Listen now | Concise outline of the audio lecture: I. Introductory Thoughts (Listen to Dmitry Shostakovich’s 2nd Waltz here to take a nice break) II. A Satirical View of World History from the Perspective of the Universal Human Rights Advocate (Listen to Eugen Doga’s
Excellent first lecture and fantastic selection of reading. The Moldbug essay was great food for thought, especially the thought experiment of what would happen to a country’s economy if it ceased international trade. The Waltz essay started off dense, but wound up becoming quite illuminating. I particularly enjoyed page 42 where he talks about how a globalized system forces specialization on states, which, while making the whole system more efficient, makes that state weaker as it grows more dependent. That really set off a lightbulb for me over the changes we’ve seen to the US economy over the past 30 years.
I found the most thought-provoking essay to be Hudson’s piece on Human Rights. The essay starts off reasonable enough. I subscribe to the Christian idea that all human beings are given dignity by God, hence, Christians are called upon to love their neighbors, with “love” meaning to will good of the other.
I then noticed the victories that she claims for Human Rights which includes the fall of colonialism and apartheid. Can these really be claimed as victories? Since Europe left Africa, the continent has engaged in endless civil war, infrastructure has evaporated, and dysfunctional states that masquerade as democratic nations are the standard for governance. Is this inherently better for human dignity, than when outside powers enforced the rule of law on the continent?
Okay, so what then is the UDHR’s standard for dignity and where do they come from? Hudson states that the framers consulted philosophers from different religions. Yet when you read the UDHR, there is no reference to God in the document. Okay, well perhaps this was some sort of natural law. After all, most religions agree on the golden rule and oppose things like murder. Well, if you were hoping for a limited document that highlighted only shared universal values, Eleanor Roosevelt is here to disappoint you. The UDHR declares that values as far reaching as: forming trade unions, free & compulsory elementary education, participating in community art, and holiday pay are all *Human Rights*.
These “rights” didn’t come from religious prophets citing divine revelation. They came from what was fashionable amongst late 1940s liberals. But in 2020 what was progressive in 1940s clearly isn’t liberal enough, so it’s been astonishing to watch UN’s Office of the High Commissioner interpret Article 16, the right for people to get married, to not only include gay marriage, but also suggest that the article indicates that IVF and abortion are human rights.
Since the UDHR refused to root itself in a distinct religious morality, under the justification that this would make the UDHR more universal, we see that the end result is a system of morality that is neither universal nor religious. Take the Human Rights Campaign pushing for gay marriage as a “human right”, a view which UN leaders are sympathetic to. Gay marriage is a concept that is condemned by all major religions and culturally is rejected almost everywhere except in western Europe and North America (and even there it's been implemented by courts, not popular vote). The end result is that we have an international body advocating and enforcing a culture which is rooted simply in elite fashion, not in divine revelation or cultural tradition, as was originally advertised.
This newfound culture has become like a religion, and States who stray outside of these norms find themselves condemned as sinners. In a world where human rights are enforced with military action, Martin Luther King’s “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” takes on a menacing tone. With such rootless standards, it’s only a matter of time before elite opinion changes, and a state finds itself targeted by the hegemonic power.
While the way the UDHR interprets Human Rights is insidious, I can’t help but be sympathetic with its original aims. The 20th century was horrific for civilians. Slaughtering innocent people is wrong. If one has the power to stop atrocities, it’s hard to argue that they should stand down. The idea of letting another Rwanda happen is unsettling. The siren’s call of Samantha Powell is alluring. The sad reality of it, as seen in Libya where Powell turned a small human rights crisis with a liberalizing dictator into a decade-long, region-destabilizing, civil war; is that the West’s cure is often worse than the disease. I think it’s possible that there can be a balance, such as the 2014 intervention against ISIS which targeted a non-state actor who was committing atrocities. But with a track record as bad as ours, perhaps it isn’t the wisest decision to give ourselves a license to kill, especially when this license is written and interpreted by such unserious people.
That was a great first lecture, and I look forward to the rest.
I began this session's readings with Yarvin's article RIP Globalism, Dead of Coronavirus. I remember reading it back when it came out, when we had very little information about the virus and extreme caution was warranted, in my opinion. His vision of split hemispheres and absolute isolation was very interesting to me. I began thinking about the potential effects of this, and if it is possible.
You mentioned in the lecture that it seems as though Yarvin is suggesting some sort of international hegemony to enforce this absolute isolation. This also troubled me. In a structure where all states are independent and free to choose their future, they act in their own self-interest. If a state was to decide that they wished to return to a pre-industrial standard of production, only a militarily advanced state could protect them from predation from their more advanced neighbors. Their isolation would be, funnily enough, subsidized by the good will of the international community. I think this is a fatal flaw for this idea of international politics.
The way to survive the state of nature between nations is as it always has been. Be strong, be wise, keep your adversaries on their toes, make it prohibitively expensive to mess with you. You can't rely on everyone else's good will. To believe it can be otherwise is pure fantasy.
All great comments so far. I’ll take my thoughts in a slightly different direction.
Cerberus opens with Plato’s Apology of Socrates and a discussion of what I’ve started shorthanding as The Veil - this idea that it is difficult to see the assumptions embedded in your society. “It is not possible for me in a short time to remove from you a slander that you have held in your hearts for a long time”. We are emotionally attached to the dominant narrative under which we are born and the UDHR is nothing more than another salvo of Progressivism and an attempt to control that dominant narrative. The UDHR’s appeal to end all violence/war is attractive if either A) you yourself cannot fight and/or B) you believe you will control the emerging ‘non-violent’ hegemony(ies) (which of course will become violent as you see necessary)
Yet I, too, sympathize with Peter Paradise’s observation of Sam Powell’s alluring siren call. To paraphrase Yarvin, modernity (and perhaps Christianity, too) teaches us to be deeply passionate and principled, to make the world a better place, and to prefer a more open and interconnected world where Universal Basic Human Rights are protected. As other commenters more eloquently stated, it is the poorly defined and bastardized notion of ‘universal dignity’ that is problematic. To what extent do I owe dignity to another who won’t grant it to himself? In what way does my obligation change if this person is my neighbor versus a stranger halfway around the world?
As I saw in a tweet today, we are a combination of our genetics and our adopted ideologies. Genetics scares the UDHR crowd so they attempt to do battle in the ideological sphere. And like Sunzi they attempt to win first by enveloping us in this Veil of Liberalism and UDHR-ology, before they go to war. @L0m3z had a nice criticism today, stating “the respectable [R]ight fundamentally misunderstands how the murky ground-level “facts” of our politics only emerge out of a narrative frame that selectively highlights some and denies and distorts others.” (12/11 @ 11:23am) In a way, facts are only facts if they are allowed to see the light of day. The same is true for ideologies.
As a recovering internationalist, libertarian and (apparently) psychotic myself, I’m hopeful that the HUM 302 class gives us the tools to further disabuse ourselves of these preconditions and in turn help others explore the light.
Coincidentally there were many parallels between Cerberus’ praise of Yarvin and the most recent Caribbean Rhythms (Ep 61: Frog Advantage). Regarding how to communicate with disenchanted liberals, Cerberus states “Moldbug begins to show…tensions that always inhere in the internationalist approach to things” and “by pointing out that internationalists are not evil.” BAP similarly states “…[the frogs] great power is in poking at those obvious hypocrisies…exposing their pretensions or ignorance…expose the ignorance and absurdities of the globalist ideas”
I have additional thoughts about Cerberus’ discussion of detachment, red pills vs. clear pills, etc. but perhaps I’ll leave that to other for now. Thanks for reading and I look forward to exploring these readings and lectures with everyone.
This first lecture was fantastic and really helped shed some light on thought-provoking readings. While I have more to say on the matter (likely in a fully-fledged essay), I have some questions regarding Yarvin's article and some perspectives which were maybe not considered or included due to time constraints.
Yarvin goes into some detail to describe the costs of internationalism, including the global homogenization that it has led to. When he runs his thought experiment on 19th-century Englishmen and Americans, and emphasizes the duty of nations to help each other flourish, his argument becomes weak. Unanswered, and perhaps answerable, is the question "why?" - subjugation of one culture by another may simply be inevitable in a zero-sum international politics environment.
If we are nationalists, then our nation certainly has no duty to help other nations flourish. Yarvin's thought experiment is the position of the weak when confronted by the strong. Why should the strong (England, America) not exert their will and exploit the weak for their benefit? What does the strong have to gain by helping a foreign nation flourish? Would the Roman Empire, for example, have survived or dominated European history had their ordering principle been what Yarvin recommends?
Furthermore, helping a lowly neighboring country flourish to become a competitor country poses a grave threat to a ruling elite who do this. This has similarities to Cold War era Eastern Bloc countries which could see their material conditions and position in the world declining - it leads to widespread view of failure of the regime's maxims and loss of regime legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Arguably, from a nationalist perspective, the Western powers owed it to their citizens to extract as much wealth as possible from China and Japan.
Yarvin's position with regards to 19th century interventionalism can only be held from a place of equal arrogance as the internationalists who imposed their culture on the East. Yarvin's thought experiment suggests that Western Powers should have assisted backwards Asian nations, demonstrating the efficacy of Western norms as they did at the time, but demand they stay culturally fixed in place to maintain international cultural diversity. Unfortunately, while the damage done by Western powers enforcing a monoculture is real, it appeals only to guilt and to the losers of geopolitical intrigue. Our arguments, if they are to be effective, must appeal to the strong, not the weak.
For further thinking on the end of globalization, some of you may find Peter Zeihan's recent book and lectures (pretty easy to find on YouTube) of interest. His argument is America was pulling away from the international order established post-WWII already, and the pandemic is only speeding the process up, no matter what Biden and his fans say about re-establishing it. I'm working, so I don't have time to write more, but I thought I'd suggest it as a potentially interesting rabbit hole to jump into.
I liked the lecture a lot, and the class in general, one reason being because this led me to that essay by Waltz. I really liked it, and although I definitely agree it's a little dry, I liked it. The analysis of international politics in structural terms adds a sense that one can investigate and uncover a sort of 'science of government' that has an Aristotelian way about it. The part I like is the fundamentals, the definitions that give us the linguistic tools to dive deeper into these topics. Great choice. To grab a quick snapshot of the fundamentals as I see them: Systems are semi-closed arrangements of component units in a given structure, each unit having particular functions, in some aspects sharing functions and operating as essential equals, while in other structures or substructures the functions differ and often have command-and-obey hierarchical qualities to them. The domestic sphere is hierarchical while the international sphere is anarchic in the sense that units do not have direct command-and-obey structures. This cannot be a complete picture, since no system of human interaction can be completely hierarchical or anarchic, since there will always be power disparities and personal autonomy.
The difference between domestic politics and international politics is one that isn't widely enough acknowledged, leading to the situation wherein people attempt to impose domestic solutions to international affairs, adding to the creation of the globalist ideology. Globalism could from one stance be considered the attempt to impose the structure by which we deal with each other domestically onto the international system. From another position, it could be seen as an attempt to respond to the international system in ways that would be more appropriate for the domestic system, in essence mistaking the nature of the system and operating with functions that might work were the system otherwise. The first position could be seen as an intentional imposition, an attempt to knowingly rebuild the system, while the second position implies simple human ignorance. Of course this nationalism/globalism conflict is more like the hundred-handed of legend that two handed humans. Perhaps the misapplication of function to system is caused by outside or domestic agents with ill intentions spreading disinformation or otherwise corrupting influence. Perhaps influence from domains as yet unknown such as deep socio-psychological disturbance.
The difference is particularly glaring in the realm of economics, wherein the free market policies that do advance technology and efficiency and add to the total level of production and widespread efficient distribution of free markets can't be applied to the global scale without serious alterations and consideration, simply because California's gain is Connecticut's gain, but China's gain isn't our gain. The competitive aspect of international affairs, on account of its anarchic structure, impedes cooperating in a fair system to the gain of all. This applies to economics and a whole host of other areas.
Waltz seems to suggest that recognizing and participating in the structure of the system, such as recognizing and resolving the need for self-help, is beneficial to the participants, and we can understand why that would be the case. So why this inability to recognize the difference between the domestic and international systems? Shouldn't this be self evident? In-group and out-group distinction has historically been a ubiquitous phenomenon. The way we deal with the out-group has always been different than the way we deal with the in-group. The fact that we treat the two classifications of people differently is what creates the different structures in the first place. Perhaps the inability to differentiate between the methods by which we deal with each other domestically and internationally can be traced to an inability to make decisive in-group/out-group distinctions.
Excellent first lecture and fantastic selection of reading. The Moldbug essay was great food for thought, especially the thought experiment of what would happen to a country’s economy if it ceased international trade. The Waltz essay started off dense, but wound up becoming quite illuminating. I particularly enjoyed page 42 where he talks about how a globalized system forces specialization on states, which, while making the whole system more efficient, makes that state weaker as it grows more dependent. That really set off a lightbulb for me over the changes we’ve seen to the US economy over the past 30 years.
I found the most thought-provoking essay to be Hudson’s piece on Human Rights. The essay starts off reasonable enough. I subscribe to the Christian idea that all human beings are given dignity by God, hence, Christians are called upon to love their neighbors, with “love” meaning to will good of the other.
I then noticed the victories that she claims for Human Rights which includes the fall of colonialism and apartheid. Can these really be claimed as victories? Since Europe left Africa, the continent has engaged in endless civil war, infrastructure has evaporated, and dysfunctional states that masquerade as democratic nations are the standard for governance. Is this inherently better for human dignity, than when outside powers enforced the rule of law on the continent?
Okay, so what then is the UDHR’s standard for dignity and where do they come from? Hudson states that the framers consulted philosophers from different religions. Yet when you read the UDHR, there is no reference to God in the document. Okay, well perhaps this was some sort of natural law. After all, most religions agree on the golden rule and oppose things like murder. Well, if you were hoping for a limited document that highlighted only shared universal values, Eleanor Roosevelt is here to disappoint you. The UDHR declares that values as far reaching as: forming trade unions, free & compulsory elementary education, participating in community art, and holiday pay are all *Human Rights*.
These “rights” didn’t come from religious prophets citing divine revelation. They came from what was fashionable amongst late 1940s liberals. But in 2020 what was progressive in 1940s clearly isn’t liberal enough, so it’s been astonishing to watch UN’s Office of the High Commissioner interpret Article 16, the right for people to get married, to not only include gay marriage, but also suggest that the article indicates that IVF and abortion are human rights.
Since the UDHR refused to root itself in a distinct religious morality, under the justification that this would make the UDHR more universal, we see that the end result is a system of morality that is neither universal nor religious. Take the Human Rights Campaign pushing for gay marriage as a “human right”, a view which UN leaders are sympathetic to. Gay marriage is a concept that is condemned by all major religions and culturally is rejected almost everywhere except in western Europe and North America (and even there it's been implemented by courts, not popular vote). The end result is that we have an international body advocating and enforcing a culture which is rooted simply in elite fashion, not in divine revelation or cultural tradition, as was originally advertised.
This newfound culture has become like a religion, and States who stray outside of these norms find themselves condemned as sinners. In a world where human rights are enforced with military action, Martin Luther King’s “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” takes on a menacing tone. With such rootless standards, it’s only a matter of time before elite opinion changes, and a state finds itself targeted by the hegemonic power.
While the way the UDHR interprets Human Rights is insidious, I can’t help but be sympathetic with its original aims. The 20th century was horrific for civilians. Slaughtering innocent people is wrong. If one has the power to stop atrocities, it’s hard to argue that they should stand down. The idea of letting another Rwanda happen is unsettling. The siren’s call of Samantha Powell is alluring. The sad reality of it, as seen in Libya where Powell turned a small human rights crisis with a liberalizing dictator into a decade-long, region-destabilizing, civil war; is that the West’s cure is often worse than the disease. I think it’s possible that there can be a balance, such as the 2014 intervention against ISIS which targeted a non-state actor who was committing atrocities. But with a track record as bad as ours, perhaps it isn’t the wisest decision to give ourselves a license to kill, especially when this license is written and interpreted by such unserious people.
That was a great first lecture, and I look forward to the rest.
I began this session's readings with Yarvin's article RIP Globalism, Dead of Coronavirus. I remember reading it back when it came out, when we had very little information about the virus and extreme caution was warranted, in my opinion. His vision of split hemispheres and absolute isolation was very interesting to me. I began thinking about the potential effects of this, and if it is possible.
You mentioned in the lecture that it seems as though Yarvin is suggesting some sort of international hegemony to enforce this absolute isolation. This also troubled me. In a structure where all states are independent and free to choose their future, they act in their own self-interest. If a state was to decide that they wished to return to a pre-industrial standard of production, only a militarily advanced state could protect them from predation from their more advanced neighbors. Their isolation would be, funnily enough, subsidized by the good will of the international community. I think this is a fatal flaw for this idea of international politics.
The way to survive the state of nature between nations is as it always has been. Be strong, be wise, keep your adversaries on their toes, make it prohibitively expensive to mess with you. You can't rely on everyone else's good will. To believe it can be otherwise is pure fantasy.
All great comments so far. I’ll take my thoughts in a slightly different direction.
Cerberus opens with Plato’s Apology of Socrates and a discussion of what I’ve started shorthanding as The Veil - this idea that it is difficult to see the assumptions embedded in your society. “It is not possible for me in a short time to remove from you a slander that you have held in your hearts for a long time”. We are emotionally attached to the dominant narrative under which we are born and the UDHR is nothing more than another salvo of Progressivism and an attempt to control that dominant narrative. The UDHR’s appeal to end all violence/war is attractive if either A) you yourself cannot fight and/or B) you believe you will control the emerging ‘non-violent’ hegemony(ies) (which of course will become violent as you see necessary)
Yet I, too, sympathize with Peter Paradise’s observation of Sam Powell’s alluring siren call. To paraphrase Yarvin, modernity (and perhaps Christianity, too) teaches us to be deeply passionate and principled, to make the world a better place, and to prefer a more open and interconnected world where Universal Basic Human Rights are protected. As other commenters more eloquently stated, it is the poorly defined and bastardized notion of ‘universal dignity’ that is problematic. To what extent do I owe dignity to another who won’t grant it to himself? In what way does my obligation change if this person is my neighbor versus a stranger halfway around the world?
As I saw in a tweet today, we are a combination of our genetics and our adopted ideologies. Genetics scares the UDHR crowd so they attempt to do battle in the ideological sphere. And like Sunzi they attempt to win first by enveloping us in this Veil of Liberalism and UDHR-ology, before they go to war. @L0m3z had a nice criticism today, stating “the respectable [R]ight fundamentally misunderstands how the murky ground-level “facts” of our politics only emerge out of a narrative frame that selectively highlights some and denies and distorts others.” (12/11 @ 11:23am) In a way, facts are only facts if they are allowed to see the light of day. The same is true for ideologies.
As a recovering internationalist, libertarian and (apparently) psychotic myself, I’m hopeful that the HUM 302 class gives us the tools to further disabuse ourselves of these preconditions and in turn help others explore the light.
Coincidentally there were many parallels between Cerberus’ praise of Yarvin and the most recent Caribbean Rhythms (Ep 61: Frog Advantage). Regarding how to communicate with disenchanted liberals, Cerberus states “Moldbug begins to show…tensions that always inhere in the internationalist approach to things” and “by pointing out that internationalists are not evil.” BAP similarly states “…[the frogs] great power is in poking at those obvious hypocrisies…exposing their pretensions or ignorance…expose the ignorance and absurdities of the globalist ideas”
I have additional thoughts about Cerberus’ discussion of detachment, red pills vs. clear pills, etc. but perhaps I’ll leave that to other for now. Thanks for reading and I look forward to exploring these readings and lectures with everyone.
This first lecture was fantastic and really helped shed some light on thought-provoking readings. While I have more to say on the matter (likely in a fully-fledged essay), I have some questions regarding Yarvin's article and some perspectives which were maybe not considered or included due to time constraints.
Yarvin goes into some detail to describe the costs of internationalism, including the global homogenization that it has led to. When he runs his thought experiment on 19th-century Englishmen and Americans, and emphasizes the duty of nations to help each other flourish, his argument becomes weak. Unanswered, and perhaps answerable, is the question "why?" - subjugation of one culture by another may simply be inevitable in a zero-sum international politics environment.
If we are nationalists, then our nation certainly has no duty to help other nations flourish. Yarvin's thought experiment is the position of the weak when confronted by the strong. Why should the strong (England, America) not exert their will and exploit the weak for their benefit? What does the strong have to gain by helping a foreign nation flourish? Would the Roman Empire, for example, have survived or dominated European history had their ordering principle been what Yarvin recommends?
Furthermore, helping a lowly neighboring country flourish to become a competitor country poses a grave threat to a ruling elite who do this. This has similarities to Cold War era Eastern Bloc countries which could see their material conditions and position in the world declining - it leads to widespread view of failure of the regime's maxims and loss of regime legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Arguably, from a nationalist perspective, the Western powers owed it to their citizens to extract as much wealth as possible from China and Japan.
Yarvin's position with regards to 19th century interventionalism can only be held from a place of equal arrogance as the internationalists who imposed their culture on the East. Yarvin's thought experiment suggests that Western Powers should have assisted backwards Asian nations, demonstrating the efficacy of Western norms as they did at the time, but demand they stay culturally fixed in place to maintain international cultural diversity. Unfortunately, while the damage done by Western powers enforcing a monoculture is real, it appeals only to guilt and to the losers of geopolitical intrigue. Our arguments, if they are to be effective, must appeal to the strong, not the weak.
For further thinking on the end of globalization, some of you may find Peter Zeihan's recent book and lectures (pretty easy to find on YouTube) of interest. His argument is America was pulling away from the international order established post-WWII already, and the pandemic is only speeding the process up, no matter what Biden and his fans say about re-establishing it. I'm working, so I don't have time to write more, but I thought I'd suggest it as a potentially interesting rabbit hole to jump into.
A little late but here goes!
I liked the lecture a lot, and the class in general, one reason being because this led me to that essay by Waltz. I really liked it, and although I definitely agree it's a little dry, I liked it. The analysis of international politics in structural terms adds a sense that one can investigate and uncover a sort of 'science of government' that has an Aristotelian way about it. The part I like is the fundamentals, the definitions that give us the linguistic tools to dive deeper into these topics. Great choice. To grab a quick snapshot of the fundamentals as I see them: Systems are semi-closed arrangements of component units in a given structure, each unit having particular functions, in some aspects sharing functions and operating as essential equals, while in other structures or substructures the functions differ and often have command-and-obey hierarchical qualities to them. The domestic sphere is hierarchical while the international sphere is anarchic in the sense that units do not have direct command-and-obey structures. This cannot be a complete picture, since no system of human interaction can be completely hierarchical or anarchic, since there will always be power disparities and personal autonomy.
The difference between domestic politics and international politics is one that isn't widely enough acknowledged, leading to the situation wherein people attempt to impose domestic solutions to international affairs, adding to the creation of the globalist ideology. Globalism could from one stance be considered the attempt to impose the structure by which we deal with each other domestically onto the international system. From another position, it could be seen as an attempt to respond to the international system in ways that would be more appropriate for the domestic system, in essence mistaking the nature of the system and operating with functions that might work were the system otherwise. The first position could be seen as an intentional imposition, an attempt to knowingly rebuild the system, while the second position implies simple human ignorance. Of course this nationalism/globalism conflict is more like the hundred-handed of legend that two handed humans. Perhaps the misapplication of function to system is caused by outside or domestic agents with ill intentions spreading disinformation or otherwise corrupting influence. Perhaps influence from domains as yet unknown such as deep socio-psychological disturbance.
The difference is particularly glaring in the realm of economics, wherein the free market policies that do advance technology and efficiency and add to the total level of production and widespread efficient distribution of free markets can't be applied to the global scale without serious alterations and consideration, simply because California's gain is Connecticut's gain, but China's gain isn't our gain. The competitive aspect of international affairs, on account of its anarchic structure, impedes cooperating in a fair system to the gain of all. This applies to economics and a whole host of other areas.
Waltz seems to suggest that recognizing and participating in the structure of the system, such as recognizing and resolving the need for self-help, is beneficial to the participants, and we can understand why that would be the case. So why this inability to recognize the difference between the domestic and international systems? Shouldn't this be self evident? In-group and out-group distinction has historically been a ubiquitous phenomenon. The way we deal with the out-group has always been different than the way we deal with the in-group. The fact that we treat the two classifications of people differently is what creates the different structures in the first place. Perhaps the inability to differentiate between the methods by which we deal with each other domestically and internationally can be traced to an inability to make decisive in-group/out-group distinctions.
In any case, great lecture! On to the next one...