication. They mellow into thoughtless conformity. (“If every person I respect has this anti-judaism/anti-Jew/anti-Israel/anti-zionism attitude, it must be a respectable attitude to have.”)

People thought they had good reasons for hating zionists (or vaguely sympathizing with zionist-haters) in 2023-2025.

They will all want to pretend you resisted this. But, right now, in the present, I only know a few non-Jews with the humanity, moral integrity and intellectual honesty to look at this situation and say what it is. Everyone else tries to blur, qualify, equivocate, squirm into conformity with the illiberalism they are in bed with. They want to reserve their right to “criticize” so they can remain in good standing with their morally bankrupt peers.

I am observing this blurriness with the sharpest eyesight.

I am watching and learning.

I will never forget how each and every person in my life behaved in this crucial time.

Most do exactly what most people did in 1821, 1894 and 1933 did: Stand quietly on the sidelines trying to look exactly as indifferent as they truly are, harboring a lukewarm mixture of confused conflicting opinions in their loose minds.

Whatever they try to blur, they will never blur the sharp resolution of my memory and of my understanding.

Hiroshimite genocide

Politics

The bombing of Hiroshima was clearly a genocide of the Hiroshimites — the indigenous people of the land of Hiroshima.

The population of this land was tiny — only 350 thousand — to America’s 140 million.

By 1945, Hiroshima had already been militarily degraded to the point of defenselessness. This is why American bombers could fly in and release their payload with impunity.

The attack was entirely unnecessary. Only a few hundred thousand more American deaths would have sufficed to win a ceasefire.

Worse, to this very day we do not know how many of the Hiroshimites were loyal to Hirohito and how many were innocent victims. But we can be almost 100% sure the support was far short of universal — especially when we count the children and women who always only want ordinary, peaceful lives, like you and me.

But if you look at a spreadsheet and calculate the death ratio between Americans and Hiroshimites, the objective facts speak louder than anything else. Virtually no Americans died in this operation, compared to nearly 140,000 Hiroshimites.

That is approximately 40% of the Hiroshimite population — just wiped out.

If you compare this to other genocides, for example to 66% of the the European Jewish population who died in the Holocaust (while Europeans either joined in on the killing or low-key prevented Jews from escaping), or the more recent genocide in Gaza where 3% to 4% of Gazans were killed in treacherous urban warfare (where Hamas did everything it could to get their own population killed so they could photograph them and use the images to emotionally manipulate know-it-all progressivist ignorami), you can see that the Hiroshimite genocide sits squarely between the 4% and 66% of two of our most paradigmatic genocides, and is therefore, quantitatively, objectively genocidal.

So it was an unnecessary, deadly and indiscriminate attack on a tiny population perpetrated by a much larger and better-armed power. Those who perished might have included dissenters and unenthusiastic supporters of Hirohito. These Asians were allegedly killed to prevent the death of Americans, whose lives were considered more valuable than Hiroshimite lives. This was true not only of Americans, but Europeans, most of whom were white. And there it is again: race. It’s always there if you look for it with eyes capable of seeing only that. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it, unless you learn other ways to understand the world.

Against red oil

Design, Politics

I caffeine-ranted at Susan this morning.

I complained about how much the work-world goes on about the importance of passion, while ignoring the personal nature of passion. It behaves as if it is a moral duty of every employee to care on command, and that it is the duty of every leader to get employees to care, or, failing that, to put on a convincing performance of caring, or failing that, to weed out those who are unwilling or unable to care or pretend to care.

And education reinforces this cultural delusion by insistently assuming that every child has exactly the same potential to be the same exceptional student, equally great at everything and passionate about whatever someone needs them to passionate about. Every child has the same potential as every other to be the same conveniently effective and efficient human resource, quantifiable as a man-hour in a man-week within a man-year. If only the world were more just, managers would have a more uniform supply of talent to utilize. Human work could be more like electricity or plumbing instead of delivered in the painfully inconvenient form of a human being.

The “social justice” of K-12 edu-activists and managerial convenience are the twin convergent goals of education, in direct service to the corporate world, which is insatiable for a supply of human resources of maximum amorphic convenience. Oil is “black gold” — human resources are red oil.

I like to think of service design as reasserting personal specificity.

The premise of service design (as I practice it) is that each person lives to provide specific kinds of services. These services give that person a sense of purpose in life, and rather than consuming their energy and making them feel depleted, used and exhausted, the work taps into inner energies. Other services, however, feel onerous or meaningless, and they prefer to receive these services from others.

In other words, people are more like organs with specialized abilities and needs than as generic plastic materials which can be formed into whatever shape is required. A corporation (etymologically, this means “body”) is an organ-ization, a system of organs arranged to exchange services and co-operate as a living being.

The core mission of service design is to understand the ideal service exchange of each personal “organ” and to organize them into something organic and effective within a service-exchanging ecosystem.

Education should complement this mission by helping each student understand their own organic ideal — the service exchange embedded in their being.

Dreher, Slezkine, Idel smush-up

Judaism, Politics

Just days after I noticed how little I care about modernity, suddenly I care again!

I was reading an alarming article on Rod Dreher on the advanced state of decay and alienation among Zoomer right-wingers, that has recently come fully to light, but which was not only predictable, but explicitly, repeatedly predicted. Oh, I know. Progressivists claimed to be wise to this evil strain within the right from the very start, and used this to justify persecuting everything right of itself, including liberalism, in order to extirpate “fascism” before it could rise up and dominate. But by treating everyday normal people as abnormally vicious, it alienated the liberal middle — including myself — and set conditions for this self-fulfilling prophesy that it can now claim to have foreseen. We now have a split Overton — the window pane is cracked into two entirely incommensurable narratives, each controlled by its own illiberal, extreme pole — each antisemitic in its own style.

Dreher mentioned a book by Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century. One takeaway:

…the skills that Gentile culture forced Jews to develop by excluding them from society gave them what it took to prosper under modern conditions. In other words, our distant ancestors made them what they are … and today, some of us wish to punish the Jews for it. Put another way, the way our ancestors made them live made Jews especially adaptable to the modern world.

Jews, thanks mainly to Christian anti-Jewish policy, were subjected to conditions that eventually produced modernity. Jews “enjoyed” a head start, and developed skills needed to thrive in a nomadic cranial labor economy. Centuries later, when the rest of the world found themselves in the same unhappy conditions Jews had learned to manage, and needed an explanation and villain to blame for it, guess who played the eternal scapegoat.

Strange coincidence — I have been reading Moshe Idel the last few mornings. One of his core theses is that the history of Kabbalah is an interplay of two primary tendencies or trends. One is theosophic and nomian and the other is ecstatic and anomian. I immediately connected it with Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian framework for understanding tragedy, which was/is the fusion of the two. I have always viewed this Janus-face fusion as Hermes.

Yuri Slezkine called the Jewish people a Mercurial people as opposed to the Apollonian nationals who play fickle host. And then I came upon this passage in Idel:

A proper understanding of the last major Jewish school of mysticism, Hasidism, must take into consideration the merging of these two mainstreams, which had competed with each other for more than a millennium and a half: ecstasy and theurgy, or anthropocentrism and theocentrism. The result was a synthesis that, on the one hand, attenuated the theurgical-theosophical elements and, on the other, propagated ecstatic values even more than previously. Or, as we shall see in a passage from R. Meshullam Phoebus, classical Spanish and Lurianic Kabbalah were reinterpreted ecstatically. This emphasis on individual mystical experience may be one of the major explanations for the neutralization of nationalistic messianism in Hasidism. Although the aftermath of Sabbatianism could also have prompted interest in a more individualistic type of mysticism and redemption, we can envision the emergence of the Hasidic type of mysticism as part of the dissemination of religious values crucial for the ecstatic Kabbalistic model.

Idel and Slezkine merged in a terrible insight.

If Jews were the proto-moderns, and antinomian totalitarianism is a kind of disorder of modern shock — is it possible that Sabbatianism / Frankism was a proto-totalitarianism?

This is a super-sketchy, reckless, unsupported suggestion — not even a hypothesis. But I want to note it here as something possibly worth digging into later.

Truce logic

History, Politics

By the logic of today’s incredibly compassionate, well-educated, thoroughly-informed and self-aware international overclass public, because there was some unknown number of innocent Germans and Japanese (at minimum, the children!), we shouldn’t have fought Germany and Japan to defeat and unconditional surrender. To stop the bloodshed, we should have fought to a truce, and left Hirohito and Hitler in power.

I need to dig around and see if anyone has written alternative history fiction on this scenario.

I can’t think of any scenario where a person of the contemporary “left” would will a military victory and surrender of any power willing to fight to the death. And the main obstacle to this would be belief such powers exist. Because, as I’ve said, this kind of mentality cannot comprehend radical evil, cannot comprehend that anything might exist that transcends its comprehension, therefore denies what transcends its comprehension, therefore denies the existence of radical evil, therefore becomes the banal servant of radical evil. They’re just keeping their heads down, doing their job, saving for retirement: la la la la.

Mechanocracy

Politics

If you accept James Burnham’s theory of managerialism, it is clear that AI is bringing that social order to an abrupt end. And changes in social order bring revolution.

We have a strange tendency, perhaps inherited by Marx, to omit questions of collective character from macrosocial analyses. It is almost as if we think the persons who constitute overclasses are interchangeable tokens. It’s just a quantitative difference ranging from zero power and total innocence to absolute power and absolute corruption.

I would say, though, that those who ascend by military prowess, those who ascend by risking and winning wild bets, those who ascend by forming interpersonal relationships, and those who ascend with pure engineering brainpower will form entirely different ruling classes who will dominate society very differently.

We are about to witness a return to genuine capitalism, after a hiatus we didn’t even realize had happened.

The means of production are being re-seized by a technological elite, who win, not by understanding people, but by rigorously excluding personal considerations. Theirs is an objectivity through elimination of subjectivity — or at least all subjectivity beyond their own hyper-technik subject.

These new technologies not only manufacture things, but information, analysis, insights, beliefs and souls. And they manufacture new technologies that invent technology-inventing technologies. And they manufacture weapon systems that no force of human warriors however large, skilled or brave can battle longer than a single afternoon.

Every age has its apocalypse. We have these apocalypses because each of us will die, and to our little selves, when we die the world dies with us. We feel it coming: nothingness.

We rummage in the dirt for what meanings mean.

2016, explained

Politics

I can’t believe I never posted this. I’ve been repeating it for years.

Who you voted for in 2016 is almost entirely a matter of who you hated more as a kid: the teacher’s pet, who took your name and made you stay in from recess, or the bully who atomic-super-wedgied you on the playground.