I'm no Calvinist, we can disagree about the relative proportion of master/slave dynamics within it and perhaps Scott underplays the master element. But I think it's qualitatively different from master morality as Nietzsche would have it. There's an essay in Also Sprach Zarathustra about how a man should become a camel, then the camel should become a lion, and then the lion a child. A man becomes a camel by becoming a beast of burden and taking on as many moral responsibilities as possible. This is an ambiguous position, on the one hand demonstrating mastery over one's body, on the other hand we end up as slaves to our conscience. So, we have to become a lion - grrr - and violently tear off the shackles of our moral responsibilities. This seems anarchic, but there is still a kind of duty going on, which ultimately eats itself in order to give way to the final state where we achieve a kind of equilibrium where we are just playing, like a child - neither good nor evil but a kind of anarchic synthesis. Puritanism seems like camel morality par excellence, yes we are choosing to rule ourselves but it's ourselves we are ruling over and that's not good enough for Nietzsche.
>Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
Great to see Rats persisting in their hilarious lack of Theory of Mind.
Sorry Scott, but not everyone is an autistic Jew in California, and the vast majority of people quite rightly see *your* values as bad.
Ingroup preferences are entirely legitimate. Vital energy and productive conflict are essential for civilizational success—far more so than “happiness.” And Effective Altruism is a repulsive peasant ideology that promotes a monstrously dysgenic misallocation of resources.
I read a long, excellent post. I think to myself “Bismarck would be livid at this”… and then the thought is supplied instantly. What a wonderful world.
Yes, I emphatically disagree with your values and think they are bad. You don't get to simply assert that your own values are universally applicable and that anyone who substantively disagrees is "not interested in morality." That's not how philosophy works.
It would be one thing if you could meaningfully ad baculum, but rationalists and Effective Altruists are substantially weaker than tribalists and ingroup preference enjoyers, so to anyone outside your bubble this tendency just comes off as impotent sneering.
Anyway if you want to debate any of this live name a time and I'll make it happen.
"Cruel" is a pretty simple term and I think can be adjudicated without having to resolve deeper moral disagreements. I think when you say (I interpret this as approvingly, but tell me if I'm wrong) that people "don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones", that's describing cruelty. Insofar as you support that kind of reasoning, it's fair to describe you as liking cruelty.
I agree "bad" is a value judgment, but it's one that I'm making now. According to my values, your values are bad. I accept that according to your values, I'm bad. I support my values, which is why they're my values, and why I use them to make value judgments. We could try to figure out whether we have enough shared values that we have a factual disagreement (in terms of how we cash our our shared values) rather than an irreconcilable difference of premises, but having seen how you behave when debating other people doesn't make me particularly excited to embark on this long and probably fruitless journey.
That probably comes across as harsher than I mean to be. I'm less against the content of your values (which I interpret as supporting personal and civilizational strength) than I am against your aesthetic (which seems to carry an assumption that being nastier, more callous, and more dishonest is a better way to build that up). I think civilizational strength is part of the good, but not all of it - see section 11 of this post for more about my thoughts of this.
But also, I do think you *might* be wrong about how to get civilizational strength. We're not having this discussion from the Roman, Viking, or Mongol Empires - on the broadest scale, civilizations/religions/subcultures survived and contributed to the current hegemonic culture in proportion to how much they embodied values of compassion, universalism, civility, honesty, and reason. I think your project is likely to be a flash in the pan compared to mine, precisely because you're too obsessed with the idea of winning (sort of; I also think there's a sense in which you're not obsessed enough, but that's another 10K word post). The people who actually win, long-term, are all some variety of religious nutcase who wouldn't know winning if it kicked them in the balls, who just pursue some deeply held vision of Beauty or The Good.
It was not so long ago that cruelty was measured by distance. Needlessly kicking a dog in the street can easily be explained as cruel. Caring about some amount of dead children somewhere dying somehow in a great inscrutable chain to produce iPhones is a very Mrs. jellyby thing to focus on!
You're kind of assuming that producing IPhones is a mysterious process, that requires some amount of faceless dead children as its input.
Not caring about some random suffering plantation that has nothing to do with you is fine in my book, but if you're sipping the sweet product, in an unnecessarily cruel chain, you're cruel, and aesthetically repulsive.
Glorifying the amount of dead children produced by industrial processes is not a common take I have seen even in the far right. I can see it being used as an aggressive rhetorical pushback to benthams piece specifically, but that’s because Bentham has a very infuriating woke adjacent rhetoric of his own where he will demonize anyone who falls on the wrong side of his arbitrary morality trolley scenarios.
> You're kind of assuming that producing IPhones is a mysterious process, that requires some amount of faceless dead children as its input.
That's exactly how modern capitalism is organized, perfectly optimized to hide from you, the end consumer, exactly how much sentient suffering is hidden in the tendrils of the production chain. If we've heard about iPhones and coltan, it's only because some people have gone out of their way to dig the information out. When you buy stuff out there, there is no exhaustive list of components and their suppliers and their methods of production, so you literally don't know. That doesn't make you cruel and aesthetically repulsive, just a random member of the public.
Of course you can buy your veggies from farmer's markers and your spices from fair-trade organic sources, if you have the time and money. But I've yet to see an organic, fair-trade server rack or industrial HVAC machine, so the approach only goes so far.
It's said "ignorance is bliss". Not knowing anything about children dying to produce my iPhone doesn't make me cruel in the least.
Now you tell me about children dying in order to produce my iPhone. I had nothing to do with the children dying, but now you blame me for it. What is the solution now? I do without an iPhone (iPhone's aren't fungible) because someone told me cruel things happen to make it possible to own one?
The morally correct thing to do is ask Apple to stop exploiting children, because it is cruel. If Apple didn't know, then it is the same situation I'm in, and you need to go to whoever is performing the actual cruelty. If THEY refuse to change, then you go to Apple, and say one of their suppliers is being cruel. Now, what's Apple supposed to do? Stop buying from their cheapest supplier? Lean on their cheapest supplier to stop being cruel, forcing them to employ more expensive methods for getting their cobalt, and thus being no longer the cheapest supplier? For someone willing to cruelly exploit children, that doesn't sound like a course of action that's going to happen.
Unless they are actually forced to work in the mines/plantations, caring about them specifically because you use their product is Copenhagen ethics, as buying their product doesn't make them worse off, it makes them slightly better off.
Perhaps we should distinguish between cruelty and callousness. Not caring about suffering one way or the other is callous; deliberately causing suffering is cruel. (Or maybe "unnecessary" suffering, since there might be times when it's necessary to cause suffering, e.g., yelling at a child for running across the road without checking for care.)
If I ignore the suffering of others, I am callous. If I enjoy it, I am sadistic. If I engage in it, I am cruel. If I support others engaging in it... I think that's a little cruel but mostly callous?
Yes. Walt is not sure about 1) whom to be harsh against and 2) why. If being harsh to the outgroup (which may feel intuitively right) makes the outgroup stronger and thus more dangerous for the ingroup, that is not wise. On the other hand, doing the opposite, making the ingroup strong by being very harsh on them while keeping the outgroup weak via welfare sandwiches, would feel intuitively wrong.
It's not that I *like* it--I merely see it as an inevitability, because I recognize that any scalable production chain will necessarily involve the brutal exploitation of various asymmetries. Everything about our modern lifestyle--from our food to our phones to our porn--is facilitated by mass exploitation and cruelty, and the vast majority of people (even EAs) ignore most instances of this because reckoning with the totality of it would prove psychologically unbearable. The point is that focusing in on buying malaria nets etc. is a colossal misallocation of resources that should obviously be used for initiatives like colonizing Mars.
Regarding aesthetics--I'm certainly more provocative and theatrical than most rationalists will find acceptable, specifically because I grew up on 4chan and developed as a propagandist and metapolitical theorist in the Alt Right of 2015-2016. But I also suspect you misunderstand where I'm coming from because of certain generational and subcultural differences that aren't necessarily indicative of intractable differences in temperament. My exchanges with BB in particular will certainly come off as meanspirited to people outside my specific cultural ecology, but they need to be understood as frattish intellectual locker room talk and unrepresentative of my overall public posture.
For instance, if you listen to the podcast I did for The Motte with Trace and Yassine you'll see I'm entirely able and willing to engage in a respectful and good faith dialogue with mostly adversarial interlocutors who are generally aligned with your own worldview:
Anyway, I write in this provocative style for a number of reasons.
First and foremost it's incredibly important to me that I remain an unapologetic champion for angry and disenfranchised young white men who hardly need yet another finger wagging in their face demanding they come to terms with the many indignities of liberal modernity. It's precisely that sort of schoolmarmish impulse that negatively polarizes young men into giving Andrew Tate power and cultural clout. Young guys want to follow someone who calls things gay and retarded and will brutally insult people who approach his spaces in bad faith, and that's why I've grown so explosively on Substack. It's certainly not for everyone, but neither am I.
The second reason is I believe that the aggressively honest, direct, and somewhat autistic rhetorical style employed by most rationalists is counterproductive in many conversations. To properly engage liberal mean girls who mostly communicate in bad faith status games you occasionally need to argue obliquely or somewhat theatrically. I've written my thoughts on this more comprehensively here:
The third reason is I have zero respect for liberal institutions or our mainstream egalitarian culture, and generally seek to cultivate an avowedly piratical mindset in young intellectual right wing white men that gives them moral permission to let loose on the world and assert their Will to Power. That's also why I'm building alternate power structures that very deliberately exploit the asymmetries and inefficiencies of modern capitalism to help my men rapidly build wealth:
Anyway, I have more nuanced and complex thoughts on "winning" and the long term prospects of our respective projects, but to my mind that topic is better discussed in a more conversational setting. Suffice it to say I'm eager to have a good faith dialogue with you, and am confident Trace and Yassine would vouch for my character and intellectual honesty.
Let me know if you're interested and we'll schedule a time.
You actually like it. I understand that. Aesthetically it is cool. Pirates are cool. I've seen like 10 pirate movies myself and kept playing videogames of that kind. Vitality has an inherent coolness, and what better way to prove that than to form a small band and take on empires.
It is even understandable that you like it. Autistic California Jews on LessWrong.com spent a considerable time figuring out what our terminal goals should be. Suppose a Machine God will grant our deepest wishes. What to wish for? Infinite happiness? We might get a lotus eater society. Etc.
Turns out, truly terminal goals are kind of hard. We just rarely think about them, because there are so many intermediate goals.
It is even harder to come up with a truly rational justification of a terminal goal. If we want to be honest, our truly terminal goals are rarely rational, we just like them.
A thing likeable in itself is an aasthetic. Heroic vitality is obviously likable, that is like 90% of Hollywood and 100% of superhero comics.
When it is called bad and cruel, it is because we really prefer to mix a lot of compassion into the "likeable things" mixture. We prefer our heroic vitality the Superman way, all that strength used to save babies from burning buildings.
I will be honest with you. I cannot speak for other people, but I think my compassion or empathy might come from a place of weakness - feeling helpless humans need being saved from burning buildings because I might one day be a helpless human needing that. I certainly needed a lot of help in my life so I am in favour of a society that helps people. Though not necessarily people across the planet -just adding to Africa's overpopulation does not seem so effectively altruist to me. But psych yards for the homeless in the West, yes. One day I could end up there.
I do not think suffering builds character and makes people stronger. The discomfort of hard work does, but one must do it from a place of health. Being unhealthy, both physically and mentally, never made me stronger. And I learned how very easy it is to become unhealthy.
I'll spare you the annoying argument on how we've vastly decreased brutality and cruelty over the past century or two (eg banning slavery, banning child labor, mandated overtime) with little damage to capitalist production, since it's an overdone argument and I can already predict the answers.
But I think if you take your own position about strength seriously, you end up 90% allied with EA (I think this is where Richard Hanania has ended up). You might not be on board with the malaria nets, but stuff like ending pandemics, promoting polygenic selection, preventing x-risk, and permitting/licensing/FDA reform are all basically the result of taking "strengthening the human race" seriously and trying to figure out where that ends up. All of these seem like much better uses of your time and energy than trying to lead a sub-faction of the alt-right. I even think the global development stuff, viewed properly, looks pretty good by these lights - turning 3rd world countries into 1st world is about as pure an example of strength and vitalism as you can get, and even if you're skeptical about the strong version for race realist reasons, there's a world of difference between Sudan and Kenya which race realism doesn't rule out and which is probably based on institutions, capital, and other changeable things.
When you're instead viscerally opposed to EA, such that the malaria nets make you really angry despite the many good-according-to-your-values things we're doing, it makes me think you're coming more from a place of really hating the weak (or at least hating the idea of helping the weak) as opposed to loving strength, which I think is a morally dangerous place to be.
I have a hard time figuring out what you truly want, because most of what you post is strategic and not really about what the final goal of all your strategizing is. You mentioned "Mars colony", but this is a trap. By all means plant the flag on Mars to show we can, but we're not going to get mass colonization before we can terraform it, because right now if you want to live somewhere cold and lifeless, you can go to North Dakota, which is cheaper and has oil, and Mars has zero advantage over this. What will actually happen is that we'll have some kind of intelligence explosion (either from AI or genetic engineering) and go straight to building a Dyson sphere. This is kind of a petty objection, but my point is that I don't think you've thought about your end goal at all compared to the vast amount of work you've put into strategizing, and I think if you ever did think about your end goal enough to make it coherent, you would find that forming a new edgy sub-faction of the alt-right isn't the best way to achieve any of the actually useful and glorious stuff, and you would end up doing something that looks more like EA. This makes me think that on some level you just like leading an edgy sub-faction of the alt-right. Which honestly does sound really fun, but again makes me suspicious of your morality. And everything else (the locker room talk, the disdain for autistic philosophy) is downstream of your decision to lead an edgy sub-faction of the alt-right.
> "I have zero respect for liberal institutions or our mainstream egalitarian culture, and generally seek to cultivate an avowedly piratical mindset in young intellectual right wing white men that gives them moral permission to let loose on the world and assert their Will to Power. "
I don't really see the difference between this and the commies who say it's okay to shoplift because capitalism is bad. "If I don't 100% agree with the politics behind institutions, I don't have to follow the rules" means nobody ever follows any rules (since people will never agree on politics) and then civilization becomes impossible. You can either become North Korea where everyone's being watched at all times, become San Francisco where half the stores have left and the others have bars on every window and keep all their items in locked cases, or you can try to cultivate the civilized virtues, one of which is some form of obedience to law.
> "That's also why I'm building alternate power structures that very deliberately exploit the asymmetries and inefficiencies of modern capitalism to help my men rapidly build wealth:"
Some effective altruists tried that too one time. They made $30 billion in a year or two, and it wasn't worth it. That part of the movement has been thoroughly purged, and good riddance. When I talk about Vikings and Mongols and things that are short-term good vs. long-term Good, it's coming from many experiences like that one and trying to think about what people could have done better.
(you could also try not to get caught, but since you're announcing your plans to defraud the disability system on a public Substack, I think that strategy probably isn't a good match for your style)
I appreciate that the version of you commenting here is much easier to talk to than the version I see elsewhere, and apologize for suggesting you were incapable of good discussion. I don't do live debates, but thank you for the offer.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply--very interesting thoughts!
I'm not *against* any of the specific initiatives you mention, but none of them really animate me. Obviously it'd be preferable on net if we could turn DR Congo into an enormous Botswana or make Haiti more like Jamaica. But ultimately I don't care enough to invest any of my own energy / resources into that just to help a bunch of subaltern primitives who'd probably hate me.
This is because I differ from EAs in two important dimensions:
A) I have a much stronger ingroup preference and reject proximity-agnostic universalist ethical systems that tend to stem from abstract moral principles instead of personal honor and private duty-bonds
B) I contend that frequent and negative sum high stakes conflict is necessary to maintain social vitality, reset hedonic treadmills, and legitimize status hierarchies.
I think these differences are mostly temperamental and not especially worth litigating. They likely stem in part from me being 15th percentile in trait agreeableness and of Scotch Irish heritage. But they *also* likely stem from a colossal proportion of EAs being autistic Jews from California who are culturally predisposed to cosmopolitanism and reductive ethical systems and are oftentimes genuinely incapable of empathizing with people from a patriarchal tribalist honor culture (i.e. your comments above on Caesar and Gaul).
Ultimately I'd submit that the median American is somewhere between us in both tolerance for ingroup preference and reverence for aggression, but that they're also *much closer to me*. Universalism currently enjoys disproportionate clout specifically because culturally significant industries are demographically unrepresentative, and that creates a massive asymmetry that men like me can and have used as a tremendous source of power.
>This makes me think that on some level you just like leading an edgy sub-faction of the alt-right.
This is entirely correct! But per my comments above this is a perfectly natural objective. I don't really have precise object-level goals and generally reject that approach to politics. My specific thoughts on things like tariff policy etc. will vary with macroeconomic/geopolitical developments and technological innovations or in response to to coalitional pressures.
Ultimately my fundamental goal is for fellers like me (by which I mean all components of identity and not just race) to have as much power as possible. I want to maximize our slice of the pie. That is what matters to me and my actions are entirely sensible within that framework.
>I don't really see the difference between this and the commies who say it's okay to shoplift because capitalism is bad
The difference is in form.
I would never advocate something like shoplifting that promotes squalor and chaos. But job stacking / overemployment is entirely harmless when done right and by my reckoning actually pro-vitalist in the sense that it demands substantially *more* from people: more effort, more agency, more excellence.
>Some effective altruists tried that too one time. They made $30 billion in a year or two, and it wasn't worth it.
The difference is SBF actually broke the law in an unsustainable way that directly antagonized state institutions. What I advocate is 100% legal and a lot more decentralized, which is what enables me to advertise it so openly.
>When I talk about Vikings and Mongols and things that are short-term good vs. long-term Good, it's coming from many experiences like that one and trying to think about what people could have done better
I mean the Vikings objectively brought back a lot of wealth and hot women to Scandinavia and spread their cultural influence everywhere. Yes they civilized eventually and fell to the Cross, but that is always the goal of things like this. You raid and plunder when you start at a disadvantage and opportunities abound and then you parlay your spoils into a more settled institutional power as things close down (as the remote work environment inevitably will) and you become the hoary old king defending his turf from the hungry young bandit.
Such is the eternal dialectic of generational struggle that I maintain is essential to civilizational vitality and must be emphatically embraced.
Anyway I'm not Tony Soprano and would never try to defraud big public institutions in an organized way. I'll certainly help my guys individually exploit certain loopholes (especially in juicy corporate short term disability policies where this sort of thing is already priced in) but it's incredibly important that everything remain technically legal and above board.
That said I'm also building a polycentric structure for ultra-agentic and highly disagreeable guys who eat what they kill and take full responsibility for their outcomes while operating under total anonymity, so the downsides to public advocacy are significantly reduced and give me lots of space to be a touch self-indulgent as a propagandist.
We'll see if it blows up in my face, but so far things look fantastically promising.
Thank you as well, my good man. Enjoyed this exchange and hope to at some point engage with you more thoroughly in longform.
'That part of the movement has been thoroughly purged, and good riddance.'
This has not been my impression. The movement seems to have avoided any serious investigation into what happened and who knew what when. There was a lot of talk, but it staid talk. Actual action seemed to instead focus on preventing bad PR.
The rumour mill goes people involved with FTX shady actions and history are still around as community members in good standing. Not because the community investigated and cleared them, but because there was no investigation.
All the soul searching and self flaggelating EA Forum posts in the wake of FTX seem to have amounted to "We will change as a movement so nobody can credibly connect us to something that might cause bad PR ever again." Instead of "We will change as a movement so something bad doesn't happen again."
These things are not the same. They're almost the opposite! More focus on PR and not looking bad means the next time some people have some circumstantial evidence and vague bad feelings abut a major EA org or figure, there'll be even more pressure to keep quiet and not rock the boat than there was last time.
Isn't it unclear whether SBF was actually doing it for EA reasons? He only donated a tiny fraction of the money he made after all. Seems to me that the naive utilitarian "dark EA" approach would be to donate *all* of it and then collapse intentionally, using a bunch of legal obfuscation or routing through crypto tumblers or whatever to make clawbacks impossible.
>we've vastly decreased brutality and cruelty over the past century or two with little damage to capitalist production
You have the direction of causality reversed here. Brutality has decreased _because_ of capitalism not in spite of it. That's because, to first order, people are always treated according to their economic value; capitalism increases an individual's economic value and therefore individuals in capitalist cultures are treated better (you stop whipping your employees when you can get more value out of them by putting them in front of a computer). Just look around at the most/least brutal environments and see which ones are more and less capitalistic.
Places where capitalism interacts directly with underdevelopment (e.g. iPhone factories) may be local maxima of suffering, but that's like pointing to a surgeon's scalpel penetrating flesh and saying it seems worse than the tumor he's trying to remove. Sometimes you have to cut to cure. The painful conditions in the iPhone factory will lead directly to long-term health of the areas that surround them in a dose-dependent way. This is consistent with the positive correlation between length of colonial occupation and modern GDP, as colonialism is an extreme example of the same principle.
You could have brought more unambiguous examples of progress. Child labor went away because economic efficiency grew so people could make a living without sending their children to work (which is what made it realistic to ban it), not because we banned it. Work hours decreased because efficiency grew so people could make a living working fewer hours, not because we limited work hours (or banned "mandated overtime", I guess a worker's right to agree in advance to be available for long hours?). Most "achievements" of the labor movement were made possible by technological or perhaps organizational improvements. At that point, workers could've just offered to accept a lower wage in exchange for better conditions; instead, they pressed the government to mandate better conditions, which likely resulted in the same lower wages on the long run, just removed people's option to choose to make more money under worse conditions. You tend to say you lean libertarian; you should think through these kinds of things from the standpoint of libertarian economic theory and at least address its objections before you bring illibertarian measures as positive examples, or just bring different examples if economic policy is not the main topic.
Getting cobalt suppliers to stop employing child labor is the same sort of thing as the reformers who got cheap low-quality housing banned on the grounds that it exploited tenants, or who try to ban gig work without employment protections, to bring examples where you agree with the equivalent counterargument.
You wrote that cruelty is not worth opposing because it's inevitable.
To me that's like saying it's not worth going to the doctor when your sick because death is inevitable.
Even if suffering is inevitable, the specific suffering caused by preventable malaria deaths is not inevitable.
You also write that malaria nets are a misallocation of societal resources. How can something that accounts for less than one one thousandths of one percent of global GDP be worth talking about in that way? Societal resources can go to whatever projects you think they should go to and also have left over for nets.
Or maybe you are not really anti-malaria nets per-say, but don't want us to spend money on them because that would force us to recon with global economic inequality about which you say
"reckoning with the totality of it would prove psychologically unbearable"
But that would suggest a principle of "never making incremental progress towards lofty goals when doing so would force you to consider the magnitude of the problem since that's psychologically unbearable"
But in advocating for that principle you are making incremental progress towards the goal of "destroying altruism" which forces you to consider the magnitude of the phenomena of "people doing altruistic things" -- why is that not equally psychologically unbearable?
I think there are a couple different valid answers to your questions. (Why not oppose cruelty?)
1. There is a difference between opposing cruelty *in principle* versus opposing *specific cruelties*. There is a good argument that can be made about how the former stance leads to a bad set of values and outcomes (e.g., worshipping malaria nets), whereas as the latter doesn't nearly as much (e.g., preventing my neighbor's daughter from being abused by her father). Namely, because –
2. Sometimes, it takes cruelty to oppose or drive out cruelty. Contrary to Christian morality, I believe it's true that sometimes Satan *can* drive out Satan. And that this is desirable, i.e., results in More Good. Yes, this always runs the risk or devolving into an endless cycles of Girardian memetic violence.
But, often times, it just ... doesn't? I smack you in the face for insulting me, and then we both move on with a blank record – but not necessarily because you forgave me in a Christlike manner or whatever.
3. Related or extending from #2, but slightly different, it the idea that Cruelty Is Necessary For The Good. Not always, and not fundamentally, but incidentally in the right ways. I think this is actually one of the main theses of Master Morality.
If you accept that cruelty is not definitionally Bad, but only contingently Bad, then you can acknowledge that Bad, e.g., cruelty things can (and maybe even ought to) occur in service of Good.
This is a step away from saying cruelty is *necessary* for the good. But the way to get there is to point out that for the rest of eternity, there will always be instances where a specific instances of cruelty are needed to produce good.
Going to the doctor wasn't worth it for most of the history of medicine, but people (who could afford it) went anyway. At some point in the 20th century it switched pure pseudo-science to adding value. Nowadays it's wasteful on the margin in the US, but still has infra-marginal value.
> You also write that malaria nets are a misallocation of societal resources. How can something that accounts for less than one one thousandths of one percent of global GDP be worth talking about in that way?
It's worth talking about, if you're talking directly to the people doing the misallocation.
The fraction of the world's dollars that go into EA is negligible. But perhaps the limited resource is the time and energy of smart young independent-minded people with free time. If all the EAs became master-morality job-stacking Greeks-speaking nudist bodybuilders, spending their time and money on awesome instead of mere good, then we could slightly increase the amount of faraway suffering in the world but greatly increase the amount of nearby awesomeness.
"The point is that focusing in on buying malaria nets etc. is a colossal misallocation of resources that should obviously be used for initiatives like colonizing Mars."
Colonizing Mars would be a colossal waste of resources considering how underpopulated the present-day Earth is.
Pirates are the enemies of all humanity. Caesar crucified the pirates he captured, though he was merciful enough to also slit their throats.
Propagandists are bullshitters. Being a propagandist, and for a cause as unworthy as Trump, does not make people inclined to take what you say seriously.
> who are generally aligned with your own worldview
I don't know that Yassine and I are generally aligned with each other's worldviews, even, much less Scott's. I love Scott's writing and have been tremendously influenced by it, but even while I feel like my meta-worldview is quite compatible with his, I tend to interact as a friendly critic of things like effective altruism and utilitarianism that are major parts of his frame.
In many ways, I wind up closer to what Scott describes as Nietzschean morality in this post than to precisely where Scott lands.
If this all sounds quite nitpicky, it shouldn't, necessarily. I think that's what differentiates Scott's reaction to you ("but I like being bad and cruel") from mine ("badly wrong about some important things, but headed in an interesting and often worthwhile direction").
yeah I suppose I somewhat lazily lump all three of you together as “rationalist types” in the same way normies will pigheadedly insist I'm still a white nationalist even though the differences are incredibly obvious / salient to me and actual WNs tend to think I'm a sleazy prevaricating grifter
I also tend to think of people more in terms of their meta-worldview than worldview simply because my own metapolitics are a lot more interesting than my object-level politics. The point was more that if I can productively engage with you guys I can also do so with Scott.
But yeah listening again to that Bailey call it's actually quite interesting how effortlessly you were able to steelman my positions on e.g. the inescapably racial nature of crime politics in a lot of instances where Yassine and I were intractably gridlocked. Meanwhile a lot of our more dramatic confrontations in the middle of that convo were positively Shakespearean.
There's something fantastically archetypal / primordial that emerges when you lock horns with a thematically appropriate foil and that's a huge part of why I'm so committed to overt conflict as a positive good.
> Regarding aesthetics--I'm certainly more provocative and theatrical than most rationalists will find acceptable, specifically because I grew up on 4chan and developed as a propagandist and metapolitical theorist in the Alt Right of 2015-2016.
is just hokey, unless you mean you like old buildings and art. Which Scott also vastly prefers over today's preferences. Or maybe you mean arthouse mumblecore?
I disagree about indifference being cruelty. I doubt you spend much time thinking about whether plants suffer, or whether aliens on a planet many light-years from us do. We have a limited amount of attention, and that doesn't make us "cruel" to everything outside that.
I think my stronger objection is that if someone did worry about these things, I wouldn't hold them in contempt or try to argue them out of it. I think most forms of suffering will have to wait for extremely powerful technological solutions like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative and maybe the Singularity, but I respect anyone who has the energy to put a little effort into working on them before that.
I agree. Holding people in contempt for that is a waste of contempt. Not caring about such people is just as valid as not caring about whatever it is they care about.
Arrgh. Okay, I have tried to gesture at this elsewhere, but here's the key to understand Nietzsche's defence of master morality. "Slave morality" in the end isn't everyone holding hands and being nice. It is ultimately universal slavery. Where it doesn't matter how much you struggle, how much you work, you have no chance to rise until everyone else rises too. And, yes, we have seen that in practice in places like the USSR and Mao's China.
Nietzsche's philosophy is more emotional than intellectual. It is a furious rejection of this - and he defends masters, conquerors more or less by default. Better a world where some are free to be heroic, live lives worth emulating, than a world were all are slaves, all are chained to all.
Now, there is a way out of this insane dichotomy, but it does involve listening to the most despised and misrepresented philosopher in history.
The false choice is between Slave and Master. People imagine Masters to be free, but they aren't. Power consumes those who wield it. Tyrants die by murder, and before they do, they are constantly struggling to avoid it.
There is a third alternative, the only one that allows liberty, and that is to be a Trader. To live on equality with others, relying only on their unforced, chosen cooperation.
I wrote the following dialogue, posted it elsewhere here:
"
Russel-Buddha: "Look on this earth and see the suffering that all men endure. Lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourshiment; the wounded in battle, dying in slow agony; the orphans, ill-treated by cruel guardians; and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow, a way of salvation can only be found, and this salvation can only come from love"
Nietzsche: "Good heavens, man, you must learn to be of tougher fibre Why go about snivelling becausetrvidial people suffer? Or, for that matter, because great men suffer? Tribial people suffer trivbially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted because they are noble. Your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be completely secured by non-existence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor Frederick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while."
Russel-Buddha: "You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal a purely negative one. True, it includes a negative element, the absence of suffering; but it has in addition quite as much that is positive as to be found in your doctrine. Though I have no special admiration for Alcibiades and Napoleon, I too have my gheroes: my successor Jewsus, because he told men to love their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the orces of nature and secure food with less labour; the medical men who have shown how to diminish diseas; the poets adn artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine Beatitude - "
Ayn Rand: "You are both wrong. You, R-B, in your creed, you, Nietzsche, not in your revolt, but in your banner. You, R.B., make a world of suffering, in your creed there is nothing but suffering and the relief of suffering, the negative and the zero. You would make all life one vast hospital. Your vision is only of wounds, of sickness, of hunger - and you banish utterly from man's lot the laugh the joy, the bright eyes directed to the future, the happiness of friends, the exaltation of the explorer. To you the conditions of *death* are human, are natural, but those of *life* are not - and you hold that there should not be one man free to find one moment of joy until all the rest of mankind is freed from their sufferings! You would have all slaved to all, for all time!"
Actual Buddha: "In point of fact, unlike this imposter, I did not teach any of this, and sought to show men how they might be free, what limitless power is available to them -"
All three: "Quiet."
Ayn Rand: "And you, Nietzsche, you revolt against this slavery, but what is your ideal instead? Those robbers on the grand scale are no different from those on the petty scale. You heap scorn on those who slave themselves to others sufferings - but those who *inflict* them are lower still, the very least of men. You would hold a leash, but that is only a rope with a noose at both ends. You think the tyrant, the king, the thug is free? No, he lives in fear, fear of one who shall cast him down, and even more, of his own mind, of his own knowledge that he is less than those he tramples and could lose all at any moment."
R.B. & Nietzsche: "What then do you propose?"
Ayn Rand: "This life is not a vale of tears; it is the highest and most joyous thing. Your life is the singular glory that nothing can ever replace - life is good, and the good is to live it. *Suffering* is the unnatural, the improper; *Happiness* is the right, the proper, the true state of mankind"
"And Man is not to be slave nor slaver. The sufferings of one are not a claim on the life of another. To be truly free, one must reject both ends of the leash - to treat with others as equal beings; not as beasts of burden or as objects of charity, but as equals, with whom you can trade and share in all the goods of this life.
And the heroes of *my* creed are not the chronic seekers after pain, nor the robbers and tyrants, but the explorers and adventurers, the builders and the makers. And *they* are not 'higher' forms of human life, they are the only truly *normal* humans on this good earth."
I went to "like" your post because I think its better then Walt's, but it turned out to be the reply button.
"civilizations/religions/subcultures survived and contributed to the current hegemonic culture in proportion to how much they embodied values of compassion, universalism, civility, honesty, and reason."
This obviously isn't true. The societies that most contributed to current hegemonic culture gave us manifest destiny, colonialism, and century long IQ raising because the strong let the children of the poor starve to death.
Perhaps they were less cruel then the Mongol's, but they were certainly more cruel then Yglesias.
Even Ayn Rand argued that Native Americans and Palestinians deserved to be conquered and displaced because they weren't worthy.
I take a less cruel stance in the modern day, I think they should be barred from immigrating and have to find a way to build their own successful societies (if they can).
The goal of Yglesias-ism is not a pretty one, and that's if it works out as well as they hope. One Billion Americans could easily end in Venezuela rather then Average is Over.
Random notes from a discussion of Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over:
Michael Mandel is optimistic. He thinks that the baby boomers are about to retire in droves (in part because of health reasons), helping to solve the unemployment problem of the young. Tyler, Robin Hanson, Megan McArdle, and I are unpersuaded.
Tyler pictures an economy evolving over the next twenty years to one with a slice of high earners (the 20 percent or so whose skills complement the ever-expanding power of computers) and then a large group that lives comfortably but without a financial cushion to protect against adverse shocks to health or other major risks.
Matt Yglesias wonders how, in a world that requires technical skill and social skills, those of us in the room have survived. It seems that most work for think tanks, newspapers, and other non-profits. Tyler replies that our presence in the room is indicative of marketing skills. Each of us has proven adept at marketing, with wealthy donors as our consumers in most cases. Steve Teles points out that as society’s rich accumulate wealth beyond what they can consume, their philanthropic ideas will, for better or worse, allocate society’s resources. Afterward, it occurs to me that this suggests that there will emerge a toady class, meaning people whose work in one way or another flatters the wealthy.
James Manzi points out that many people work in fields where output is hard to evaluate, such as education and health care, and I would add that entry to these fields is restricted by credentials. Tyler thinks that as we gather more data we will overcome our inability to evaluate performance sooner than people expect. If that is correct, then the credentials cartel would seem to be destined to fall. I believe that a lot of the thesis of his book stands or falls on whether such data-driven evaluation systems pan out. He would agree that we are far away right now, but he would argue that progress is fast.
What most concerns the discussants, including McArdle, William Galston, Jonathan Rauch, and Brink Lindsey, are the social implications of losing the middle class. (Hanson comments on this focus.) Tyler insists that societies will not fracture, nor will redistributionist demagogues take power. Factors favoring stability include aging, surveillance technology, the skill of the rich at controlling the political environment, nativism, NIMBYism, and the basic comfort achieved by the lower class. He points out that Britain and Germany are farther along than the U.S. in the growth of the new lower class, and their societies appear to be stable–Merkel just won re-election by a wide margin.
Tyler says that in the long run mood-altering drugs may be a solution. Teles suggests that Tyler’s next book will be The Great Medication.
It's not consistent if you consider all people equal. It's consistent if you consider some people essentially subhuman and not worthy of the same rights. Rand doesn't out and out say this (she makes aspirations about their "culture"), but its not so surprising that two low IQ dysfunctional groups make the list of people who can be displaced by better men.
Western countries dominated non-western ones because they are eugenically superior. East Asians have the genetic chops but did have a period where they needed to catch up (it's worth noting that Japan didn't get colonized and China never got fully colonized).
You couldn't get a much wider eugenic gap between Jews (worlds highest IQ) and Arabs (some of the lowest). It does not surprise me that the Jews defeated the Arabs over and over despite being heavily outnumbered, they are just better people.
>Ayn Rand’s stance on Native Americans and Palestinians really cannot be squared with her prohibition on the initiation of force and belief in the inviolability of private property rights.
You understand that that's perfectly consistent, right? Property rights are internal to cultures while wars happen between cultures. It's the same thing as thinking that murder should be illegal but still advocating for war with another country.
(It's important to note that actually, we are having this discussion from the Roman Empire— nearly the entire world has been influenced heavily by the Roman legacy. Crucially[in a very literal sense], this happened only because of the best of the Roman legacy being preserved by Holy Mother Church, the organization perhaps most blamed for slave morality, whereas the Mongol legacies have mostly faded, and the Vikings were not really an empire in the same sense).
I think "bad and cruel" is borderline uncharitable and in my opinion you're failing to properly Steel Man the Randian/Nietzchean/rightwing position. I'd like to sketch what I believe that to be. I don't know if you've never seriously considered it before or if you've considered it and dismissed it, but if it's the latter I'd appreciate hearing your reasoning because I think it's the obviously correct one.
To make this persuasive would take 5,000 words but here's the sketch. Economic development is the only way to actually help people en masse, and that is done by engaging with them in ordinary self-interested economic ways (give a man a fish vs teaching him to fish, etc). That's because charity, defined as any diseconomic activity designed to help others, almost always ends up being exploited by bad actors. This isn't simply a matter of being 'effective' either. It's a fundamental problem of poor incentive structures and is the same reason communism never works. This should make some intuitive sense because charities are essentially central planners: they presume to know how to allocate resources better than the market. History should tell you how that generally works out.
(FWIW, I believe that charity can be effective but only in high information situations of the type which only exist in close social relationships: family, friends, or culturally homogenous small groups like religious congregations. Strong social norms are required to both identify and disincentivize free riders.)
I acknowledge that the economic realities of the world put third-world workers in an unenviable position, but I would argue that the only thing (the only postive-value thing, anyway) you can do is accept that that's just the way it is. They were already in an unenviable position and anything you do to 'help' will actually just detract from the natural path of economic development which is already helping the third world ~as fast as it's possible to help them. As Shakespeare said, things without remedy should be without regard. I understand the emotional impulse to view this as callous, but consider that our emotional responses were evolved to help us navigate small tightly-knit groups. They fail utterly when applied to complex systems like global economic policy and international development. I would therefore urge you to maybe regard your instincts here with skepticism, particularly if you're a naturally emotional thinker.
Here's a simple, probably reductive, analogy that illustrates my position. Accept, for the sake of argument, that ordinary free market economic development is actually the best way to help the third world in the long run. Economic development, then, is the benign well-intentioned country doctor ready to treat all of his third world patients. Imagine him ready to operate on a painful suppurating tumor on a poor suffering child, but the child's mother is ignorant of medicine and views the surgeon as a butcher who only wants to carve up her beloved son. Instead of using her meager savings to pay for a life-saving operation, she spends it on pain medication and a visit from the local shaman. In my view EA - all charity, really - is the mother. It takes resources from the one thing that could _actually do good_ and reallocates them to palliatives which at best do nothing. Likely they make the problem worse. Sure, surgery is unpleasant and doesn't always work but it's the best chance the child has. Just like the mother, I would invite you to look past your emotional reactions and try to grapple with the possibility that the option which feels most barbaric to you is actually the best way to achieve your long term goals.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as patronizing. Anyone who wants to engage with this please do. Like I said this was just a sketch. I'm confident my position will stand up to scrutiny, so if something here seems obviously wrong then by all means point it out.
Yes, there's a generational political realignment underway and the GOP is becoming the party of the working class. My comment isn't about domestic politics. I'm using "right-wing" in the traditional libertarian free-market sense, not in the Republican vs Democrat sense.
I don't think your analogy maps onto reality that well. I agree with the opening bits, economic development is probably the best and fastest tool to genuinely help people in developing states. But EA and economic development don't need to be exclusive. Consider something simple like buying malaria nets. How are people supposed to go to work and build capital and make their society better when they have malaria? Building a skilled and educated workforce is a lot harder when people drop dead from preventable disease, or worry about their children dropping dead.
The same principle applies to something like donating rugged water filters to people without access to potable water. Of course it would be better if their country had a working water distribution and treatment network with modern plumbing. But it's even less likely they manage to build something like that when they have cholera from drinking contaminated water!
I don't see how EA or charity directed like this is anti-development. In fact it seems quite the opposite to me. Unless your position is that EA/charity is actually all like the shrimp suffering people instead of the malaria net people.
>How are people supposed to go to work and build capital and make their society better when they have malaria?
I think the better question to ask is how are people supposed to build capital when they can't even get it together enough to buy bed nets. How do you expect them to be able to solve the hard problem if they need you to solve the easy one?
Allow me a rambling analogy. No-go theorems (no faster than light travel, no communication via entanglement, no cloning, etc) are the party poopers of physics. They kill your super-cool inventive idea and usually they don't even give you the satisfaction of understanding some interesting new principle: just a dense mathematical proof that your idea violates some conservation law in an esoteric way. Boo, right? When I was learning relativity in undergrad we all had fun with the various paradoxes and figuring out exactly how time and space bent to preserve the integrity of causality. People would come up with FTL communication schemes that seemed plausible until the professor pointed out exactly what was wrong with it. Sometimes the reasons were really subtle! The takeaway is that even if it's not immediately obvious where the flaw in your FTL machine is (or your perpetual motion machine, for that matter), you can rest assured that if it breaks the speed of light (or gives you energy for free) then it's wrong. Doesn't matter how clever it is, it's 100% wrong. /ramble
The Randian/Nietzchean version of a no-go theorem for this context is: Price-driven market mechanisms are the only non-violent way to manipulate populations, and any intervention that tries to circumvent price signals at scale is guaranteed to fail. The specific reasons are in general subtle and complex and will vary from situation to situation. Simple-seeming problems in complex systems rarely have simple solutions. That’s because surface-level features (like, say, not having bed nets) are emergent phenomena. They’re equilibrium points of complicated interacting social feedback loops that involve millions of independent incentive-driven agents. That’s why solutions to social problems can't be directly engineered.
Take one of your examples: bed nets. I can think of many reasons why supplying them won't matter. For starters they might not even have positive expected value! If you assume these people are capable of rational economic behavior (which you are because the long-term goal of your intervention is to get them on a path to first-world status) then maybe not using nets is actually economically rational for them. The overhead of distribution channels, proper use, maintenance, etc might actually be higher than the value of the lives they're supposed to save. Or, you know, this could happen:
The point is that unintended consequences always dominate. Always. This is a universal rule and a direct consequence of the Randian no-go theorem of development above. That's because direct solutions only work for systems that can be analytically modeled. In complex systems like societies, solutions have to be evolved. They can't be designed (unless, of course, you use economic principles). Again, this is why communism never works. The traditional mechanism for evolving solutions for complex social problems is called culture. This is why right-wing types are so adamant about preserving culture. It's not arbitrary, it carries centuries of practical wisdom and represents the most-efficient set of tradeoffs for navigating the economic realities of the society which carries it. It is social technology.
The problem with EA is that it's the naive mother who just buys palliatives. They don't help (or, as in the bed net example above, actually hurt) and they make people feel satisfied that they're doing something when they're not. Bad solutions are worse than no solutions because they distract people from doing better things. Plus also there's the straightforward economic argument (from Robin Hanson) that it's provably suboptimal because of discount rates and compounding economic growth: saving N lives today always comes at the cost of investing that money and saving 2N lives in ~7 years. Lives saved by charity is a linear function of wealth and wealth is an exponential function of time. Trading exponential for linear benefits is always a mistake. A rising tide lifts all boats. It's far better to just let that happen than to build some retarded block-and-tackle pulley system that lifts boats by hand *especially* when doing so also interferes with the tide coming in.
> that people "don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones", that's describing cruelty. Insofar as you support that kind of reasoning, it's fair to describe you as liking cruelty.
To me it's less like cruelty and more like consistency.
There's a lot of faraway suffering in the world and I can't possibly care about all of it as much as I'd care about suffering that happens close to me. If I started caring about Congolese cobalt miners as much as they perhaps deserve then I'd have to start caring about a whole lot of other things too, and the emotional burden would be too great for me. If I'm going to stay sane, I have to filter out the vast majority of the suffering in the world.
A few years ago I went down the path of caring about everyone equally. I quickly became too stressed out to do anything and had to stop reading the news. I still care about the suffering of others outside of my immediate life, but I mentally place it back where it was before - a distant suffering, not a proximate suffering.
I think that's the only possible way to live at this point.
> We're not having this discussion from the Roman, Viking, or Mongol Empires - on the broadest scale, civilizations/religions/subcultures survived and contributed to the current hegemonic culture in proportion to how much they embodied values of compassion, universalism, civility, honesty, and reason.
You are having this discussion from a post-Roman civilization, writing in the Latin script in a country governed by a Senate whose main religion spread through the Roman Empire. This would not have existed if the small city-state of Rome had not had engaged in ruthless military conquest. And the US would not exist if it the colonists had respected the natives' right to their lands (or would not be a superpower if it had started doing that at independence). Softer values do succeed and spread sometimes in some ways, but there is no general rule.
I don't know if you meant it that way, but if you say you should care about kids dying in cobalt mines specifically because they contribute to making your iPhone, that sounds like Copenhagen ethics, unless they are actually forced to work there.
I'd also reserve "cruelty" for actively harming people, not merely failing to help them.
You could have brought examples of cruelty where there would be a broad consensus for your point and against Walt's (ones where the victim is actively harmed and/or the victim is in the same country as the perpetrator), I don't see why you brought the sort of example that can be questioned by many people from several angles, and which only a small ("autistic Californian") bubble cares about as much as you do.
Well, I don't know how if Walt would endorse any example of cruelty where the victim is actively harmed. But as far as I understand it's a form of slave morality to be concerned even about the powerful actively harming (e.g. enslaving) the powerless; if Walt would oppose that, he may not be all that opposed to slave morality.
(Child laborers may not make voluntary decisions themselves, but I assume parents generally put a high priority on their children's interests, and if they decide their least bad option is to send their children to the mines so they can at least eat something, I don't pretend to know better than them from 5000 km away.)
Scott, when you consider the affects of rationalism has affected society, the way we view the world, subjective well-being, even access to the most basic human requirements for happiness, is it not cruel? It seems to be a passive eugenics for people who thrive in the new world.
Behold! "the vast majority of people quite rightly see *your* values as bad" is simply asserting that your own values are universally applicable and that anyone who substantively disagrees is "not interested in morality".
If you're interested I made this argument (as I have many many times before). See my comment elsewhere in the thread (in response to Rothwed) and by all means please engage with it.
But seriously, even from this short exchange it's obvious - at least obvious to me - that Bismarck objects to your principles not because he "likes being bad", but because he thinks (could be entirely wrongly, but that's what he professes to think, and I see no reason to doubt it) they lead to a greater evil in the long run, e.g. decline and destruction of the civilization. Maybe he's completely mistaken, maybe every single argument he provides to prove it is utter bullshit, maybe every factual claim he bases it on is an actual lie (I don't say they are, but even assuming this extreme case) - that still would not make “but I like being bad and cruel” an accurate description. A psychopath that just wants to be cruel has no reason to worry about civilizational advance or misallocation of resources - what is in it to him?
It's easy to dismiss an arrogant and rude opponent without even bothering to consider what his argument actually is. Maybe it's even what they deserve, sometimes. But for people that pride themselves on being rational and seeking the truth (or at least the correct argument and not just the one that feels good) and not on winning internet points by "owning the outgroup" it's not exactly the on-brand behavior, I think. I hope for something better.
But in that case he could make the case from a consequentialist framework and slave morality terminal values, making the case about why this or that cruel-sounding decision increases happiness on the long term, instead of dissing those autistic, utilitarian Californians. Those autistic Californians, at least Scott personally, are quite open to considering counterintuitive suggestions as long as they are made in that framework.
FWIW, I was greatly disappointed by the last post, about "hey Righties, remember to never ever fight back :)" — but this post made my heart swell with love & appreciation for the (return of the) Scott Alexander I have remembered all this time, the one with whom I end up agreeing very nearly 100% of the time.
"You either see it or you don't." That was the point I suddenly realized: oh my God, he *does* still see it!
ok i finetuned a model as Scott (2014) - he'd have replied this:
>Scott Alexander responds:
> I’m confused. You’re saying that you like being bad and cruel, but also that that’s not bad and cruel because other people are bad and cruel, which sounds like an interesting combination of Nietzscheanism with slave morality.
> Sorry Scott, but not everyone is an autistic Jew in California, and the vast majority of people quite rightly see *your* values as bad.
Who are these mysterious people who “quite rightly” see my values as bad?
Is it the vast majority of the world’s Christians, who agree with my belief in altruism, charity, and humility, and disagree with your belief in “productive conflict”?
Is it the majority of the world’s Muslims, who agree with my belief in “happiness” as a terminal value, and disagree with your belief in “vital energy”?
Is it the majority of the world’s Chinese people, who agree with my belief in intelligence and productivity, and disagree with your belief in peasant blah blah blah?
Who are these people who have the right to claim the vast majority of the world on their side opposing my “repulsive peasant ideology”?
You’re right that I’m an autistic Jew in California, but you seem to have confused “I don’t like this person” with “this person is part of some kind of tiny, doomed-to-failure fringe”. Autistic Jews have built world-spanning empires before, have had their beliefs sweep entire continents, and generally have a better claim to being the default cultural and political paradigm than any of the ten people who read your blog.
Can we steelman you so as "I want people stronger, not happier?"
But the question in that case is whom? If you want the outgroup to be stronger, that is dangerous to your ingroup. If you want the ingroup to be stronger, you have to be harsh, almost cruel on the ingroup while spoon-feeding the outgroup into a Wall-E.
This is where you are inconsistent, you decided harsh is good, mostly aesthetically, but cannot really decide 1) on whom and 2) why. Random harshness on the outgroup just makes them stronger and more dangerous to your ingroup, while if you want the ingroup to crush everybody under the caligae, you have to be three times harsher on them than on anyone else, which is a strange way of showing love, and in fact you should be demanding welfare sandwiches for the outgroup (as it makes them weaker) while denying them to the ingroup.
I want the ingroup to be stronger, which is why I mostly support elite immigration.
I think it makes White people a lot more capable / vital / "Faustian" if they need to actively compete with Brahmins and Jews for power and resources. That is the main sense in which I'm harsher on my ingroup.
But I have also argued for e.g. buying off black people with a reparations scheme to politically disempower them and simultaneously engender significantly greater ingroup sentiment in White people:
the short meme answer is because Robert Moses singlehandedly bulldozed minority neighborhoods and put highways there, and now that's why we cities elect idiots as supervisors. also NEPA/CEQA.
but. skyscrapers are getting built. see billionaire's row in NYC. and see how B1M the youtube channel/community is absolutely deifying them. (even though they are pretty small, and weak, and disappointingly they are not the foundations of a future arcology. :( )
the problem is that elite migration is targeting those weak elites who desire suburbia. sure, they fit right in, and they are more GDP-productive than the local poor, but they are culturally meh. otherwise they wouldn't put up with all the shit you need to put up with living in the US.
One question is why you feel the need to define "White people"* as your in-group. That is hardly something given by nature. People have a variety of identities, and which one they most strongly perceive to be their in-group is highly malleable and contingent.
Brahmins in India mostly marry within caste (which is how caste persisted there). But not Indian immigrants to the US. Indians raised in the US tend not to even know what their caste is.
Maybe I do. I think it is standard European or worldwide nationalism projected to America. When you are half Scottish, quarter Swedish, nearly quarter Irish and sure as well 1/32 Anishibe, how can you make sense of your ethnic identity? It is hard to make sense of your roots, and without roots your culture is basically just consumption.
These white-identity people do not simply mean it as pale-skinned, they mean it as a mixture of Northwestern European Protestant cultures.
Given how common it is, I understand it. But it is highly contingent, in many respects. I seem to recall reading that at one point the Boston branch of some national white people's organization banned Irish members, but the president of the SF chapter was Irish. And while someone from northern Laos might define themselves as in a different in-group than someone from southern Laos, you can bet that if they both immigrate to Peoria they will likely identify as "Laotian" or even "Asian" (but probably not as Asian if they immigrate to San Francisco or Orange County, or anyplace else with a large non-Laotian Asian population).
Which organization was this? The Irish have always been legally white. There have been other white people who didn't like the Irish, but then their focus wasn't on whiteness but some other category the Irish fell afoul of.
That's been very weird to me. If the left/social justice wanted to eliminate white privilege, the best way to do that would be to undermine the concept of White. Blend in non-white people and draw lines along different axis such that skin color is not the defining aspect.
Instead, they seem driven to make White a distinct group with its own identity, which is incentivized to vote for White politicians (who support White goals) and become more and more racist.
This could be on purpose to create an outgroup for the minority coalition the left wants to build. I think that's both a dumb own-goal and directly contradicts their publicly stated purposes, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect.
>If the left/social justice wanted to eliminate white privilege
That is very definitely NOT what the left wants to do. White privilege is their bread and butter - or at least the perception of it is. The left wants to maximize the *resentment* of white privilege because they profit politically by marketing themselves as the ones who can fight it.
""I want the ingroup to be stronger, which is why I mostly support elite immigration.""
Shouldn't you want the strongest group to be strongest? Why overly support the 'in group' which could be weaker? It is entirely possible that current 'in-groups' are no longer 'stronger' and are simply 'coasting' on their inherited wealth. But if the board was re-set, they would flounder.
This is obviously wrong. There is something special about white people that makes us take risks and live in a very open, exploratory, and novelty-seeking way that isn't usually seen in other races.
But even if this weren't the case I don't need there to be a reason. I love my family more than other families because they are mine; likewise with my race.
Surely this is a joke? "Special about white people". Is this troll bait? What is 'white'? Are Italians White?
I think there are sufficient number of articles about the confluence of factors geography, water access, coal, demand, etc... needed to start the industrial revolution, or how different countries grew/fell over thousands of years, to dismiss this assertion.
Or, plenty of articles on how 'white' people have less melanin, because they live in colder northern areas, which also have less diseases than in tropics. It could all be weather, nothing to do with skin.
Just FYI, I'm not a Walt Bismarck fan or anything — no idea who he even is, I must shame-facedly admit — but this actually IS objectively wrong.
I don't mean that in a hostile way — I'm glad to discuss it, if you've an interest — just, as I said, FYI, in case you view yourself as adhering to the rationalist motto of "if I'm wrong, I wish to believe I am wrong" & would like to know that more research might be needed.
(I offer this mainly because I think I can tell that you don't debate this particular issue very often: these are what you might call "first level" arguments, if you know what I mean; like, as if someone came in and told Scott/ACX readers "effective altruism? ah, but did you know that SBF was into that stuff?!" — i.e., THAT specific point was settled to our satisfaction many, many moons ago... isn't exactly a thunderbolt to the whole worldview, so to speak.)
>Shouldn't you want the strongest group to be strongest?
There exists some subset of the population that, if superadvanced aliens arrive, would immediately sacrifice themselves to the aliens upon request. Many rationalists are in this group, actively trying (or claiming to be actively trying) to develop a "machine god."
The vast majority of humanity, on the other hand, wants themselves and "their people" (however defined) to be safe and comfortable regardless of who is strongest on the other side of the Rawlsian veil. Not many people are utilitarian to the point of self-destruction.
Why not just, like, consider all of humanity as your ingroup? It's really not hard, and then everyone would like you and you'd be on everyone's side and you could channel all this energy into something good instead of stirring up shit...
Says who? Personally my morality extends to all humans. Almost everyone I know feels the same way. What's weird is the people who still think they way you describe. Like... it's 2024. Including all humans in your morality is well overdue.
Lots of people seem to really, really dislike those who have decided to consider all of humanity as their ingroup. The former are sometimes called "somewheres" or "localists", the latter "nowheres" or "globalists".
I think they're denying the possibility of all people simultaneously being part of their in group. They might point to Russia and Ukraine and ask which one is part of your ingroup? You can say something about caring for people on all sides, but when push comes to shove, you can't actually support both sides of a conflict.
Or, for a more obvious and extreme version, you can't support both Hamas and Israel, or Al-Qaeda and the West.
Why not just, like, consider all animals as dogs? it's really not hard, and then tigers would let you pet them without attacking you and elephants could live in your house without wrecking it and
Why would I consider all animals as dogs? That's a different thing which is basically unrelated, stupid, and not morally right to do. This is a very low-effort reply.
It seems to make a good point to me. Why not consider all humans, etc? For the same reason you don't want to conflate other different things with each other. 🤷♂️
Hi Walt, you know how every iteration of white nationalism always circles back to George Lincoln Rockwell trolling on a street corner? That's not literally true, Jared Taylor never did, but it's worth being concerned about your movement going the same way:
you shouldn't obsess over the JQ in either direction
it needs to be an acceptable topic of discussion when relevant, and in this case the extremely jewish nature of EA is an entirely legitimate object of analysis given that Jews are famously cosmpolitan while EA tends to simply assume ingroup preference is illegitimate
I'm not a white nationalist but it does seem like a lot of the moral realism stuff boils down to a lack of theory of mind. It's guys who have fully internalised a particular progressive moral framework, taking for granted that everyone shares their intuitions.
I don't see how Effective Altruism is in conflict with the idea of ingroup preferences being legitimate, unless you have a very weird definition of "preference." Like, I prefer Star Trek to Star Wars, but that doesn't mean I only watch Star Trek and have never seen a Star Wars movie. I prefer pizza to burgers, but I often feel like burgers instead of pizza. Similarly, it seems absurd to say that someone lacks ingroup preferences if they spend any amount of time working towards universalist, impartial good, even if they also spend a lot of time and money on ingroups.
I donate a portion of my money to EA causes and spend a larger portion on myself, my family, people I know, etc. I suspect most EAs are similar. Some may just admit they are hypocrites, but I am sure many of them also have a principled belief in how much they are obligated to give. The fact that they give any money to EA at all does not mean they have no ingroup preferences, it just means that they don't have ONLY ingroup preferences.
I often hear critics of universalist moral theories say that a moral theory that allows for no partiality or obligation towards family or other ingroups is absurd. I don't disagree, but I also believe the opposite is true. A moral theory that posits no moral obligation towards a universalist, impartial good is just as absurd. A truly comprehensive moral theory should have both, people should have obligations to those who are close to them AND to universal, impartial goodness. The way EA currently handles this, with people donating a percentage of their income and spending the rest on whatever they feel like, is a model of how to implement such beliefs.
It's fun to watch two of your favorite authors duke it out. (Yes, I read the rest of the thread and yes, I have subscriptions to both of you under another account.)
So as a semi-autistic hemi-Jew originally from a big blue city on the East Coast and therefore intermediate between both of you (the other half's Spaniard if you go back far enough), I think Walt is quite right about tribalism. I admire Scott's attempt to think about everyone and produce a mental framework for that...and I believed in that kind of thing as a teenager, back in the 90s. Life, of course, got in the way.
Truth is most people care about themselves, most people like to be around people like themselves (heck, even rationalists have meetups), and nice things for me usually exist because someone else suffered somewhere in the world. And, a severe lack of suspicion of others' motives is a big reason why FTX happened. "Earn to Give!" Yeah, right, Sam, you want to get rich like everyone else. I'm a little surprised you were dumb enough to blow it all, but I guess some people don't know when to quit being greedy.
The dirty secret is that dark tetrad traits are useful in small doses, especially if few other people have them. (Or even large doses if you're smart and/or lucky enough...look at Donald Trump's narcissism.) Confidence is good, Machiavellianism is common sense, small doses of psychopathy are necessary in a competitive world, and sadism...well, you'd be surprised how many people are masochists in bed. (I'm straight, but given how many women make money as dominatrixes this is clearly not limited to women!)
And if he wants to get white guys to job-stack, more power to him. (Though maybe stop talking about it on Substack? If I can find it, so can Elle Reeve or Will Stancil.) They're going to discriminate against them, they should fight back. That's what it means to be a (censored) white male... Everyone else is forming identity teams, you have to also, or you'll just lose. Heck, if it weren't for my tainted blood, I'd join his movement.
Admittedly, I have a hard time hating anyone who turns 'Under the Sea' into 'On the Alt-Right'. I used to write music parodies as a kid, but Walt did a much better job.
I think the reason Scott comes off way better than Walt in this exchange is that Scott is a nerd with a Substack who knows he's a nerd with a Substack, whereas Walt is a nerd with a Substack who thinks he's the Ubermensch. Sorry to have to tell you this but anybody who really came from a master race would be busy actually taking over the world, not spending all day pretending to be a tough guy on the Internet. Respectfully.
not sure if I’d call it taking over the world, but I am absolutely taking concrete steps to build a fast track to wealth and institutional power for the men who follow me
>Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I have only read this guy a couple times, and disagree with him generally on a lot of things including analytic vs continental philosophy. But I do think he sort has the stronger argument here versus Bentham's Bulldog regarding the weaknesses and dangers of utilitarianism and its big pitfalls as some single overarching morality.
But I have been big for 20+ years on saying that the commitment to devaluing proximity is just beyond absurd and badly misunderstands what morality is even about or how to construct one people would care about or follow.
Hiya Walt. I'm not an autistic California Jew, but a WASP snot admirer of them. I don't know how California autistic Jewish thinking approaches the problem of people whose style of argument is to state but not defend their own beliefs about an issue, and then spray a layer of insults and jeers on top, sort of like, you know, Reddi Wip. My own WASP take is that it's a strong predictor of a case of undergraduate arrogance, even when it manifests in people far too old to be undergrads. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Judaism identified the phenomenon a couple of millennia ago.
I would say it's probably more accurate to call them metaphysical. I am a metafaggot: My cock is also a faggot. And I myself am nested in the middle of the great chain of buggery: I am the penis of God. John, by any chance do you have one of those cute bubble butts?
Hey. Playing with latest GPT. Since AI might be in a future 'out-group' and be subject to Slave-Master discussions. Perhaps also taking jobs like the Brahmans that Bismarck blames. Here is GPT response.
Comments on Astral Codex Ten: Nietzschean Superman
The comments on the Astral Codex Ten article "Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman" by the user 'walt bismarck' do not appear to show a deep understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy. The comments reflect a general engagement with the topic but lack specific insights or detailed analysis of Nietzsche's concepts.
General Engagement:
The user 'walt bismarck' participates in the discussion about the Nietzschean Superman but does not provide a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche's ideas. The comments are more focused on the broader implications of the philosophy rather than on specific details
Lack of Specific Insights:
The comments do not delve into the nuances of Nietzsche's philosophy, such as the master-slave morality or the concept of the Übermensch. Instead, they reflect a more superficial understanding of the themes being discussed
Contextual Understanding:
While the user shows an awareness of the general context of Nietzsche's thought, there is no evidence of a deep or critical engagement with the primary texts or a thorough understanding of the philosophical arguments
In summary, the comments by 'walt bismarck' on the Astral Codex Ten article do not demonstrate a significant understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy. The engagement is more general and lacks the depth of analysis that would indicate a strong grasp of Nietzsche's ideas.
----BUT---
Maybe need to give Walt Bismarck some slack. When summarizing all of his comments. GPT seems to think he is more traditional after all .
Specific Comments:
In one comment, 'Walt Bismarck' mentions that they do not see themselves as part of any in-group, including white people. They express a desire to be judged based on their individual actions and character rather than their racial or ethnic background
Contextual Understanding:
The comments reflect a broader libertarian or individualist ideology, emphasizing personal freedom and responsibility over group identity. This perspective is consistent with a critical stance on traditional morality and societal norms
lol. lmao. lol. yeah sure supporting the incompetent members of ur ingroup against competitors who'd eat their lunch on a fair playing field is the thing that promotes good genes...
> Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I didn't find the linked post especially convincing and have a lot of disagreements with both the content and the belligerence of the writer, but I don't think "I like being bad and cruel" is at all a fair description of it.
It was very clearly a sneering and uncharitable characterization aimed at denying rightist interlocutors any space to challenge moral universalism. This impulse (and by extension the thesis of BB's original piece) is grotesquely anti-philosophical and obviously contradicts rationalists' purported desire for an honest discourse free of underhanded status games.
Although otoh going by this note referring to "fatty yglesias", I can see why you would not want to give Walt the benefit of the doubt. Content aside he does seem to just enjoy being mean.
There probably are some groups like that but they're very unusual (it's not a general male thing), and even if it's just normal ingroup ribbing for you it's still not something you'd do with a stranger (I'm assuming you're not actually casually familiar with yglesias). Weird ribbing dynamics that come off hostile are common - e.g. my brother calls my aunt fat at random times and it's clearly friendly - but not with strangers!
Please note that what you just did is considered a poor form from both the master and slave moralities' perspectives.
You either shouldn't offend people -- or you should be a man enough to own it!
But what you do instead is strong words, followed by "I was just joking" when you receive a little pushback. Some people consider such behavior edgy. Other people just consider it pathetic.
And this is basically a small example of a more general problem: You don't actually prefer master morality. What you prefer (judging by your behavior) is talking about "master morality", but expecting people around you to be civilized. In a world actually acting on master morality, you wouldn't bother trying to discuss here, and Scott would simply ban you if you tried. Your actions seem to contradict your words.
The closest thing to master morality the internet has are scammers and people who call SWAT teams on those who disagree with them online. That is what someone like Achilles -- magically transported to our era, learning computer skills, but keeping his moral system untouched -- would do; that is, if he spent his time online at all, because it is more fun to do things in real life.
I disagree with practically everything Walt Bismarck says, and I object to how he says it, but "I like being bad and cruel" is an unfair characterization. Specifically, it's an accusation of sadism. He's promoting callousness and selfishness, but not sadism. He may be sadistic as a rhetorical technique or a personal failing, but his moral system (which he outlines in detail, with bullet points, in the linked post) specifically recommends ignoring other people's suffering; not taking pleasure in it.
I disagree semantically. If someone hates expending effort, it's accurate to say they 'like being lazy', even if laziness is not itself a factor in their utility function at all and is just the natural consequence of their actual preferences.
If someone likes to do things that create bad outcomes and inflict cruelty on others, then even if they are doing those things for non-sadistic reasons, it's still accurate to say that they like being bad and cruel. Maybe not for the badness and cruelty itself, but they like what that lifestyle gives them.
It feels wrong to say that slavemasters in the south were not cruel if their motives were purely profit-focused.
Doing things is different from liking to do them. People often do things they don't like to do.
Liking the outcome of a thing is different from liking the means by which it's achieved. People often use means they dislike to achieve outcomes they like.
This is splitting hairs anyway. Arguing with Walt over how to interpret his own position is not a winning strategy. Best to engage on the merits.
> I contend that frequent and negative sum high stakes conflict is necessary to maintain social vitality, reset hedonic treadmills, and legitimize status hierarchies.
actually looks to me like it is straightforwardly endorsing being bad and cruel -- or, in his words, "having negative sum high stakes conflicts in order to legitimize a status hierarchy that has me at the top".
The linked post has a weaker version of the same statement -- "As a rightist I support relentless conflict and competition with others as a vitalizing force to regularly kick you in the ass."
OK. If you're a Nietzsche expert, I'm DEFINITELY a Nietzsche expert: maybe not a world-leading expert, but perhaps a local celebrity Nietzsche expert. Not only have I read most of his books (without fully understanding them, but I think getting some way), but I've actually lectured to classes of hundreds in Great Books courses that have Nietzsche as part of the reading ... So that said ...
I find it very misleading to have an entire post on Nietzsche's idea of morality that doesn't mention the Will to Power. The point, for Nietzsche (at least on my local celebrity expert reading), is that ALL morality is an illusion. Master morality is an illusion, slave morality is an illusion. The only thing that is real is the will to power. Strong people actualize the will to power through master morality, weak people actualize it through slave morality. On that basis, there is no moral reason to prefer one to the other at all - there CAN be no moral reason to prefer one to the other, because (as I said) all morality, slave or master alike, is an illusion, a mask thrown up by the will to power which we all possess. So there's no point in preferring one form of morality over another, from a Nietzschean perspective, or worrying about whether Andrew Tate is a cruel predator for raping people and so on. Andrew Tate is seeking to maximize his will to power; and so are the people attacking him and trying to jail him.
Now, Nietzsche obviously - and perhaps inconsistently - has a generic preference for master morality, perhaps because it seems to him more honest. Slave morality is based on "ressentiment" - people projecting their own weaknesses outward onto others, whereas master morality is based on people celebrating their own strength. But that seems more an aesthetic preference than a moral one.
But, separately from that, Nietzsche also has an idea of human self-actualization - that it is desirable for humans to fulfil their maximum potential as humans (that's the superman thing). Again, it isn't clear how he can consistently reconcile it with the idea that all forms of value are effectively an illusion, but there is a consistent sense through his work that master morality, even if it isn't exactly fulfilling the natural human potential, comes closer to it, in as much as it doesn't depend on sublimated self-hatred in the way that slave morality does.
But the bottom line is that I don't really feel that any attempt to reconcile Nietzsche with any normative moral system is going to work, since the essence of Nietzsche's case is to deny the validity of any moral system.
Thus spake the local celebrity Nietzsche expert ...
Wasn't the Will To Power basically written ("edited") by Nietszche's sister and her German nationalist husband? To the extent that attributing its contents to Nietzsche himself is in doubt?
Aside from that, I agree that rejection of all morality, and in particular of both MM and SM, seems like the essence of Nietszche's thought.
Yes, but I didn't mean the book "The Will to Power", I meant the concept, which comes up in Nietzsche's other works also - for example, he talks about it extensively in the third essay of Genealogy of Morality.
Argh, sorry, that was a stupid confusion. I think I just unconsciously assumed that the concept was, like the ubermensch, only present in one particular book.
But it is trivial to derive morality from pure self-interest! I do not want to be seen as the dangerous individual who gets exiled from the group. I want to be seen as a valuable member of the group, with a lot of allies, trade partners and people owing favours, and possible elected chieftain. Grantly it might just mean I want to LOOK good, but every time one does something bad one risks that reputation and thus one does this really rarely.
Saving that proverbial drowning child goes a long way on the chieftain election.
Thus our really really big problem is those people who are really good at looking good while secretly doing bad. But those people are very different from the Walt types.
"But it is trivial to derive morality from pure self-interest! I do not want to be seen as the dangerous individual who gets exiled from the group. I want to be seen as a valuable member of the group, with a lot of allies, trade partners and people owing favours, and possible elected chieftain. Grantly it might just mean I want to LOOK good, but every time one does something bad one risks that reputation and thus one does this really rarely."
Of course! And Nietzsche would never deny that - on the contrary, he argues that this is one of the ways that value systems become dominant. But what he would say is that the people who have internalized that sort of behavior are deluding themselves: they believe that they are attaching themselves to some kind of absolute value system, whereas all they are doing is actualizing their will to power in the most effective possible way.
Ah. That makes sense. Have you heard of István Bibó? Anyway, he figured this will to power is just will to safety. We are the only animals who know we will die. This makes us kinda anxious. So we want to kill, exile or repress anything that might kill us. Bibó's idea was that if we could get rid of this fear, we would also get rid of this will to power.
I don't know how accurate this is as a description of Nietzsche's beliefs (I'll assume it is), but it doesn't quite sound right to me.
If a genie gave me a remote with two buttons and told me "the left button will send Andrew Tate to jail forever, the right button will make him go free, and nobody will ever know what choice you made", I'd still press the left button (after some double-checking). In that scenario I'm clearly not trying to actualize my will to power (I have nothing to gain either way) and I don't think I'm deluding myself either (I *know* I have nothing to gain and I don't care).
For what it's worth, Scott's post doesn't sound right to me either; I don't think it reflects the reasons people actually make decisions or moral judgments for.
Just to be clear, I'm not Nietzsche - I'm describing his views, not endorsing them!!! I totally agree with your objection.
That said, Nietzsche has a straightforward answer to you (or to me): he thinks that in particular circumstances (such as the one you describe) people can have internalized the system of morality to the point that they follow it even in circumstances where their will to power would be better actualized in other ways.
That is why (on Nietzsche's view) even strong people who would benefit more (and would actualize their will to power more effectively) from following master morality nevertheless in our world, where slave morality is dominant, often have absorbed and follow that value system, to their own detriment. That is the sense in which he thinks you are deluded - not because you don't know you have nothing to gain, but because you believe that you should press that button even though you have nothing to gain.
Only in ways that having any agency whatsoever is having power. Under that definition doing *anything* except staying in bed is power-seeking, that's not an interesting or insightful observation.
Nietzsche was not attempting to build a moral system, he says this explicitly many times, and it is a common trap to read him as trying to do that. Therefore, he would have no answer for you because he was not trying to answer that question.
So basically you're saying that Nietzsche chose the 2nd option in the Edward Teach section. I think Scott is trying to tackle how morality can be utilized in the real world, and so can't really do much with the meta claim that everything is invalid anyway.
The whole point is that even if Nietzsche ultimately says "Silly, it's Moloch all the way down!" our collective response should be "Yes we know, we're trying to construct anything that can keep Moloch at bay anyway!"
And so, given that Nietzsche defined 2 sorta-opposing concepts that can be talked about, even if he then did the hipster thing of saying that ultimately it's all void, you can still talk about those concepts.
Nietzsche wasn't trying to create a moral system. He says this many times in his writing. Additionally, at the time he was writing, "the meta claim that everything is invalid anyway" was a novel concept with a lot of surface area still to be explored. Nietzsche's exploration of this topic is largely way it seems so dull today: he explored a lot of it already!
He was looking at a world that was rapidly changing, socially, technologically, politically, etc. and was trying to figure out what it all meant for philosophy. His famous quote "God is dead" is not a claim he was making, it was more a conclusion of looking at the world of the time. And it was not an endorsement of Atheism. In many passages Nietzsche seems almost sad that he has to conclude that God is dead - he feels forced to conclude it based on the modern world.
Anyway, he definitely didn't chose the #2 option. Nietzsche rejects nihilism in very strong terms (it's ironic that he has become so closely associated with it). He looked at a world where "god is dead" and instead of choosing the nihilistic option and pushes the thread forward and asks where that leaves humans and philosophy.
He also does reject all morality. This is something missing from Scotts piece. At first Nietzsche throws out all existing morality but does not throw out the idea of virtue (just most of the predominant virtues - those of the slave morality mostly). Scott would get an answer to his Andrew Tate question if he knew this. Politeness is one of the virtues Nietzsche keeps! (There is also no passage I can remember where Nietzsche endorses rape, but his views on women were quite negative even for the time. This could have been skewed by his failed love life and problems with this sister.)
Hmm, what I tried to say, unsuccessfully, is that here we have two people speaking orthogonally past one another.
I don't think Scott tried to do the academic thing and suggest that there is a true reading of Nietzsche which can be presented and that here he is expounding upon it and showing how erudite he is in his knowledge of the tradition of explicating Nietzsche. If that was what he was doing, then indeed some noted scholar can show up and say "well acsshhhually" and give his one true Straussian reading of Nietzsche, QED.
Rather, I think Scott was, very practically, using the fact that there is a known source for the two phrases "slave morality" and "master morality" that are used by some group on the internet for their own ends, and decided to use that source as a launch-off point for his own thinking.
I'd make two comments here. My first point starts here, with this throwaway remark of yours, "But that seems more an aesthetic preference than a moral one."
For Nietzsche, these are not two different things -- he *does* have a moral preference for master morality, precisely because he has an aesthetic preference for it. An aesthetic preference IS a moral preference -- though I think what is really happening is the the inversion, that morality is suboordinate to aesthetics, not the other way around. I think it's instructive to think of Nietzsche's notions of morality as a type of aesthetic claim about beauty. We all are, in some sense, aware that there is no universalist conception of beauty that is objective in the same way that the laws of physics are. Nevertheless, most of us have no qualms in asserting that one work of art is superior to another along some dimension or another.
You see this theme emerge very early in Nietzsche's work -- it's essentially the thesis of the Birth of Tragedy. Here again we get a similar move as the thing that troubles you about his preference for master over slave morality: Nietzsche very clearly endorses the Dionysian aesthetic consciousness over the Apollonian, but there's no real objective grounding for why one is better than the other. He's basically just hoping to persuade you to adopt his preference by helping you see things as he does. You can't rationally test it. You can only bring your own conscious reason to bear on the problem and you are either affected by his arguments or not.
My second point is about the question of whether or not morality 'matters' to Nietzsche. I think you are reading the frame of a moral realist back into Nietzsche's work where it doesn't belong when you connect the idea that value systems are 'illusions' to the secondary idea that they therefore don't 'matter' or aren't 'real'. That secondary idea is I think pretty unsupported in his work -- he is obsessed in Zarathustra and in other places with demonstrating the weaknesses and perversions of various value systems. You are making him out to be essentially a nihilist, which is perhaps the type of person he most detests (and I think it's no accident that this hate is accompanied by deep similarities between his thought and that of committed moral nihilists). Recall the transformations of the spirit -- the final stage here, and the one most closely associated with the overman, is the self-generation of a coherent value system that is grounded in aesthetic consciousness rather than in social coercion.
In short, I think it is simultaneously true that morality can't possibly be objectively real and is illusory, but also that it is of critical and central importance to Nietzsche's thought. You cannot 'self-actualize' without first having a conception of value. Power does not passively exist, it is an active force that must be used to *do things*, and only value systems can provide a higher framework than base, animalistic urges. The real distinction here is that these value systems be grounded in the question of what is beautiful rather than what is 'good' (since for Nietzsche the latter question is vacuous and obscuring).
“Power does not passively exist, it is an active force that must be used to *do things*, and only value systems can provide a higher framework than base, animalistic urges. The real distinction here is that these value systems be grounded in the question of what is beautiful rather than what is 'good'.” Agreed. Nietzsche was obsessed with artistic culture (especially music), not sports - whatever the Prussian version of kickboxing was - or business - whatever the Prussian equivalent of real estate deal-making was. The issue is not just "what Nietzsche Really Thought" but that defining and applying "master morality" without reference to artistic culture makes the concept uninteresting and subject to easy dismissal. I do not know who a modern Wagner might be – and of course Nietzsche famously broke with Wagner and wrote all about it – but merely having power (being an “alpha male”) without using that power to create culture in accordance with "revalued values" is not the Nitzschean ideal.
A more modern Wagner might have been Pablo Picasso, who had a (justifiably) high opinion of himself and was infamous for being terrible in his personal life. I've also heard that people have told horror stories about working for film director James Cameron, although I've never looked up the details.
"So there's no point in preferring one form of morality over another, from a Nietzschean perspective ... Andrew Tate is seeking to maximize his will to power; and so are the people attacking him and trying to jail him."
My reading is that Nietzsche oscillates between "slave morality is awful and gross" and "slave morality is one form of WTP being exercised." But reading the books (not an expert) I disagree that Nietzsche doesn't preferring one to the other--he absolutely does prefer master morality to slave morality, despite common commentary on how it's WTP all the way down. I think he would criticize Andrew Tate on other grounds (obsession with sex, pandering to losers on social media, dispensing shitty advice for money) that are distinct from the rape allegations.
I think I said that in my original post, didn't I? Even though both forms of morality are illusory (which is why I said that he wouldn't rate Andrew Tate higher than his accusers on ethical grounds), Nietzsche clearly and very obviously prefers master morality, on the basis that it is closer to actualizing human potential, and because (as you rightly put it!) he thinks "slave morality is awful and gross".
But you say he’d have nothing to say about the merits of Andrew Tate (stylized as rich, great fighter, rapist) vs his detractors (stylized as people who want him in prison because rape is harmful and evil). I think this is wrong and Andrew Tate is much closer to a Nietzschean ideal than the stylized liberal detractor.
Your comment made me look it up, and I found that Nietzsche's psychotic break was near the end of his life, shortly before it happened he seemed sane, and it was probably caused by the strokes he suffered. So, I doubt Nietzsche's philosophy has anything to do with schizophrenia.
The problem I have with Nietzsche is that he was smart enough and lived late enough that he should have figured out that technological and organizational changes were making war ever more horrible. But he didn't.
Five years after Nietzsche cracked up, the elderly Engels wrote an essay in 1895 advising his fellow revolutionaries that their Fight-on-the-Barricades theory of how they were going to win was outmoded. Modern armies would absolutely slaughter workers in a fight.
The year after that, the Olympics got started, reviving a key institution of Greek master morality ... but one that didn't get people killed.
He definitely did see that. For one he was in the Franco Prussian war, so he knew how deadly it had become. For another, he writes somewhere that glorifying war is stupid because while war may have been heroic once, now it just kills an inordinate amount of young people who might have otherwise become poets and scientists - or something to that effect.
Orthogonal to most of the discussion, can you explain why Nietzsche found "Untergang" (doom?) so attractive?? I find that perplexing. _Regardless_ of whether one is valuing slave morality, master morality, or esthetics, I would expect that e.g. 2 year of serving the herd, exhibiting excellence, or creating great art would be better than 1 year of the same.
I've always found it interesting how Christianity is tied into "slave-morality" when Christianity has always held that envy was a black sin, bad enough to get on the same list as "pride". Christianity has tried to ride the golden mean between pride and envy.
It brings to mind Chesterton's criticism of Nietzsche, combined with his criticism of "slave morality" types (here represented by Tolstoy):
"The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is--well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
...
"Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We KNOW that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost. And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.
...
"As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist. In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough. The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.."
Thanks. I *think* what he's saying, and what is my own view, is that nihilism (can we please stop calling Nietzsche a master moralist; he's a nihilist!) is self-defeating. Metaphysically, if all truths are relative then the fact that all truths are relative is relative, and thus just as false as it is true. Aesthetically, if nothing has meaning then the observance that nothing has meaning is, far from an insight, an observation or claim of no meaining at all, and can be immediately forgotten and ignored.
Nietzsche was not a nihilist in the sense you're describing. He held the view that a nihilistic universe is a fact, and one has to accept it and adapt. It's not a contradiction, it's an observation that there's simply no metaphysics at the base of our judgements.
Chesterton criticism might hold as to his character, though Nietzsche did fight in the Franco-Prussian War.
I don't think I understand your disagreement with ascend on Nietzschean nihilism; he seems to be saying that Nietzche is a nihilist, and you seem to be saying that his metaphysic is that nihilism is a fact. Could you unpack the difference there?
I would also point out that the idea that there is no metaphysics at the base of our judgements is a metaphysic about our judgements itself. Why should I accept his nihilistic metaphysics over my own non-nihilist metaphysic?
Nietzsche explicitly considered metaphysics irrelevant rather than having other, additional strong opinions on it. I don't recall which book it's from but at one point he says that the knowledge of metaphysics is as useful to us as the knowledge of the composition of water is to a sailor navigating a storm. Or something along those lines.
Sure thing. The difference is between nihilism as an attitude and as a theory of reality. Nietzsche wasn't expressiving a nihilism of hopelessness or that there is no meaning in our lives per se, his whole philosophy terminates in an exortation to create meaning in the true metaphysical context as he saw it, that there are no metaphysics. That it cannot be based on ground truth is the tragic context of our meaning, not it's termination.
There being no metaphysics is to say there is no reasonable expectation of logic or reason operating in moral systems, they are mad mixes of historical phenomena of many types, given a veneer of totality and coherency by priests (as a broad generic type). There is nothing but ultimately arbitrary human judgements, notwithstanding that in practice some moral systems are more advantageous towards given ends that are arbitrarily held as valuable.
For instance we tend to construct moral systems as having opposites in the way elementary particles are opposites (though mind you I believe even that is actually a simplification). It's like a kind of platonic ideal is supposed to be operating in the firmament, an ideal good, an ideal virtue, and their opposites, but we don't explicate as much because it immediately looks ridiculous. Instead we try to construct air tight practical arguments that divide the ideal good from the ideal bad, as in this article, and the conclusion is always that we haven't quite gotten there yet. In fact we will never get there, because there's nothing at the base of these ideals that give it a fundamental metaphysics.
As to whether you should buy this vision or another, I think the question has to be how you anchor the idea of objective meaning. If you're religious, that is reasonable, but this is ACX. And the consequence of accepting this nihilism, again, isn't the destruction of meaning, or cutting ties with what you have loved and valued. It's recognising what's really going on, that it is an exercise of Will upon the world.
Chesterton so much did not understand Buddhism, it is atrocious. Basically words in Buddhism do not matter for much. It is about meditation, and words explain that and maybe give an advice or two about how to live. "Not grasping anything" does not mean what it means in common language. You cannot just decide to "not grasp". But you can have a non-graspy feeling in meditation and you can try to keep that feeling around.
> Christianity has always held that envy was a black sin
No that's a main feature of slave morality. It takes the herd's natural envy and sublimates it into the herd's own self-discipline. Envy itself is not purely a herd feature; the warrior feels envious of someone, so he kills him and takes his stuff. The herd is told, "actually your envy itself, not the object of your envy, is what you need to defeat" And so they repent and pray and purge themselves. This is an essential part of slave morality and it's why Christianity is the prime example
>Christianity has always held that envy was a black sin
...and that the meek and weak would get their just rewards in the "real" superior spiritual world. Christianity doesn't try to ride between pride and envy; Christianity banishes envy to the realm of the inferior physical world and tells its adherents to focus on Heaven. Secularized Christianity (social justice) is worse because the physical world in which envy and resentment exist is the only remaining one.
Yeah, this is why the whole thing puzzles me. The post clarifies why one could be opposed to this thing being called "slave morality", at the expense of leaving me more confused why it would be associated with Christianity. Either the people saying this (I have no idea about Nietzsche's exact views; I have read only a few passages quite some time ago before deciding that he was either too odious or too muddled to worth reading further) cannot keep straight what they mean by "slave morality", or their idea of Christianity is a confused caricature, or both. (Given some of the other comments here, even in this subthread, I'm leaning towards "both".)
On another note: A quibble, maybe, but I always flinch at appeals to the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean as an account of virtue. It's not always wrong, I suppose, but rather than drawing up a spectrum and identifying virtue as some point in the middle between excess and deficiency, I think it's better to think of the Good as its own, positive thing, and vices as various ways of going astray from it. They don't always, or even usually, form pairs of opposite errors between which virtue is found. Indeed I don't think that Pride and Envy are opposites, or represent a deficiency and excess of some quality; they can easily (and generally do) coexist in the same person.
I think my disagreement here is that you seem to be treating master morality and slave morality as symmetrical. I.e. you're treating both of them as approaches evaluating people, which vary primarily in how they do the evaluation. For example, you say:
> Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. [List of them.] I think master morality has to approve of all these things.
and
> a commoner can’t do much with this kind of master morality besides conclude “yeah, I suck”.
But if we instead think of master morality as being about pursuing excellence, then neither of these is necessary. You don't need to figure out how much you approve of other people, or even yourself. You can just keep your eyes on the path towards excellence, and figure out what you need to change in order to get closer to it. (This is related to a post of mine about one-place versus two-place judgments: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qXZLFGqpD7aeEgXGL/p/sbJgv5De6d34eiHWA). You preempt this approach by saying "if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes?" But I don't see why picking heroes needs to be objective; it seems fine to just pick whoever you personally look up to. Indeed, picking one set of unified heroes that everyone is meant to look up to feels very slave morality.
I don't know whether any of this is anywhere near what Nietzsche means by either master morality or the superman, but to me it feels like the right approach, and one which steers you away from a bunch of traps. For example, you write:
> Suppose Tate wasn’t a rapist, he was just some kickboxing champion who was a jerk to people online and constantly posted about he was better than them because of his Bugatti. I still want to feel contempt for him!
Should you feel contempt for Tate, or pity, or admiration? The answer: you should have very few feelings about Tate, because he simply isn't your problem. The contempt is a trap! It's not going to help you or the world. Reorienting your morality towards what allows you to feel contempt for Tate is precisely how slave morality gets its hooks into you.
That feels like a Lutheran version of Nietzscheanism, the quote about Shoemakers would be perfect but apparently is fake. But the idea you can be strong and perfect by being the best version of yourself seems a consistent and useful compromise of slave and strong morality.
> Should you feel contempt for Tate, or pity, or admiration? The answer: you should have very few feelings about Tate, because he simply isn't your problem. The contempt is a trap!
Yes! I think about this whenever I hear people talking about Musk. The lovers and the haters would do well to focus their attention elsewhere
I understood "unified assessment" to mean summing up a person's good and bad qualities to get one overall judgement of how good you think they are. I don't think it means different people need to come to the same assessment.
"Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity."
I have not read a lot of Nietzsche, but I have read Zarathustra, and what confuses me a lot about when people speak of Nietsche's Superman / Übermensch: In Zarathustra, he is very clear (to me, at least) that the Übermensch is an unrealistic ideal (not even a clearly formed ideal) to strive towards on your way to your downfall (Untergang). He is very clear that the right thing to do in life is not being a superman (that is impossible), it is striving towards that goal, being the bridge that may someday lead to the superman. But not because achieving the superman makes it worth it, instead because you will die anyway, dying later rather than sooner isn't better, so it's better to die for a cause. Any cause. Doesn't matter which, choose your virtue.
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal"
"One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one’s destiny to cling to." (Terrible translation on gutenberg.org, the original is "weil sie mehr Knoten ist, an den sich das Verhängnis hängt. = "because it is more of a knot that your doom can cling to". Verhängnis /= destiny)
Zarathustra speaks A LOT about about your Untergang, which again is horribly tranlasted to down-going, it means ruin, downfall, demise, doom. He contrasts it with the last men, who are too cool and blase to care about virtues, and reach the highest age, but fail to live at all, too concerned for their health.
So I have a very hard time understanding how one moves from this seemingly very clear concept: (there is no god, when you die, your soul dies before your body -> living longer isn't better then living shorter, but living for your virtue is better than not -> choose your virtue and follow it until it kills you, that's better than being killed anyways) to saying "I am a superman, because I have a Bugatti" or whatever.
I wonder what Nietzsche would make of transhumanism. It seems like "there's a decent chance that we'll get a materialist, non-wooey form of immortality, like, within our lifetimes; and we can choose to spend our lives taking actions that make that more likely" short-circuits the argument.
> being the bridge that may someday lead to the superman
"Communism can't be achieved at present year, but we can aspire for socialism, which will be the bridge that opens the door to true communism."
My man's sounding a lot like Lenin right there.
_______
Similar to the promise of communism, the reason no one wants to be the bridge, is being being the bridge is a miserable existence. All the effort & suffering, with none of the reward.
I mean you can make a case for Communism being some kind of *societal* Übermensch in this analogy, but Nietzsche was mostly offering inspiration to individuals, and prophesying the emergence of some individual overman rather than the transformation of society.
The people you hold up as examples of Nietzschean morality make a great argument against that whole school of thought, just by existing as they do. You don't need to construct a theory of morality to look down on Andrew Tate, you just need to look at him.
I've always wondered how a sincere bully-worshipper would react to being physically brutalized. If you gouged out one of Richard Hanania's eyes and told him that you'd tear out the other unless he adopted all your political opinions, would he do it? And if he did, would he really believe it in his heart? It sounds ridiculous, but his writing does imply that he should.
I suppose on some level, a battered wife is the most sincere master moralist. They're showing real commitment to the hierarchy, not just taking advantage of it when it's convenient.
Bully worship is a thing. Some people would rather align with the bully, and take a chance of being brutalised, than against,and take a chance of being killed.
> I suppose on some level, a battered wife is the most sincere master moralist. They're showing real commitment to the hierarchy, not just taking advantage of it when it's convenient.
It's for sentences like these that I read the comments!
> I suppose on some level, a battered wife is the most sincere master moralist. They're showing real commitment to the hierarchy, not just taking advantage of it when it's convenient.
This is a completely different psychological mechanism. Generally, women who are attracted to abusive men have borderline personality disorder. They need intense emotional interaction, and getting abused is the direct path to achieving that. Especially if the abuser feels bad about it after and tries to make up for it, before inevitably abusing them again later. It isn't a power dynamic or hierarchy in the way you are thinking of. Probably something like a dom/sub relationship would be more on point.
"behold the newest inventions making our leaves richer, safer, and easier." leaves => lives
"and trying to retvrn to some kind of crunchy organic notion of life" retvrn => return (although this is an odd typo to make, and maybe some kind of reference to the Roman practice of writing U as V?)
Roman inscriptions sometimes replaced U with V because carving a V is easier (two straight lines instead of a curve), so writing in all caps with V's makes your writing look "ancient Roman."
Great post, Scott! I just wanted to add that I think Nietzsche does manage to explain the psychological appeal of what you call "cycles". In fact he was arguably the first philosopher to see, contra Aristotle, that the meaning of life may not consist in achieving some terminal value, but in encountering and overcoming resistance. (cf. Antichrist 1: "What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome.") In extremely brief summary, Nietzsche thinks that the will to power (which each of us has) is the will to seek out and overcome resistance to more determinate ends (being helpful, glorifying civilization, creating art), and that this explains the appeal of cycles: there is no terminal point at which the meaning of life has been achieved, because continuing to satisfy your will to power means continuing to seek out and overcome resistance. For the book-length version see Bernard Reginster's "The Affirmation of Life".
Man, the Sid Meier part did a good job actually explaining and writing down the "thing I've been thinking for years but never clearly wrote down anywhere". Including specifically using civilizations as the example.
Very, very interesting. Feels like a return to Slate Star Codex quality.
Having said that, I have a lot of issues, but expressing them will be difficult, so I'll start off with two.
First, there's this assumption that Nietzsche is in favour of Master Morality. I don't claim to have any expertise on Nietzsche, but that seems completely wrong to me. My understanding is that he thinks it's as incoherent as Slave Morality, just as much an attempt to paper over the reality of nihilism. And that the only reason he didn't criticise it specifically (like he did SM) is that he either assumed it was unnecessary since nobody thinks like that anymore and it's not coming back, or he didn't get around to it before he went insane.
So regarding "Sometimes it sounds like the Superman is the guy who brings master morality back in style. Other times it sounds like he reconciles both systems, keeping the best parts of each. Still other times, it sounds like he transcends them entirely." I'm pretty sure it's the last one.
Second, you kind of hint at, but don't really address directly, what I think are the two main objections to SM. First, that it's just another way of persecuting people but doing it under cover of humility (see the Catholic Church, the French Revolution, modern Cancel Culture, and every other extreme manifestation of SM). And second, that people are naturally cruel and if denied the ability to be cruel to others (even in the aforementioned hypocritical way) they will turn that instinct on themselves. This isn't just "SM causes people to be miserable" it's "SM causes people to *actively inflict misery on themselves* as a form of masochism".
These are my interpretations of Nietszche, not my own opinions. I could be wrong about them. I'll have more to say when I figure out how to express it.
I said this in more detail in my own comment, but I think Nietzsche is favouring master morality because it's more advanced towards it's own transcendence.
I don’t think Tate lives up to master morality at all — he’s desperate for attention and admiration and validation, working hard and driving a cool car so other people will think of him. Not as a triumph of greatness in and of itself. Meanwhile, something like philanthropy could probably be a master morality thing if it’s done for the greatness rather than as some signalling of humility and self-lessening to the herd.
The thing about ancient barbarian warrior-kings wasn’t their muscles or their violence. It’s _being_ warrior-king.
Compare this to the eagles and the lambs analogy. Tate seems to care a lot about what “the lambs” think of him — much more than the freedom feeling of air under the wings, or whatever.
The Greek heroes (Neitzschean models for the supermen) of the Iliad (especially Agemmenon) seem very similar to me. The pretty armor, the prettiest girls to rape, the most slaves, the best tent positions on the beach, the sulking and petty vindictiveness, while compelling reading, always leaves me (a Girardian at heart) wondering how on earth they were models for anything other than memetic desire run amok.
Tate is pathetic because he exhibits all the above vices with none of the virtues of the Classical heroes — a willingness, no eagerness, to sacrifice one’s life for a purpose greater than oneself, the aesthetics of male beauty in action and not mere preening (the body builder vs the boxer), the brief moments of gentleness.
Tate is closer to Agemmemnon. He thinks and acts like having the best booty makes you the brightest hero. Even in the bronze age, that was pathetic.
> while compelling reading, always leaves me (a Girardian at heart) wondering how on earth they were models for anything other than memetic desire run amok.
Yes, one of the important axis that this essay entirely leaves out (as far as I understood) is the day-and-night difference between the true creative impulse and mere seeking of fame or approval.
The classical heroes did not seem to me particularly about sacrificing their own lives to a purpose greater than oneself. They were prepared to *risk* their own lives in service of their personal glory, or in order to keep a promise, or exact vengeance, or to attain great riches, or for vengeance, but martyrs for the cause they were not. And the scenes in the underworld from the Odyssey seem to indicate they regard even the above reasons as foolish reasons to risk ones life, which in the hazy clarity of the underworld they realize was really the most important thing of all.
Agreed. Also, isn't he a kind of a snake oil salesman? I don't know much about the guy, but my sense is he's selling a vision of masculinity where if you just adopt the right alpha male mentality of assertiveness, confidence, etc., success is sure to follow. That advice seems reductive at best, and at worst, a quasi-scam. I don't think that's particularly ubermensch-like...selling fake or at least highly questionable self-help platitudes to low-status men.
I think there's some truth to it for a certain class of people -- those who severely lack assertiveness and confidence will find themselves much more successful if they can acquire a normal amount.
If you already have a normal amount of assertiveness and confidence, then further gains may be a bad idea. Extraordinarily high levels of assertiveness and confidence are only a good idea if they're backed up by actual extraordinariness, otherwise you're just an annoying person that nobody will like.
I don't disagree, but I tend to think of that advice as not super helpful even for the people who need it. E.G., for a guy who is losing a race, you could shout at him "run faster!" and that would not be an erroneous course of action for him to follow, but...well, you see my point.
That was my response too. Selling self-help to children in order to afford luxuries isn't "strength". Elsewhere he mentions that master morality isn't interested in spreading itself:
Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too
Andrew Tate's entire day is spent trying to convert people! That's what all his hustle and energy is going towards.
"So sometime around the Iron Age, the slaves started working on a morality of their own, one where they’re the good guys and the masters are the losers."
Maybe this is much older. There is the hypothesis that humans evolved from (the least common ancestor with) apes by self-domestication. Part of that process (Christopher Boehm says) consisted in commoners banding together and killing the alpha males.
No one ever said Nietzsche was an expert on paleoanthropology. He was a philologist of classical Greek so he read his ideas into that society, not anything earlier.
Right. "Hierarchy in the Forest" by Boehm makes a strong case that hunter-gatherers spend a lot of time putting down their potential alpha male to keep him from monopolizing the women.
That seems like it feeds in to the "Against the Grain" argument of, roughly: agriculture -> non-portable capital -> bandits -> government, and a transformation in the male ideal of "providing the best food" from "actually hunting/gathering/farming the food", to "taking food from other people", and thus to an aggressive warrior ideal.
I think this leads towards "Well, [group] is obviously made of bad people who would insult me if I gave them the chance, so it's fair to insult them", with gradually expanding values of [group].
Members of [uncontacted tribe] engage in combat, combat is wrestling until one member takes a chunk of flesh, usually biting off an ear(other times less friendly), you are free to feel its barbaric, should the tribe be contracted by attempted to gauge who is the aggressor by sniper?
Given two socail-darwinists(i.e. people who believe generics can factor into how people are treated) and what you could classify as a slur (bugman) how do you know they airnt engaging in ritual combat by *their own* rules ethically?
>Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I don't think you are being fair here, so I will throw out a steelman: he is saying "I want people stronger, not happier." which is sort of the essence of vitalism, and yes it has been associated with fascism, and Walt apparently does not mind that association one bit, but still, I don't know whether this is enough to completely throw out vitalism.
"I want people stronger, not happier" can be interpreted as "First survive. Then make fucking sure you survive. Then maybe you can relax and focus on happiness."
This is not true in many specific places of the world though, as far as I know, which is what a lot of effective altruism is dedicated to correcting...
In the five or so countries with lowest life expectancy, there is about 10% child mortality, and then on average, people who survive childhood live to age 65. In those countries, on average, 65 year olds live to age 77.
Not enough people live to those ages in those countries, but it’s still pretty common.
Right - but I am happy to focus my altruistic endeavors on that. I don't disagree with the facts, I disagree with saying (in these locations) "survival is super-easy," though I can see how you can be "poor" and still "probably" live to 75 almost everywhere in the world.
I think you think that the fact that he has some goal means I can't accuse him of being bad and cruel. I am happy to admit he has that goal, I just think the way he's going about it is bad and cruel. I think Bulldog accused him of not caring about human suffering, and he answered "yes, I don't care about human suffering (and here's why)".
>"I want people stronger, not happier" can be interpreted as "First survive. Then make fucking sure you survive. Then maybe you can relax and focus on happiness."
The problem is, if everybody maximizes for selfish survival at the cost of everybody else's, then step 3 can never come, because just as you finish up step 2, everyone else catches up and you have to go back, ad infinitum. Getting everyone to agree to make relaxation into step 1 is the better long-term strategy.
Part of why I like being a mathematician is that proving *some* theorems sometimes really feels like a terminal goal (there is some spiral-ish stuff in it, of course). I guess works of art may feel the same to some creators, not just "to make other people happy" (e.g. Tolkien and the Silmarillion).
Proving a theorem is getting at a real fact. But I would say that the reason getting at real facts matters is because that is the sort of thing that is nearly universally helpful for getting at whatever it is that someone actually desires.
I don't think this is true of most facts that mathematicians find interesting. I think it is better to count "getting at real facts" among their their "actual desires."
(If you want to say that mathematicians' desires are a mental spandrel produced by evolution optimizing for other goals, I completely agree — but that's not what you seem to be saying.)
> At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach.
The way I think about this (which I came around to after reading something in Ryan Muldoon's Social Contract Theory in a Diverse World, which I recommend) is that the whole dynamic is very similar to mechanisms at work in financial markets.
Investors are generally modeled as having some kind of Relative Risk Aversion where the richer they get, the more they have to lose, and the less risk they are willing to take. I think the same thing works for societies and somewhere in the 20th century we reached this point.
That bit about relative risk aversion surprises me. I'd expect richer people to be more risk-tolerant, as the diminishing marginal value of money means your wellbeing isn't as impacted by losses.
I think that as you get wealthier, your risk tolerance for a thousand dollar loss gets larger. But your risk tolerance for a year of sickness or a year earlier death gets less, because that year of healthy life is so much more valuable.
This was almost great, except it concentrated too much, at the end, on internet figures not really that well known outside their own bedroom.
I dislike Nietzsche for many reasons. Scott hinted at one - what exactly is the superman? Argue that it’s a right wing idea online and many will agree while others suggest that the superman is extremely nice to kittens, as a primary characteristic.
The real problem is that Nietzsche wasn’t at all aware of the actual world he was in. Apparently.
One where the “slave morality” of Christianity dominated the world. All of Africa, most of China, much of Asia, America and South America of course. And this had been largely the case for generations. Islamic countries were largely occupied or quiescent and nobody gave much thought to it. Yet, Islam is clearly more militaristic and less slave morality.
So why did “slave morality” dominate the world? Because it wasn’t really. Scott hints at this in his aside about puritans. What Christianity has is enough space for master morality hidden by kindness, enough in it to promote wars against its enemies and all non Christians (not just for personal glory but to spread the Word, the absence of which condemns the natives to eternal damnation, so it’s a good thing to invade).
Then there’s that phrase about dying for your friends - There is no greater love than this: that a person would lay down his life for the sake of his friends - well that’s as good an entry into heaven as dying in battle is to pre Christian religions, which were trashed in battle over the centuries anyway.
In fact right across from where I write - a matter of a few dozen feet
- is the site of a battle between the Christian Normans and the last remaining Vikings who were their antecedents. The Vikings were exterminated.
Anyway the “slave morality” of Christianity might have helped rather than hindered world domination, after all — outside Islam — most of the world invaded by Christians converted.
Why? Here come these nasty people but look they say nice things, promise an eternity of happiness and, to be fair, do engage in some acts of charity that perhaps more outwardly supremacist invaders might not. So let’s accept this religion and therefore the culture of the invaders.
China was doing badly at that time. Late in that century there was the Sino-Japanese War, which inspired Sun Yat-Sen's Revive China Society to launch their Guangzhou Uprising. But surely Japanese imperialism wouldn't be considered an example of Christian "slave morality".
You should consider reading Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution. He addresses the problem with Ayn Rand by (in my words) viewing evolution as an entropic force. So for instance, part of our elan vital is eyes, which connect us to sight. He argues that this cannot reasonably be said to be caused by natural selection, because while natural selection can explain that if there's a steady stream of mutations that give ever greater eye, sight, and thus fitness, it cannot explain the correlation in where this stream of mutations come from. Instead, the root cause of eyes lies primarily in light, as light makes sight possible; natural selection merely removes the obstacles to sight e.g. that the original life happened to lack photosensitivity.
The cosmos is completely filled with light and yet I will bet any sum that we will fail to find lone eyeballs rolling around in Alpha Centauri. Selection is the more particular and thus more causative principle.
By my understanding, this should imply that by the same token, natural selection would remove the obstacles to wheels, where the original life lacked equipment for rolling.
However, if an evolutionary pathway to such an outcome exists, it doesn't seem to have been explored so far. Some things are physically possible within the laws of the universe, but not readily accessible via random mutation and selective pressure over generations.
This strikes me as an interpretive framework laid over the process of natural selection which generates predictions which are simply wrong, and forces us to rationalize why it doesn't mean the things it appears to mean in order to bring its predictions in accordance with reality.
Wheels and eyes are low-entropy, so they don't spontaneously arise.
When it comes to the evolution of eyes, it is *sight* that mediates free energy (from e.g. noticing plants/animals to eat), and eyes are eroded into being by pressure from this free energy.
Similarly, if you have roads, then the possibility of driving mediates free energy from more efficient ways of going places, and therefore erodes wheels into existence. But nature does not have roads.
I don't know; it requires an opportunity for driving, but this opportunity is the interaction of other factors than roads, e.g. there needs to be some place to drive to, and something to drive. Also, forces can't discretely jump states from non-driving to strongly driving; instead it requires there to be a continuum of varying degrees of driving, which is a stronger condition than the mere possibility of driving.
Wheels clearly don't require opportunity for driving though, they just require opportunities where rolling is at least temporarily an efficient way to get around. Animals like flying squirrels can glide temporarily, but they don't need to get everywhere by flying. It's enough that being able to glide to some degree offers them an advantage in their environment. An animal which gets a fitness benefit from wheels doesn't need to rely on them constantly or exclusively.
Let me know if I'm understanding this right: the objection to the evolutionary view is that it doesn't predict _having a bunch of mutations specifically to eyes_ and should instead predict random mutations that don't all point on the same direction?
I think an evolutionary biologist would counter that there's a constant baseline of random mutations, and ones which _happen_ to line up usefully get preserved (because they're adaptive) whereas ones that are neutral or negative tend (all else equal) to not spread or persist.
Does Bergson just think that the numbers don't add up (and there aren't enough random mutations, or isn't enough selection pressure, to account for chains of beneficial mutations) – or does he have another argument against the standard view?
An example he gives of the failure in prediction is that different lines of evolution converged on similar structures for eyes. My impression of his argument is that he's saying this makes sense if we imagine that light and biochemistry has properties that make certain kinds of eyes work (e.g. tiling structural cells around photosensitive cells to form a pinhole camera), but not if we imagine all the effects of mutations (on the body and the elan vital) to be uncorrelated. In a scenario driven solely by random mutations and natural selection rather than by the properties of biochemistry and light, you wouldn't expect sight to consistently develop in such particular forms as eyes.
His book was written prior to the modern understanding of DNA, so he didn't really discuss whether this was the correct interpretation.
This just sounds like the normal modern theory of evolution. I'm failing to see the difference. In regular evolutionary theory, eyes won't evolve without light, or if sight is biochemically impossible. Convergent evolution is also expected in many cases.
I'm confused about the point. The physics/biochemistry/etc. matters for how eyes tend to form, and if you want a full model of how natural selection works in our reality you'd have to consider those details. And?
> natural selection merely removes the obstacles to light
It selected for genes that tended to work better because the environment had light? Is the argument that there's some already-existing processing-capability that evolution is directly building off of and that it is just letting light in and then growing from that?
> ... This description of his view actually makes me wonder if the rationalist community has been unfair to Beff Jezos' assertion that increasing entropy is the meaning of life.
I still don't see the difference between that and "reproduction is the meaning of life", they both still seem reductive and not useful as explanations?
(And then I'm confused about how it resolves the problem with Ayn Rand)
I think you are trying to do the same thing I was thinking a lot about: rescuing vitalism from fascism. Vitalism is the idea that people should be stronger, not happier (or not only, both). This is not unusual for a doctor, doctors define illness as pain or dysfunction. Dysfunction matters, weakness matters, and in this sense happiness-only utilitarianism is too narrow. We want to heal people's knees not only so that it does not hurt but also so that they can run a half marathon.
Eric S. Raymond tends to justify this vitalistic aspect on survival. If we become lotus eaters, the first society-wide major shock will make us extinct. Yes, true, but it is a classic multipolar trap, coordination problem?
Another way is aesthethics. A strong, bold, vital optimism like those Commie propaganda posters is just simply cool and needs no other justification other than coolness. We just like strong horses.
So it looks like it is a job for the artists, not the thinkers.
But you are right that they have a weirdly right-wing vibe, because now we associated left-wing with victimhood.
One way to deal with that is make it explicitly queer and non-white, that won't get criticised a lot.
What about being the fastest runner? In that case, you being stronger hurts others on the margin (the other people running the race, who would like to win and would be sad to lose). The same goes for job opportunities, and romance, and any other positional good and zero-sum (or even positive-sum but not entirely fungible!) game - your being stronger/better will bring rewards to you that would have gone to others otherwise.
I like Amadeus as a meditation on this for the specific case of creating art.
But what's the point in the other runners competing if they don't have others to compete with them and push them to run faster? They can just run by themselves if they hate coming behind anyone.
What's the point of pushing them to run faster? That's a vitalist value.
You could make the case that if everyone stopped running competitively, the competitive sport would die and the runners would be sad. But I think the parent comment was just about the fastest runner, who on the margin makes the second fastest runner worse off.
Whether or not it's vitalist, it's simply a fact that runners enjoy competing with each other. If you own a dog, you might notice that they enjoy running, and while they could simply do laps around your home, they enjoy it more if they have another entity to run with or something to fetch.
Yeah. This doesn't address the point me or the parent commenter were pointing out though.
If your moral system is be vitalist only in situations where it benefits others, how would you apply this to the fastest runner? By training hard and being the fastest, they are hurting the other runners. The second place runner would be better off if they won, right?
The runners would still be able to enjoy their competition. You'd just have other winners.
It's pointing out that most people place some value on greatness even when it doesn't benefit others.
It's not that easy to rescue vitalism from fascism, because the moment you start talking about vitalism someone comes along and calls you a crypto-fascist.
(And then you reply "no, I'm not a fascist, I'm not any kind of socialist" and then your interlocutor denies that fascism is a form of socialism, and then you wind up arguing about that instead)
>because now we associated left-wing with victimhood.
Yup. The oppression olympics seems to be a new thing, beyond the slave morality of Nietzsche's time. I don't like seeing it getting to the point of disempowering the competent. From a purely practical point of view, I don't want the electric grid to fail.
> Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2
This may turn out to be small comfort if you happen to live in a place
>>She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in.
Rand is not so different from USSR's morality. When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I felt a strong sense of deja vu that I couldn't quite place. Only after reading the whole thing I realized I was reading a very typical Soviet book of Rand's time. Yeah, really so. There was a whole sub-genre in Soviet science fiction that was quite like that. Basically, if you take any of these old Soviet books, and change the heroes' speeches from "Communism brings progress" to "I want to be selfish and bring progress", but leave the entire rest the same - you'd get Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, people tend to underestimate how deeply-influenced Rand was by Soviet/socialist ideology, I think. The whole of plot Atlas Shrugged is that a bunch of workers go on strike, bring capitalism to a stop, and build a workers' commune in the mountains, for Galt's sake!
I think these both really miss the point. Striking and and such are the trappings of socialism, Ayn Rands problem is with the psychology of socialism.
In the Soviet book, the entire collective of workers would strike and bring the owners of capital to their knees and then collectively take ownership of the capital and operate it by committee.
In Rands book, a few exceptional owners of capital who haven't forgotten how to be outstanding workers take their ball of capital and go home somewhere where no workers commune or committee or bureaucrat can ever touch it. They care about it being theirs so much that they are willing to work towards it with only the sweat of their own brow and those who deign to trade with them.
The thesis of galts gulch is "you say the capitalists need the workers, that society allows us to have the infrastructure in which to prosper. We say you're wrong. We will prosper entirely of our own accord and expose "society" as at best a stowaway and at worst a parasite"
Soviet fiction would allow no such premise. The rest of the book is a hero story, and sure everywhere has hero stories, even Soviets. But Soviet heros are men-of-the-people devoutly concerned with the collective, and the good of all - Rands objection and novelty is that the heros in her story have no special concern and oft special scorn for the collective.
I just have a question about master morality - it seems like Nietzsche still seemed to think it could be a thing, but I wonder what its content could ultimately consist in, other than forcing other people to bow to you?
Like, we can stride around the world erecting skyscrapers, but why should anyone care about those skyscrapers? You could become a master sculptor, but what if no-one wanted to look at your rocks? Don't you have to force them to like your work, which means ultimately you either are the local warlord, or you're working for the local warlord, and your successes are a by-product of his violence.
I dunno, I'm definitely not a Nietzsche expert. I just haven't worked out how any of this works.
And... once again I have failed by not reading to the end. This idea is pretty similar to the point that Scott got to at the end of the post. Ho hum, sorry.
> You could become a master sculptor, but what if no-one wanted to look at your rocks?
It'd make it harder to make a living from it, but the idea that it would become *pointless* is alien to me. People can and do take joy and pride in their achievements even if no one else ever knows about them. Sometimes someone somewhere dies of old age and their distant next of kin or their landlord finds out they've filled the place with art they've produced over multiple decades. People leave easter eggs (like the signatures inside the Apple Macintosh case), where the entire point is that very few people will find them. People bury letters in time capsules, where any appreciation for the contents will come long after they're dead and may never happen at all, or be entirely negative.
That's not to say having others value your work isn't psychologically satisfying as well: it almost always is, which is why truly hidden achievements are rare and why people often try to focus their efforts where they'll be appreciated. But there's some value in the achievement itself distinct from that. Honestly building a bunch of secret skyscrapers no one will find sounds pretty cool, not good enough to replace my current life plan (and I can't afford to do it), but if you gave me a choice between spending the rest of my life doing that or doing equivalently-hard work leading to no actual outcome, I find that I am far from indifferent.
So... this is where the vagueness of Scott's thesis becomes a problem. (I don't mind that he wrote this piece in a very vague and hand-wavy way, it's just useful to acknowledge that this piece much more impressionistic than his deep data dives or some of the philosophical dissections he's done in the past.)
Because I agree with you about the satisfaction of work. But I don't think that "feeling satisfied with some work you've done" constitutes a "master morality". Master morality is surely bigger than a guy feeling good about his work. It's about the "masters" informing the rest of humanity that the things they do constitute the good and the right; that they are to be admired and emulated. Remember those Greek heroes who embody the classical master morality - what they wanted was *glory*: the adoration of the masses and recognition from their peers.
Perhaps in the ancient world it was clear to everyone how that might happen, and it was clear to the masses whom they were to appreciate. But in the modern world, where we have had heroes as various as Einstein and Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan and Donald Trump, I can't see how you get everyone to fall in line and adore correctly without cracking a few skulls.
Why do you need to get *everyone* in line? Past a certain point you run into diminishing returns.
If you look at the pro-achievement people (at least the subset who aren't also endorsers of totalitarian ideologies), they don't express the need to get everyone to admire the same things. Musk wants to build a city on Mars, and he has plenty of fans who will shower him in adoration and praise for it, who will try to buy rides there. And as oversensitive to criticism as he is, he doesn't actually care if most people want to stay on Earth and don't really value what he's doing.
The group trying to get everyone in line are the harm-minimization people, who put the destruction of 9 bird nests in a Starship launch as the very top story of the New York Times: https://x.com/pescami/status/1810402441134829798 in a push against them getting more launch licenses. Harm is harm, and your vision of people eking out a living on the red planet gives you no more right to destroy bird nests than to anyone else.
Master morality says "if you destroy bird nests on the way to achieving your glorious goal, so much the worse for the bird nests". It's not nice, but it doesn't foreclose someone else going and making another habitat for those birds with no rocket launches somewhere else, so long as they don't get in the way. Slave morality says "this is an endangered species, and until it is no longer endangered, everyone everywhere must adjust their behavior to minimize harm done to it". Arguably kinder and more caring, but also a much more totalizing perspective.
The classic exemplar of a failure mode of master morality, glorifying war, can only happen in a world with other people who oppose you. "And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer." is a fake quote, but captures the sentiment well. Going to the moon was that much more of an achievement because we beat the soviets to it. "Vae victis" is fundamentally a recognition that you're harming the vanquished from their perspective, but that's just too bad for them.
Sorry, I think we're still at cross purposes. You're talking about who's doing what; I'm not talking about that at all.
I was trying to talk about what it would mean to create a morality based on these so-called master virtues. There are an infinite range of possible different master virtues: they might include beauty, exploration, rigour, physical strength, IQ, scientific insight, compassion, etc., etc., etc. As such, simply claiming master morality is empty until its actual content has been specified. And because there is no other morality to guide that process of specification, it has to be physical force that makes the decision in the end, doesn't it? I'm not sure of this conclusion, because I haven't read Nietzsche and don't understand his philosophy properly. But that's how it seemed to me.
I'm not doing internet politics in this thread, just internet philosophy. The question of Starship and birds nests isn't relevant to the question I'm asking: How does the content of a master morality get decided?
> And because there is no other morality to guide that process of specification, it has to be physical force that makes the decision in the end, doesn't it?
Why? Only if you care deeply about getting everyone to share the same full set of virtues. Which you keep insisting on but never justify in any way.
> I'm not sure of this conclusion, because I haven't read Nietzsche and don't understand his philosophy properly. But that's how it seemed to me.
I'm also a non-expert, but AFAICT his big overarching idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was that people should come up with their own values, even though, or rather because, they'd differ from everyone else's. Which is utterly at odds with your concept of a universal moral code that everyone will end up following. Here's a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on him that decently covers it:
"the demand of one morality for all is detrimental to the higher men"
So the question of "how would we all agree on morality if we were operated like Nietzsche thinks we should" is ill-formed. We wouldn't.
I mean, you're kind of making my argument for me. I said, isn't master morality just violence? And you said, rape 100 women, win the war. That's what I thought!
Im sure those thoughts will be very comforting while you die to the rampaging war-rapist
Id suggest maybe, you should try to *not* die while thats a possible moral position; instead of mental masturbation; you could maybe suggest different actions the war-rapist could take, how you could defend yourself, what you could bargain with.
You should argue with people *where they are* and not by your standards. If someones a race realist, how do you suggest different courses of actions besides yelling racial slurs on the street (to reduce harm), *that they would believe*.
Maybe you don't get what slave morality is in contrast?
Why should you care about what others think of your sculpture?
Well, you should to the extent that you care. Part of the whole slave morality shtick, as far as I get it, is that you would feel required to like it because of others. Perhaps it is 'in' with your social group, maybe even honestly popular, but you just don't get it. Yet you feel forced to enjoy it anyway.
The 'master morality' would be that you care to the extent that you should care. You may be the kind of person who needs validation, but often that sort of validation seems associated with slave morality, though I don't think the theory fully disallows legitimately wanting such.
This may result in your forcing of others to look upon your works and despair, or it may be that you merely sigh, and continue on with the next sculpture that interest you.
You seem to be trying to get some objective moral fact out of the system, or a socially prescribed moral fact, but that's kinda what master morality is against... I think.
Interesting, thanks. Perhaps that's it - I was getting hung up on the word "morality" in master morality, and yes, you're exactly right that I'm trying to get an objective moral fact out of the system. But perhaps you're right to say that master morality doesn't do that. I will try to read some more about it.
Slave/master morality are misnomers. They should be called feminine and masculine morality because they reflect how groups of men and groups of women function internally.
In this sense a master is a leader who puts together a hierarchical group of men (warband/movement/company) and leads them to success. If he is a jerk to the outgroup is irrelevant as long he is generous and fair with the ingroup. Universalism is a characteristic of slave morality anyway. That's why the same man can be violent and even cruel in a conflict with the outgroup while being a kind and generous pillar of his family, community and friends.
“you had better ensmallen yourself if you know what’s good for you” is how groups of women function. Women are ruthless egalitarians who will gang up on the tall poppy and exclude her which is the worst punishment possible for most women. That's why women are far more obsessed of keeping up with their peer group both in fashion and ideology.
Some aspects of early christian morality like valuing virginity, chastity and fidelity are also obvious feminine values. Largely the same with caring for the children, the sick and the old.
Even the way charity was done changed with the rise of Christianity. For example roman emperors provided food and games for roman citizens (their ingroup) while christians provided food for the poor regardless of legal status.
I would not use the Roman Empire as a good example of in group preference, as the definition of Roman citizen was continually expanded for political reasons. Not unlike how it is today
Expanding the ingroup was the secret of roman success at least during the Republic. The writer of the ACOUP blog makes a good case that this how roman armies were able to vastly outnumber everybody else.
Rome is important because it's a well documented society that went from master/masculine morality to slave/feminine morality.
The process of using other tribes for the Roman armies only really worked well for the socii. Acoup says that the Romans failed by not giving more privileges to the Germanic tribes pillaging the empire gives you an answer for why the Romans weren’t interested in the idea. And also makes you wonder why raising infinite legions from Africa and Greece and Egypt didn’t pan out.
While some of acoup s writing is interesting, he comes across as extremely ideologically driven in his conclusion, similar to Jared dimond.
Romans gave socii rights to their fellow italic tribes with whom they were closely related and compatible. Even when expanding the ingroup they still needed an outgroup that could be looted and taxed.
Unfortunately being extremely ideologically driven has become the norm in modern american academia.
Yeah, by emperor Commodus of Gladiator fame. But that was long past the times when the Roman Republic was expending with her armies of levied roman citizens and italian socii.
I haven't read the ACOUP blog, but the claim that Romans succeeded by expanding the ingroup goes back to antiquity. But the point wasn't primarily about giving citizenship to allies - it's that the Romans, highly unusually among ancient societies, gave citizenship to their freed slaves (and a LOT of slaves got freed). There is a famous letter of Philip V of Macedon dating from 217 BC (so just before he himself got entangled with Rome) in which he argues that this was the secret of Roman success.
In 217 BC? No, though it might depend how you define "Italians". Over the previous 75 years Rome had engaged in massive military conquests in Magna Graecia (southern Italy, but Greek speaking, and not at that point considered ethnically Italian), Cisalpine Gaul (the region north of the Po, similarly not considered Italian at that time though later became incorporated into Italy), Sicily and Sardinia (Italian now, but never considered as such in antiquity). The likelihood is that those were the source of a large proportion of the slaves being sold in Rome at that period.
I think that Christianity was partly responsible for the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as a feminine morality was poorly suited for a militaristic empire.
The rebirth of the West after the year 1000 was the result of the synthesis of masculine and feminine morality in the form of Chivalry which became the morality of the feudal ruling class and who's rules like don't butcher and enslave the peasants when you're raiding and don't rape captured ladies form the basis of our own moral rules.
I see greco-roman morality as being masculine, followed by feminine early Christianity than by a synthesis in the form of Chivalric morality and then a gradually transition to a fully feminine morality which has been undergoing since the victorian era.
I find this take, like so many other takes, greatly trivialises the extent to which fundamental ways of thinking are built into the fabric of a civilisation over time and aren't going to be undone quickly (or ever) and also aren't just going to coexist with opposite modes of thought in the same society. Suggesting that men follow MM while women follow SM, *in the same society*, has a nice neat aesthetic but just utterly lacks coherent plausibility to me.
Masculine and feminine morality are based on innate characteristics resulting from human psychological dimorphism so they cannot be changed. When one becomes dominant they shape the fully fledged moral systems at civilisational level but can not eradicate the other which continues to exist at the lowest level, the peer group.
Except that power fantasy is not how modern men work. I am a 46 years old man and the hierarchical kind of social life stopped right after high school and went egalitarian. It never resembled a warband. Outgroup violence was not tolerated because there was no outgroup.
Companies are hierarchial, but that is just what we do to pay our bills, that is not real social life.
Well, a point of nuance needs to be added here: as Arnold Kling likes to say, there are two main types of hierarchies, dominance hierarchies and prestige hierarchies. Dominance hierarchies are hard to maintain when there is free movement of people and stuff (ie, not high school) but prestige hierarchies still persist.
Maybe it's because I'm in STEM, but when I'm around other women, I (for example) absolutely 'brag' about my latest achievements and encourage them to do the same. I've never observed anything else. These people are some of my best friends and I've had the (somewhat awkward) pleasure of them talking about me to their (incidentally also female) friends behind their backs as "Neike's really cool!", which I found out upon meeting said friends.
To be clear, this is just data for you, it's not meant to be an argument that you're wrong. Subcultures are a thing and I am definitely up to my eyebrows deep in nerddom and STEM, and that might be the most of an explanation why things are so palpably different for me. I know exactly one woman in my circle of friends who is even into fashion; she adores me for some reason, even though we have approximately nothing in common, but maybe that's the appeal. (It's certainly mutual, I think she's fantastic for being totally different to the people I usually hang out with, without being judgemental.)
Ish, very ish. Egalitarian/altruistic morality is popular with women , as one can tell from voting patterns, but also with poorer men and minorities. There's no reason for "male" values to be uniform, since alphas and betas have different interests.
I won't be popular here, but female sexual choice appears to be very favorable for exceptional men, isn't it? Male "slave morality" is not great for this chemistry (without cultural "patriarchal" pressure), Andrew Tate might argue. Was Nietzsche imitating the seeming female optimal choice out of frustration?
Why do you say it's obvious that virginity and chastity are feminine values? Women benefit from getting to choose their mates but not from chastity for its own sake. I would say it's clearly men who care about women's chastity for evolutionary reasons, with women (in most cultures) acting as enforcers of that preference for practical reasons.
So, another issue: I'm very suspicious of the idea that *anyone* in the modern west is an actual example of master morality. SM has been the orthodoxy of western civilisation for a couple thousand years; the idea that anyone now can *really* be a practitioner of MM seems almost incomprehensible. I don't even know if the Nazis qualify: they had a huge persecution complex and a great amount of envy towards the Jews and their material success. They were obsessed with claims that Germany had been stabbed in the back and mistreated at Versailles--basically the exact same "not faaaair" childish whine that the likes of Nietzsche would attribute to all slave moraity. And the resulting cruelty was as much self-righteous revenge as it was domination and glory.
Basically, the left and the right and every other ideology (insofar as its a meaningful "ideology" that people can rally around) is a form, ultimately, of slave morality. Even if it claims to hate SM, it will eventually just largely fall back into it. The alternative is to suggest that a way of thinking that has dominated civilisation for many centuries and has been unquestioned and unquestionable is suddenly, in our very special unique present, entirely up for debate in its fundamental form. And I don't find that plausible.
You can either agree with Nietzsche that SM is an illusion, like all morality, to be abandoned and ultimately transcended, or you can disagree and say morality exists and is good (and by morality you *will* mean what N calls slave morality). Actually following master morality is something you either accuse your enemies of doing, or you pretend to do to seem brave and edgy, but that nobody really does.
Data point: The description of master morality in the essay resonated a lot with me and I would identify with it quite strongly, to the point where I am sincerely tempted to use the term and start normalising it in my circle of friends. I'm generally not an asshole (what would that achieve?), but I definitely aim for vitality and success in my life, and consider it fundamentally wrong if I fail at these things for preventable reasons.
The "This just says 'I can do what I want'" meme unironically basically describes my attitude. It turns out you can in fact have that attitude without also being a jerk, or edgy about it. I think the idiom "If you want something done, you need to do it yourself," when positively rephrased, is exactly that. If I want something done, I *can* do it myself. There's a component of anarchy here - rules are useful guidelines, they're not constraints. That doesn't mean you go around breaking them all the time (again, what would that achieve?).
Not Nietzschean (as far as I know) is that I go a step in a different direction, too: If someone is more awesome than me, *I want to help them succeed harder*. I will be the sidekick! Let me be the sidekick! (I guess this is potentially Randian as Scott understands it?)
Lots of footnotes and asterisks apply (e.g. if I personally perceive someone to be an asshole, I am not going to be their sidekick, regardless how successful they are; I *also* identify as a deontologist and so believe certain categories of things are morally wrong; breaking some societal rules has big consequences and that factors strongly into the decision whether to break them; and so on), this is a comment on a blog post, not a blog post, but my core point is that I am neither trying to be 'brave and edgy', nor would I accuse my enemies of following master morality, since from my perspective, it's not an accusation. (That said, neither is "slave morality" and I wouldn't say I "hate" it?)
I guess one could say this is just a form of "transcend all morality", not actually "master morality", since it's got a bunch of footnotes and asterisks on it. But I would say the same is true for "slave morality", surely? Usually people have asterisks and footnotes on those; e.g. success in sports might still be championed, the hierarchies Scott mentioned Western society tends to at least grudgingly accept, et cetera. I think if we claim "slave morality" is followed by some people, we can also claim "master morality" is followed by some people, surely?
If you're gonna use it in conversation I recommend reverting to the German Herrenmoral. Fewer syllables, overtly a term of art, and very cool sounding.
Dumb question: In English "master" is ambiguous. It can mean master of a skill or a field, or it can mean master of other people. Does German have the same ambiguity? Which sense does Nietzsche seem to imply?
Nah, not a stupid question at all, I don't know my way around languages I didn't grow up with, either, and sometimes googling these things leads to dubious results.
"Herr" can be three things that I can think of off the top of my head - "mister" ("Herr Schulz" is "Mr. Schulz"), as well as the two meanings of "master" you mentioned (e.g. "Lord of the Rings" is "Herr der Ringe" in German).
"Sklavenmoral" and "Herrenmoral" in context of each other definitely tap into the master/slave dichotomy, which makes it awkward terminology, for sure. But just taken by its own, "Herrenmoral" sounds rather dated, or like it might potentially reference a morality of men (meaning 'men' as opposed to 'women', not 'men' as a shorthand for 'humanity').
Isn't that more of a centrist anti-woke thing? The author of this blog has written a lot about how terrible feminists are to certain men for example.
There's a difference between "it's wrong for you to oppress us" and "we should stop letting ourselves be oppressed", isn't there? One is begging for mercy, the other a call to action.
Sometimes I wonder that the people we call intellectuals are mostly boys who were showed into lockers at school by bullies a lot. I mean, I am one. Physically weak, clumsy, but smart. Funny how these things correlate.
(Walt was either the type who did the showing or was also showed a lot and keeps compensating for it ever since. )
I mean, when intellectual analysis is also self-help therapy, is it still good intellectual analysis?
So I wanted to be positively judged on passing exams and writing essays. I did not want to be positively judged on throwing balls and doing push-ups, I had no chance.
Because I knew I will not be positively judged on winning fights, my best bet was negatively judged as being someone who never starts fights, never harms other people, trying to turn weakness into a virtue. I am not weak, I am not cowardly, I am a Nice Guy! Is this what the Nietzscheans are calling out? Because yes, in that case, yes, it was indeed a lie.
Except that I think they are massively overcorrecting in the other direction. Weakness masquarading as goodness is a lie, but there is also true goodness, the goodness of the strong.
My point, we really do need to stop looking at weakness as a virtue, we really need to stop that lie that we pretend to be good, when in reality we are just too weak to risk doing harm.
Which is why women are shaming But I Am A Nice Guys - they can smell that fraud from a mile. They can smell that type stops being nice every time he thinks he can get away with it.
This is easier said than done. I can admit I am weak, but I think I would still not go about beating people up even if I was strong. But how to precisely separate the two?
Anyhow all I can say is this. It is easy to not start fights when weak, it is actually harder when one is strong. So I guess the way out is do not shame those people too much, who do things we do not dare, risk doing. It is hard to know how much goodness a counterfactual strong-me would show. Yes, this is a bit of an argument for "boys will be boys" and "mean girls will be mean girls".
If .morality is only about consequences , it.doesn't matter. If morality is about praising what you want more of, and punishing what you want less of , they are entirely different.
To quote Nietzsche: “Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”
Jordan Peterson has also often espoused this line of thinking: "A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control."
I think the answer many would give to this from a *practical* perspective is that the potential for anything meaningful is morally neutral. Someone without the capability for great harm is, in some sense, also lacking some pre-requisite for great steps forward. i don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, we're allowed to just exist and in practical terms it *might be* the same outside of situations where broad capability is required - but what that means is being locked into what might be called mediocrity.
In a more theoretical sense, I think there's something to the idea that meaningfully being a good person requires forbearance of something that they're *actually capable of*. There's a saying in Tamil that translates to "guy with a stomachache on a religious fast" and this sort of reminds me of that - you don't really get credit for not doing what you can't do. This seems less concerned with the practical side, where someone who can't do harm and doesn't want to do harm (but can) is identical outwardly, even if the former might actually want to a lot of harm - but it does seem like a difference to a philosopher.
> Someone without the capability for great harm is, in some sense, also lacking some pre-requisite for great steps forward.
That sounds very symmetric and plausible at first blush, but is it really true? I don't really see why.
If you ended up with a defense mechanism of appearing harmless, it doesn't mean you don't have any inner strength, it just means you're too afraid to put it to use in most circumstances. It only takes one circumstance where that fear doesn't trigger, and all of a sudden you see great steps forward.
The meek person who suddenly does something forceful or heroic or unexpected is not that rare, in fact it's common enough to be a literary trope.
It may make more sense if you extend the way of thinking from simple physical dangerousness to something more general: agency, applied intellect, commitment & will, status, physical fitness, competence, and efficacy in general are forms of power – of being able to effect change in the world. Power is potentially dangerous.
Then there's also the whole integration of shadow aspect - for example, recognizing, accepting and using your inbuilt aggression constructively, rather than repressing it.
I would *much* rather spend time with a self-controlled werewolf then a toddler. He probably has a lot of interesting stories! I mean toddlers are nice, but this is an honest-to-goodness good werewolf over here.
I don't think it's about being practical, it's more that you can't call yourself "good" unless you had the opportunity to do evil and rejected it. Otherwise you just took the only course available to you, which isn't moral because it's not a decision.
Much like how you can only be brave when you're afraid, etc.
I'm right there with you. People who just can't help being nice and who simply can't bring themsleves to do horrible things, even when the situation might arguably call for it, are just immeasurably nicer to be around than people who're constantly capable of horrible things but also constantly reigning themselves in. You'd have to be absolutely flipping loopy to want to work with or, heaven forbid, to *actually marry* the latter sort of person, over the former!
"Which is why women are shaming But I Am A Nice Guys - they can smell that fraud from a mile. They can smell that type stops being nice every time he thinks he can get away with it."
Of course, those same progressives are making excuses for how Islamic societies aren't actually invading countries like the West is, which is exactly the same effect you describe (but just a billion times more obvious)...
>Sometimes I wonder that the people we call intellectuals are mostly boys who were showed into lockers at school by bullies a lot. I mean, I am one. Physically weak, clumsy, but smart. Funny how these things correlate.
There does appear to be a correlation, but I'm pretty sure this isn't causative. I'm about as far towards the nerdy intellectual side of the continuum as anyone, and if we're going to infer childhood experiences from adult social behaviors, I'd probably have a long history of being shoved into lockers. In fact, my mother told me that a psychologist I saw in my childhood once told her "it's a good thing your son knows how to handle himself, or he'd probably be bullied like crazy." I was very much a social outsider as a kid, but I was also strong, physically skilled, and good at fighting. I quickly learned that I was too strong for anyone to pick on, and developed enough confidence that people generally didn't try. For a while, I became a bit of a bully, throwing my weight around and belittling people I didn't like, because they knew I could kick their asses, but it didn't take me long to grow out of that and feel guilty about it.
I don't think many nerdy intellectual adults had this experience growing up, but I don't think the fact that I did makes itself particularly apparent in my personality. I think that there are a lot of weak but meanspirited people who would never have learned to withdraw from the pleasure of lording their own strength over other people if they'd had the opportunity. But I don't think learning that lesson takes a particularly rarefied level of moral character. I strongly suspect that people who seem about as nice as I am as adults, but were weak growing up, would probably also have been about as nice as I am if they'd grown up strong.
> Hanania is terrible at being right-wing. He’s pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, and supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump.
Most of that just sounds like American conservatives are bad at being right wing rather than Richard Hanania.
> Andrew Tate
I'm not convinced that Andrew Tate exists. Sure, his physical form probably exists out there in the world somewhere but I'm not convinced that "Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer" really exists as a manosphere influencer rather than as a boogeyman for the other side. I have never once heard his name from someone supposedly on his side, but I hear it all the time in the form of pearl-clutching articles about how terrible it is that boys are listening to manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate... written by people who couldn't possibly name another manosphere influencer. Andrew Tate is a character, a troll, a class clown, who exists in a symbiotic relationship with those who hate everything he stands for. Of course you hate Andrew Tate, he's a classic heel whose every move is designed to irritate you and who exists only to be written about negatively. Using him as an example of anything, let alone master morality, is cheating.
Do you talk to teenagers often? r/teachers and other teacher forums discussed him a lot last year since it was a barrier to classroom management. They're interesting discussions because unlike most pearl-clutching, the teachers are actually interested in accomplishing some goal (such as getting a 16 year old to practice stoichiometry rather than bark about bugattis). He's discussed in the same way that fidget spinners were discussed a decade ago.
When I was a teenager, it was towards the tail end of the gangster rap era, when pimps were considered the epitome of cool. So I'm not exactly shocked to hear that teenagers think Andrew Tate is cool.
My brother was doing substitute teaching a while back. Some of the boys asked what he thought of Andrew Tate, he said he disliked him because he was a pimp. They then argued about whether he was part of The Matrix or not, with the "nots" mustering that he was not a woman.
Andrew Tate has a stupid level of following among teenage boys. He appeals to the juvenile male id.
I understand that it's pretty common practice among scammers and grifters for their pitches to include moderately-obvious flaws, for the specific purpose of weeding out anyone who's smart or careful enough to be a difficult mark. That way they can focus their time and attention on the marks more likely to pay out.
Tate's target demographic is young men who are anxious about their masculinity and some combination of unintelligent, inexperienced, and gullible: this is not the sort of person who's writing think pieces, appearing on podcasts or, well, writing blog comments on a site like this. If you lurk on the right corners of Facebook (which I don't recommend doing) you can absolutely find people talking him up or defending him.
"Andrew Tate is a character, a troll, a class clown, who exists in a symbiotic relationship with those who hate everything he stands for. Of course you hate Andrew Tate, he's a classic heel whose every move is designed to irritate you and who exists only to be written about negatively."
I could replace "Andrew Tate" in this passage with "Donald Trump" and it wouldn't be one whit less true. Their sheer hateability seems to be a large fraction of their popularity: people who are angry and resentful place a high premium on doing things that piss "those people" off, whether "those people" are their parents or their political opposition. But also there are just lots of people who like things that seem bizarrely and incomprehensibly bad to me: this was quite apparent to me long before either of them became household names. Humans are strange sometimes.
The end ties it all up nicely. Ultimately all debates about morality lead nowhere, and we have to get on with living our lives. In the words of Wittgenstein, who solved philosophy a century ago - "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
When thinking about Rand and egoism and altruism, it's good to keep in mind that by "altruism" she means something different than most people. She's talking about altruism in the same sense as the originator of the word, Auguste Comte: as otherism, living for the sake of others, self-sacrifice.
So, for a Randian egoist: Helping others because you value them, out of a sense of generosity and great-heartedness? Fantastic! Helping others out of a sense of duty, stunting your own life and happiness? Nope!
As far as efficient altruism goes, most people espousing it seem to think in utilitarian, rather than purely altruistic terms. Under utilitarianism, helping others in a way that also helps you is *obviously* better than helping others in a way that makes you miserable, other things being equal.
I thought Verhoeven started reading it, then got disgusted and tossed it aside while screaming to the heavens "Fascist tripe!" After, he vowed to sabotage the film in an orgy of vengeance.
Yeah, Yglesias would be just about perfect except his macroeconomics is wrong, thinking there is a place for fiscal policy in managing aggregate demand. I keep hoping the will read my corrective comments and eventually come around.
I'm sort of surprised that Scott did not do a take on Tyler Cowen and his Prometheism cum common sense morality.
It's perfectly reasonable to think that monetary policy should be the regular method for this, and break out fiscal policy for emergency situations (like the 2008 crash or the threat of a Covid crash).
The central bank always acts last and can apply monetary offset. The exception is if the rest of the government overrides that, like with FDR devaluing the dollar.
COVID was a "real"/supply-side phenomena. If the central bank anchors expectations of nominal GDP growth, then we can still have that even if it means inflation. And falling short in one year (if you worry it's not fast-working enough) is offset the next.
I thought the reconciliation (and indeed the foundation of civilization) was that individual masters are weaker than multiple unified liberals. That the fremen myth was a myth because by allowing a society to form, specialise and create surplus, it will out compete those barbarian warlords who focus solely on negative sum games. This requires the introduction of some slave morality to enable cooperation, without letting it grow like a cancer and ultimately leaving your society weak to those same warlords (though see most of Roman history for how master morality can be equally cancerous). I taught my son early on that it is better to make friends than to be good at fighting, because the guy with a bunch of friends to back him likely will never have to fight at all, and if he does it's better to have 20 fists than 2. Of course, I still teach him how to fight because throwing a good punch or kick or grappling well is its own reward outside of its ability to overpower others.
Anyway, it's all information replication evolution in the end. We're just a bunch of genes and memes trying to find the most effective strategy to replicate, to have our informational payload expressed across time and space. If part of that payload is a pleasing melody of the pursuit of cycling goals, it seems worthy enough.
I don't think you can understand Rand without understanding her habit of making up completely straw man definitions of words. "Altruism is bad" means "There is this specific thing I will can altruism now and it is bad", and then it turns out it means giving in to precisely those envy-driven people that do not like achievement at all. And "selfishness" defined as "not doing that".
But that thing she called altruism is exactly what Auguste Comte, who at least popularized the word and perhaps coined it, advocated. A while back I copy edited a scholarly bio of Comte, which quoted a passage where he said that Jesus was not a sound moral teacher, because his line "Love your neighbor as yourself," implied that it was all right to love yourself (indeed, that your love for yourself was the standard for love), whereas, in Comte's view, to feel any love at all for yourself was immoral. That's exactly like the sort of thing you imagine Rand making up as a parody of altruism.
Of course, already, in Comte's lifetime, his friend J.S. Mill was trying to water altruism down to "concern for others," taking out the harsh "lack of concern for self" part. And it's been steadily watered down since then. But I think that Rand was spot on about the original meaning; and I can't think she was wrong about people who liked the sound of the original but wanted to make it less virulent.
"Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact."
Huh, so Rand's twenty-pages-long proofs are weak, but we're supposed to accept this paragraph as an axiom instead? I guess it does have a virtue of brevity, if nothing else.
"If they’re forced to draw attention to their advantages, they should talk about how they benefited from privilege, and how millions of people with the same skills are unfairly languishing in poverty."
It's amusing that an obvious clown like Tate is presented as an exemplar of master morality, while there was no mention of the likes of Musk and Altman. I'm pretty sure that they don't go around abasing themselves before peasants, and to the extent that they are flawed characters that isn't one of their flaws.
I think Rand claimed to have objectively proven stuff by first principles, and liberalism just says here are our values. I understand there are some attempts to prove liberalism (eg Rawls), but they're not great and they tend to be more than a paragraph.
I don't think Musk particularly claims explicitly that he's better than other people. I agree Musk is an interesting example of master morality done somewhat well, or at least better than Tate, but that's not what I was going for!
"It’s our headline result" seems to imply that this was somehow derived from underlying principles, though. And I do agree that there are some considerations that support this conclusion, e.g. from game theory, but even so there's no good reason to believe that it's particularly stable, or truly represents terminal values of a large number of people.
It's not reasoned from underlying principles, it's justified entirely on consequentialist grounds. I guess some people have tried to justify it from first principles like Rawls but ymmv
You can justify it from first principles if one of those principles is a Literal God on His Literal Throne, but when you swap him for the metaphorical version you just have to take it on faith.
This is not being short - it's my genuine answer, but I'm sure that venezuelans would convert if given the chance. If ideologies are religions, then Liberalism seems to me to be the most intuitive and correct. Its converts dominate various measures of success.
Since nobody can actually perform the calculations, you can't justify anything non-trivial by invoking consequentialism, the most you can do is appeal to your intuitions for what the outcomes would be and hope that others share this intuition.
I basically agree, and note that the intuition stems from basic interactions and self-interest. You would buy marginally fewer substack subscriptions if the price increased. You would buy a marginally newer car if the prices went down. As far as I know, the efficiency of markets is experimentally proven to incorporate information about the real world into prices.
This means that markets are generally optimal. From there you can try to justify through various means such as science that certain political systems are better than others.
None if it is really first-principles based, nor do I see why that's important. The first principles of the most influential challengers are pretty arbitrary ie communism (rich people bad) and fascism (our dear leader is good). The evidence of the misery created by those systems compared to alternatives is evident.
The strength of liberalism is that it doesn't require a precise set of values, so it can form.large alliances. And if everyone has the same values, there would be bonkers for democracy.
Musk believes basically the opposite of hanania and Yglesias. He’s on twitter talking about The Great Replacement, not One Billion Americans and open borders. He leads the anti-war faction while hanania and Yglesias have gone all in on liberal global imperialism. He has come out for Donald Trump while the other two oppose him. Etc etc.
I think it’s telling that the actual “Superman” (or should we say Ironman) is a complete inversion of beliefs from people that blog for a living and lie all the time (Yglesias won’t even mention IQ and huge sections of his work are nonsense because of it, hanania has his own lies). It’s the difference between a doer and people who are just trying to make a living as bloggers.
Great post! I felt like Scott was groping around trying to reinvent chivalry without quite realising that's what he was doing.
The idea of chivalry of course was that knights would seek to distinguish themselves by their virtue. The virtues they were to aspire to were laid down in the codes of the orders they would seek to be accepted into. So there was that desire and drive for greatness - the quintessential chivalrous man was a literal knight in shining armor. He was brave, and fierce, and deadly on the field of battle. But he also protected the weak, was courteous to women, kept his oaths, fought with honour and showed mercy to a vanquished enemy.
The reality of chivalry probably never lived up to those noble ideals. But what real world has ever lived up to any ideal?
A modern day chivalry might exalt rich successful capitalists - while also insisting that they don't do the bad things that rich successful capitalists are known for. To be inducted into the Order of the Sparrow you need to have a half a billion in net worth - but also you need to be honest and fair in your dealings, and be faithful to your wife, and treat women with respect, and donate a hundred million to charity, and treat your employees with decency and dignity, etc. And if you do those things your membership in the Order of the Sparrow makes you a highly admired man that everyone wants to do associate with. And if you fail to uphold them you get tossed out of the Order and that's a terrible scandal and people worry how it might look to associate with you.
Would it work? I dunno. But I wouldn't mind giving it a try.
Rand wanted to create a code of honor for chivalrous capitalists. Her flaw was not giving enough credence to how the original capitalist men who inspired her were created by a synthesis of religious and civilizational values that can not be replicated just through words alone
The dichotomy Scott Alexander is talking about is off the mark. The true dichotomy is between people who uphold the classical liberal values that built Western society (positive-sum thinkers) and those who oppose these values (zero or negative-sum thinkers). In this dichotomy, the former are unequivocally good and the latter are unequivocally bad. The key question now is how should the former react to the latter forcing their values on them.
Master and slave morality muddles things because there are positive and negative aspects in each of them.
The positive sum / zero sum distinction requires everyone agreeing on numbers in the payoff matrix, ie value consensus. I think most of modern political squabbles consist of each group accusing the other of defecting. And according to their own internal value system, this is true.
"The positive sum / zero sum distinction requires everyone agreeing on numbers in the payoff matrix, ie value consensus."
Does it, though?
I think in general it's the case that the points in a payoff matrix are by each player's own lights, not based on consensus between all players.
Me buying a coffee from Starbucks is positive sum. And yet, I value having money and having nice coffee, and Starbucks (to the extent that it is a unified entity with values) values having my money while giving me as little coffee as possible for as much money as possible. We don't agree on what is valuable, often our values are in direct conflict, yet I can give Starbucks something it values, in exchange for something I value, and it works out better for both us than if we had not traded.
Another nation may have a very different culture and very different values and interests than your nation, and yet negotiations can happen where both get things they want from the other.
In fact, value differences (I value the amount of money I would have to pay for a cup of coffee less than I value the coffee I receive when I buy one. Starbucks values the money more highly than the coffee it gives me. When nations negotiate, they often give things they value very little in exchange for things they value more) are key to trade.
So being positive-sum doesn't require value consensus. And when we say "zero sum thinking" it's typically in contrast to positive sum thinking - I. E., someone who treats it as fact that they can only get what they want at another's expense. I can think in a zero-sum way even when someone is attempting to propose a positive-sum deal to me - I'd just see it as a "I won, so my opponent must have lost" situation. And two zero-sum-thinking agents can believe they are winning and the other is losing by whatever values they have, without those values being the same - and so a deal gets done, both zero-sum agents think they've won and are happy, no problem. I think the concept of "saving face" is related - it's the ability to let someone else feel like or claim they've won at your expense, even though from your perspective/by your value-set they've lost and you've won.
"I think most of modern political squabbles consist of each group accusing the other of defecting. And according to their own internal value system, this is true."
Sure. And if I was trying to cooperate, I would offer the group I was trying to cooperate with something it valued, regardless of what I value, and understand that if I did something it disvalued, that would be considered a defection, regardless of what my values might say about the matter. I think most political leaders (unable to say the same for online mobs) are sophisticated enough to take the other side's perspective and likely reaction into account when doing things, and rarely make a "oopsie, I thought you would like this because I would like it, I forgot you aren't me, didn't mean to defect" sort of mistake.
You seem to be talking a little about how an individual ought to behave, but mostly, what kinds of behavior, in aggregate lead to a healthy prosperous society.
Why would these two match up? You’ve also left out families, neighborhoods, and communities, cities, etc. There are incentive games at every level of interaction, and at some level we are all playing prisoner’s dilemma with ourselves.
So if you ask the question, “is there a diagonal strategy that’s cooperative with all levels, from the individual to the family to the community on up”, there’s no reason to believe the answer is yes. And that seems to be what you’re looking for here.
Unless you believe that there’s some intrinsic fitness between morality (at all these social levels) and prosperity, you end up saying things like “we all know X is true but we try not to think about it too much.” This isn’t sustainable in an era of digital communication, and so your model of morality ends up being an argument for a bunch of nonsense we all pretend to, but don’t really, believe.
The alternative to all this is considering that morality is _real_ and describes a strategy which maximizes both individual and group prosperity, but that humans keep on getting it wrong because we get attached to culturally constructed maps, and start ignoring the territory. When this happened historically, it was interpreted as, “people turned from God and he punished us.”
But, if we believe that morality just describes the optimal long term strategy that maximizes cooperation at all scales, we can then talk about reality and drift between map and territory. If you don’t have this idea that morality is real, you can’t describe this “drifting” phenomenon and don’t have the ability to talk about off-diagonal strategies, (say a family defects against their community) because you end up stuck in a place where you can’t say your OWN group is wrong. As you said, master morality isn’t trying to convert anyone, and salve morality rejects your attempt at prophecy because how dare you think for yourself.
I agree that morality is about individual and group survival.and prosperity , and disagree that it is "a strategy"...there are a whole bunch of different virtues and values, and a lot of tension between them.
In the limit, I think there’s a single strategy, which is the integration of all those virtues and vices in such a way that, in each moment, the ideal long term move is made.
As a nominal right-winger, for me the argument has always been economic. I don't have time to show my numbers right now but if most of what the right claims empirically is correct about history and innate inequality, I estimate we're looking at 1-5 quadrillion dollars of economic mismanagement easily. The full case is almost too depressing to consider.
4. The sages and the prophets did not long for the Messianic era so that they may rule over the whole world or dominate the heathens, nor to be exalted by the nations, nor in order that they may eat, drink and be merry; but only to be free [for involvement] with the Torah and its wisdom, without anyone to oppress and disturb them, so that they may merit the life of the World-to-Come, as we explained in Hilchot Teshuvah.55
---- i.e. we can act life we want the stuff in master morality but have to secretly pretend we don't and have some kind of aultirior non-master morality motive
5. In that era there will be neither famine nor war, neither envy nor strife, because good will emanate in abundance and all delightful things will be accessible as dust.
--- us being masters will make everyone else better also (Like Rand Says)
The one preoccupation of the entire world will be solely to know G‑d. The Israelites, therefore, will be great sages and know the hidden matters and they will attain knowledge of their Creator to the extent of human capacity, as it is said: “The earth shall be full with the knowledge of G‑d as the waters cover the sea!”
---- altruism bottoming out in something else i.e. "knowing God"
This post gives a little too much credit to Andrew Tate as a flawed man with many admirable qualities. He got started as a kickboxer (although I’m not sure how challenging his kickboxing league is as far as materials arts go), but all his money and internet notoriety stems from his webcam pornography business, with his online classes originally telling men how to start their own cam business. I’m not sure that’s enough to make him a Superman figure.
OK this is officially confusing. I know something about Scott's post (I read most of it), but I'm not an expert either, so consider this a free riff on the theme. How do we undo the confusion? Here we have two completely separate concepts, uncomfortably joined at the hip by the word "morality". So let's lose the word and look at them separately. What do we have?
On the west side, we have mastery. Everyone knows mastery. Everyone wants and admires mastery. You want your potatoes to grow big, your house to keep you dry, your arrows to hit the bullseye, your drumming to be steady, your singing to be in tune, your poetry to scan, your stews to be tasty, your lovemaking to be otherworldly, your excel sheets to be accurate, your LLMs to mimic intelligence, and so on and so forth.
Note that mastery is logically independent of your choice of goals. Contra Scott, if your goal is to efface yourself before God, you want to be a master of divine receptivity. If it's to meditate yourself into non-existence, or even better, into a state beyond both existence and nonexistence, you want to be a master of formless meditation. These things require as much dedication and discipline as becoming a world-leading harpsichordist, and their practitioners are rightly called masters.
Note also that, contra Scott, mastery does not necessarily imply taking your cues of success from mainstream culture. You can be as much of a contrarian as you want as long as you actually hone your skills.
On the north side we have empathy. That's looking at another human being in the eyes, and seeing "another you" there. It's avoiding the lure of feeling like a single center of interest here ("looking out for number one") and a basically inert rest-of-the-world outside of your skin. It's basically taking the other people's existence into account as people, and probably extend some of this empathy to animals too, and why not to the environment as a whole. That's Kant and Jesus and Buddha and Buber right there, and most everyone else who has considered the basic "I-you" relationship.
These two are basic human capabilities. They have evolutionary roots, and various cultures have polished them into various shapes. They both need to be learned and trained — young kids lack both, and the elderly lose them. They also are not in any kind of intrinsic contradiction with each other. Maybe I'm naive here, but in terms of basic psychology it seems like they should help each other; mastering stuff should give you self-confidence so you don't need to see others first and foremost as a threat, and being empathetic should help you find a place in your community where you can hone some useful skills.
So if these two end up as a dichotomy or a trade-off, it's only in some secondary, non-essential way. Such as the simple fact that they both take effort to develop beyond what comes naturally, and there's only so much effort you are able or willing to put. Or that society starts rewarding you for one that you focus on that and forget all about the other.
So far this is all at the individual level. What does the world need? It seems obvious that it needs both. As a civilization we want our things to be well-functioning and beautiful and accurate, *and* we want people to treat each other as people and not as unfeeling tools.
Having cleared the space around and taken some good picture of the area, can we join the whole thing back together? Can we put the "morality" back in and avoid being off-topic?
I guess in the end I'll be boringly pluralistic as usual, and just say that there is no one true principle to rule things. Not even utilitarianism. Morality is complicated, it has evolutionary roots, it has cultural variety, it has individual variety, and it's always a question of balancing different principles with each other. When you take one of these too far, and ignore the other, you get into a failure mode, like wanting to conquer the Earth for no good reason, or submitting to others for no good reason. Then you end up with confused double hierarchies, like the woke (or Christian) thing where the downtrodden are simultaneously at the bottom (by definition) and at the top (by overcompensation).
Same goes with the individual-collective axis. If you go too far in individualism you end up in "neo-liberal terminal late capitalism" ruled by Musk and Zuck and people are starting to hate that. If you go too far the other way you end up in a failed communist state or something.
So balance people. A is not the enemy of B, unless you go to extremes. Don't go to extremes.
I found the essay confusing too, although parts were thought provoking. I’m not sure that the master/slave morality dichotomy is useful for explaining whatever Scott is trying to explain.
The biggest problem that any society has to deal with is ultimately the problem of the individual with competence, ambition, and no moral code; the individual that wants the best for themselves with no thought given to how this affects everyone else. I think this is similar in some ways to psychopathy, but to avoid running into specific definitional issues I'm just going to call these people assholes.
You can't build society around assuming that there are no assholes. There will always be people that both have extreme self-interest, high competence, and the ability to ignore morality (or define morality to their own benefit). Any utopian vision that assumes that people will not be assholes is doomed to failure.
Master Morality doesn't generally care if people are assholes. Strength, virility, ambition are good. The difference between an asshole noble and a non-asshole noble is the asshole either lacks the sense of noblesse oblige or fakes it. The problem is that this makes it easy to claim that Master Morality is Asshole Morality, when asshole morality is actually whatever they can use to get to the top.
It then becomes very easy for an asshole whose strengths lie in manipulating people to use slave morality to push themselves up. To go with section IV:
1. Assholes profess the idea that the system is rigged. Because they're not yet at the top of the current system, and they deserve to be.
2. They believe that all virtues are subjective, meaningless, and kind of a grift, because they themselves have no virtues.
3. Any attempt by anyone else to talk about good things, pursue good things, or achieve good things comes across as a bid for status, because that's the what the asshole would do. Their goal is to unite all the envious people into a Tall Poppy Police who agree that successful people suck, because leading the Tall Poppy Police is a great way to have power and the ability to hide their own Tall status.
5. The asshole replaces the normal cost-benefit calculus with their own version that ignores benefits to anyone other than them and obsesses over harms. If everybody who has accomplished things is a bad person, then they win by default.
6. They become collectivist. They demand that every action be done only after getting unanimous non-hierarchical collective approval, because their particular skill is in controling the collective.
7. They believe that people should be judged not by their actions, but by the purity of their ideas. Ideas are easy, and they can always profess or believe that their ideas are the most pure of all.
I don't think there's an easy solution to the problem of how to deal with people that are assholes. But it does put the lie to "Isn’t slave morality, with its concern for charity, peace, and equality - simply correct?" If concern for charity, peace, and equality is the path to power, then assholes will fake it. Anyone who's not continually improving their morality to filter out the changing ways that assholes slip into power is doomed to end up with assholes running the show.
Realy clever, interesting, thought-provoking, and helpful post - but whatever happened to words like aggrandise and diminish?
("I shall ensmallen, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"..)
> 'Maybe at some point there’s a hidden offramp marked “TERMINAL VALUE” '
This is the most interesting/crucial part, for me. Trying to take the large view ('large' in that it encompasses, er, all of philosophy, all of history and all of civilisation..) I think it's reasonable to suppose, given what we've seen of the universe so far, there's roughly even money as to whether or not there is some very-hard-to-discover slip-road leading to some terminal value:
If it turns out there isn't but we keep expanding and learning forever whilst we search for it for it, no big deal - partly because, as Scott says, "the trip is [or could be] pleasant enough", but mostly just by definition: without any fundamental terminal value out there to find, is *anything* a big deal?
If it turns out there is a terminal value slip-road but we get locked into some sort of philosophical/civilisational trap whereby we permanently stop searching for it, that might potentially be (again by definition) kind of the worst thing ever.
From the above, it follows that:
1a) The *ultimate* goal of ALL OF CIVILISATION IN ITS ENTIRETY ought to be to search for that slip-road, and meanwhile to learn and grow and develop itself so as to be able to better search for that slip-road.
2a) Therefore, the *immediate* goal of OUR PARTICULAR CIVILISATION (which we can think of as a component/sub-civilisation of the broader civilisation that also encompasses all of history, the future of humanity, any AI/posthuman/whatever descendants that may come after us, any alien civilisations we may collaborate or merge with, etc. etc.) ought to be to balance civilisation's growth/development/learning vs. its robustness against any philosophical/civilisational/existential traps (ie. nihilistic philosophies, Orwellian dystopias, Molochian races-to-the-bottom, etc.) that might hamper a super-civilisation's future search for the terminal value slip-road. (In short: human civilisation is too small and dumb to have any hope of finding the terminal value slip-road, but if we try really hard maybe we can avoid killing everybody for long enough to eventually grow into a civilisation that may potentially manage to find it)
3a) Therefore, the goal of ME AND PEOPLE LIKE ME ought to be to contribute as best as we can to (2) - to what we might loosely call the project of civilisation. This will require some contribution across the domains of economic growth, intellectual development, kindness, empathy, and a dozen other things - a different contribution from each individual, sure, but with the hope that civilisation can on aggregate progress along every domain necessary to achieve (2)
I'm not trying to make some sort of end-justifies-the-means, "cruelty is acceptable provided it brings us closer to finding the terminal value slip-road" type argument, here. Rather:
1b) There are almost-certainly many, many different kinds of civilisation capable of finding the terminal value slip-road, and still more different ways our civilisation could potentially grow into one of those
2b) If two hypothetical civilisations start from the same point-of-divergence but arrive at the TVSR (yes, I'm fed up with typing that long-form now..) after having generated different amounts of suffering, any extra suffering in Civilisation B was by definition unnecessary, since that civilisation started from and ended at the same place as Civ A
3b) Provided I'm willing to make the *unbelieveably tiny* assumption (seriously, it's possibly the smallest, fairest, most reasonable assumption in all of philosophy..) that needless suffering is a bad thing, it follows that in addition to our civilisation's imperative, in (2a) above, our own Civ also has a moral imperative to take the Civ A route rather than the Civ B route - and in addition to my own imperative, in (3a) above, I also have a moral imperative to minimise suffering, maximise wellbeing, etc., insofar as this doesn't harm my civilisation's chances of eventually growing into a civilisation that can find the TVSR
(And of course, once a civilisation achieves (1a) and successfully takes the TVSR leading off from the M25 of endless Development>Expansion>Development, what it morally ought to do next would depend on what that terminal value actuallly turns out to be!)
Finally, if a civilisation grows and develops to the point where it can say for absolutely-definitely-certain that no terminal values actually exist within the universe - as I happen to suspect might turn-out to be the case - it's still morally compelled to minimise suffering, maximise wellbeing, etc. because the (3b) assumption still holds - except now the civlisation knows for sure that all suffering is needless suffering. What it ought to do after that would depend on what it's learned about the universe on its philosophical journey towards the Ultimate Truth in the Absence of Terminal Value - perhaps it ought to gradually and painlessly wind-down all of consciousness to leave a sterile universe because it's learned that suffering must necessarily eventually come to outweigh happiness, like a sort of ethical Second Law of Thermodynamics. Maybe it ought to tile the universe with hedonium because it's learned that avoiding suffering is trivial and once you've mastered that, maximising happiness is all that's left. Maybe it ought to pursue some more complex definition of wellbeing that transcends "avoiding suffering" and "maximising happiness", much like we do as individuals, except it's pursuing it on the scale of a (presumably colossal and coherent) civilisation and with the certainty that there's absolutely definitely nothing more important that it ought to be doing...
> whatever happened to words like aggrandize and diminish?
("I shall ensmallen, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"..)
Many people whose rhetorical style is well-regarded, such as Churchill and Orwell, have commended the use of Anglo-Saxon-derived words over Latin ones.
That's really interesting, I've never heard of this before! On what grounds do they favour Anglo Saxon? Aesthetics?
(I suppose I do have a personal preference for A) using, where possible, dictionary words rather than recently made-up ones, and B) words with some aesthetic quality to them; to my ears "diminish" has an elegance to it that "ensmallen" very much does not - but even if this particular example is just me being weird ..oops, I mean strange.. I'd still argue that Romance languages are generally somewhat famous for sounding beautiful whereas Teutonic languages are famous for, well, not.
Of course I do have to admit that in a question of language where Orwell, Churchill, and Scott Alexander are all united against me.. probably I'm not occupying a particularly defensible position....)
Mostly, yeah. I think the idea is that they're different REGISTERS, and the shorter Saxon ones are more … visceral.
Churchill: The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek.
I'd recommend Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." It's a pretty short essay, which makes this and a few other good points I like.
This is super-fascinating, thanks so much for sharing!
Churchill's argument does seem to be as much about rhetorical power than beauty, though (then again there's probably plenty of overlap..)
(Also: I absolutely feel your pain with "REGISTERS" - why does it have to be so hard to get italics into Substack.. without them we all sound like we're trying to discuss rhetoric during a hurricane..)
Thanks for the reccomendation, too; I shall definitely read it.
True, but at the same time, I'd bet quarters to pennies that Churchill and Orwell would prefer extant words to neologisms.
I fail to see what "enbig" offers that isn't already supplied by "enlarge" - other than an aesthetic blemish on an otherwise fascinating essay. (Ditto for "ensmall" vs. "reduce".)
Yeah, as part of his advice in "Politics and the English Language," Orwell does say to break the rules he suggests to avoid saying anything "outright barbarous," which he might consider these. But I like them, so there.
Given the Galadriel example, I actually imagine Tolkien, who also had a similar preference for what he called "Old English", liking these words, given his pretty famous lack of aversion to neologism.
(Also, "embiggens" with an "m", due to phonological assimilation.)
If you aren't familiar with Poul Anderson's essay "Uncleftish Beholding" - an "Anglo-Saxonized" description of Atomic Theory, but purged of all words derived from Greek (such as "atomic" and "theory") and Latin, it's worth looking up. You might get a kick out of it.
Thanks. Yeah, I've seen that. Fun, as is the broader "Anglish" movement.
I want to clarify that this is not my personally favored aesthetic: I enjoy Greek- and Latin-derived neologisms more than the next guy. But used sparingly, the Old English words add some nice variety.
The Civilization IV reference is fun, but I think the last chapter could have been called Tyler Cowen.
More than any other writer I know, he exemplifies the whole vibe of having fun being excellent while remaining modest and working to make the world better for everyone.
I think Nietzsche's distinction in relative value between master and slave morality is that master morality is pro life, seeks to fully unravel the potential in things, while slave morality is a product of being damaged, a curse at life. Nietzsche puts emphasis on the physiological weakness of the slave minded type (seperated from literal historical slavery), and calls it the mark of the declining type. He sees the spread of slave morality then as the end of history and dissolution of man, whereas master morality keeps building a bridge towards some future.
He's not exactly setting up a universal dichotomy, where morality is master or slave, either/or and you have to swallow one pill or the other. Rather they are historical phenomena, the two principle modes that come down to us by the particular path we've taken. Master morality then is superior inasmuch as it's forward and life loving, but it's not a terminus in the possibility space of morality.
The great task that he sets up in his Superman is the revaluation of values, the transcence of historical accidents in the development of morality. Master morality happens to have more to offer in his view, but I suspect he'd grant that is open to contention when in a less polemical mood. I think he'd argue that, given there are no moral facts, altruism may well be "good" but this cannot be straightly derived out of slave morality, it must be sanitised of underlying metaphysics, which really are masks for underlying psychology. On the other hand the virtues of master morality are more readily translated by the Superman. The master perspective that spurs elaborate arguments in favour of emenent greatness is more akin to where Nietzsche sees the transcendence of morality leading.
"...new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?--Never! Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.--It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs."
I don't think I "skimmed" through "Atlas Shrugged", but I still hated the book, because Ayn Rand is simple a bad writer. Other people wrote about similar ideas way better (of more recent writers, Michael F. Flynn's "Firestar" series comes to mind). Her characters are cartoonish, her dialogues are childish and her sexual scenes are frankly off-putting (I guess maybe there is nothing wrong with rape fetish, but she's trying to sell it as The Only Right Way To Make Love - like she's trying to sell everything else). It's not bad for a religious text - which I firmly believe it is - but it's a bad book in every other sense. Also, I didn't get any feelings about positive-sum society from it. My reading of it is more like "Atlases of our world should be given free reign, and if it so happens that your puny little non-Atlas life is made worse by their actions, well, you're out of luck and deserve what's coming to you because you suck".
Now, I also have to object to "toxic slave morality of USSR". I know it's still popular to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end, but it seems like most people get their knowledge of Soviet culture from Cold War sources tinted with a heavy dose of propaganda. Or Ayn Rand herself. Soviet society always celebrated unique individuals - actors, scientists, sportsmen, no less than its Western counterpart. It just denied hyper-rewards for such individuals: top Soviet actors, for example, still lived in apartments (if a bit nicer than your ordinary worker), not in mansions behind high walls and security. Frankly, I can't say their acting was worse off for all that.
I guess you can say that while there was no "official" slave morality in USSR, the rules were set up in such way to actually encourage it, e.g. by writing a letter to NKVD/KGB about your more talented peer to cut them down. While I agree that this is true to some degree, I think all societies in all times had something like that - from reporting someone to Inquisition, to reporting to him to Un-American Activities, to reporting to HR for harassment, an individual talented at "office games" can always make life of someone more talented at actual work miserable. I guess it was easier in USSR for most of its existence, compared to contemporary Western countries, and it was detrimental to nation, but to call all of USSR "slave culture" because of that is an overreach.
While I agree that the love / fetish scenes are off putting, I don’t think there’s anything cartoonish about Rands character writing. The real world is filled with living weathervanes. When Orwell shows a crowd enthusiastically agreeing that we were always at war with Eastasia, was this cartoonish?
The Atlases of Rands world live by a code of specifically not making the world worse for random people just through their actions. If you don’t like the idea of working in Reardens steel mill, you aren’t forced to. Reality of course does not live up to such lofty expectations, but it never does for any utopia.
> I don’t think there’s anything cartoonish about Rands character writing
Well, at the very least, all her characters are "color-coded for your convenience" in the worst comic-book manner possible. All her positive heroes are beautiful and strong, while her villains are slovenly and dull. I expect such approach from children morning cartoon, or at best from pulp fiction novels. I mean, nothing wrong with having your main hero be lantern-jawed steel-eyed superman, but when EVERY character falls into one of two clearly defined visual categories, that's when you know the author either doesn't take her readers for intelligent people, or just can't do better herself. In Rand's case, it's the later, since her writing is generally bad. I mean, I've read Doc Savage novels as a child - they had better writing than Rand, despite literally being low-brow pulp fiction.
And her villains? They're comically evil. They don't twirl their mustaches only because mustaches already went out of fashion at the time of writing (or maybe Rand didn't know the word "twirl"). Look, a bunch of incompetents who managed to run a nation into the ground is not unusual, but there ARE ways to write them better. David-fucking-Weber managed it with rulers of Republic of Haven - and he's not what you call a heavyweight writer, and also has an agenda to sell.
And her heroes? Well, she sure does a lot of "tell, don't show". For all that they are supposed to be geniuses, we don't get a single good glimpse in what makes them so great at being inventors, or captains of industry, or whatever. Paul Anderson's Van Rijn, now that's a capitalist I can get behind. But Rand can't invent a good plan of action for a fictional situation in her own book. That's OK, neither can Becky Chambers - but Becky has other redeeming qualities, for example she can actually write interesting, nuanced and funny characters and dialogues. Not so Rand.
One can say what one likes about Rand's ideas, but as a writer, she's on the level of bad teenage fan-fiction. Then again, I don't think she ever attempted to write a good book, or make herself a better writer - it was never her primary occupation. She just wanted to write a parable - in religious sense - to explain her views to wider audience. Bible's pretty bad, too, as a book - rambling, inconsistent and self-repeating. It still doesn't appear to need a defense from critique as a work of art, so maybe neither does "Atlas Shrugged". I still hate that book, though.
I don’t believe that something written with simple morality or in the style of a parable is disqualified from being good literature. Sometimes heroes are plainly virtuous, and sometimes villains don’t have a complicated and sympathetic backstory. Again, I could point to Orwells writing for being parable like. Or going back further, there are stories like the Canterbury tales or epic poems like the epic of Gilgamesh, where heroes are frequently larger than life instead of “realistic.”
The Bible has many sections that are legalistic or genealogical in nature rather than being meant for pure reading, but dismissing the entire thing as bad literature smells of grade school contrarianism.
Well, I can't defend my view any further - I'm not a professional literature critic, and indeed I was, and remain very much "grade school contrarian", much preferring science fiction to classic works of literature. All I can say is that I, personally, found Rand's writing horrible even when compared to other authors I don't like, and so far nobody managed to change my mind on that.
And frankly, I don't get everybody's love of Orwell, too. He's not as bad as Rand, certainly - a professional writer, compared to amateur, but what's so great about his works? OK, "Animal Farm" is at least kind of funny, being a thinly-veiled satire. But I think "1984" is overhyped. Then again, I must admit I have a strong bias against all anti-Utopias. Unless author makes a very big effort to show me how it all works, and how it is sustainable for any long-ish period of time, I refuse to believe in anti-utopias, and since neither Neal Stephenson, nor Brandon Sanderson are in business of writing them, I'm yet to meet an anti-utopia which meets my criteria for beliveability. Utopias I can tolerate, because they're pleasant to read about (but they're very few and far between these days, so I admit I don't have a lot of experience with the genre - maybe only Ada Palmer's "Too Like Lightning" comes close).
I hated Atlas Shrugged and have a low opinion of Rand's writing ability, but I had to read it in school so maybe there is some emotional baggage attached to that. Orwell had a much better representation of ideas in his writing with respect to propaganda and psychology, but I agree 1984 isn't that good as a story. It's much better as an illustration of methods for totalitarianism. Also, was Terra Incognota a utopia? The idea of Hives instead of nation states was utopian, but it only worked because a prostitute secretly groomed all of the leaders. As soon as this became public knowledge, they all started killing each other.
Terra Ignota was as close to Utopia as I could find in modern fiction, and that it was flawed only made it better (though not entirely realistic - Ada has some problems with hard sciences, and her flying cars are waaaay too hand-wavy and magical). It's a society I'd like to live in more than the current one, and that's a very rare case in sci-fi: most sci-fi societies are, at best, same-as-now-but-with-better-technology, but hers was uniquely different in its structure.
More importantly, while people in this book did start a war, it was unique (again, in sci-fi) in that there was no "bad" side to the story: all participants wanted a better future for humanity. Only their visions were so incompatible (mostly because of resources required to make them come true) that they still had to fight it out, even though "all sides had very fine people".
Not all of Rand's characters are black and white like that. Robert Stadler is one of the worst of them, but he has major sympathetic moments early on, and we see him betraying himself. Fred Kinnan is a labor racketeer, but he enjoying pointing out uncomfortable truths to the other schemers; he vetoes a proposal to have the death penalty in industry, and makes it stick; and he actually enjoys talking with John Galt, while acknowledging that Galt has no use for him. The Wet Nurse starts out being entirely on the wrong side, and over the course of the novel he changes his mind, largely out of admiration for Hank Rearden.
It's certainly true that Rand thinks that some things are objectively good, and some are objectively evil. But she does have characters who are in between, or who change. In fact, the essential struggle in the novel is between Dagny Taggart and John Galt—and she fights against changing sides to the bitter end.
I cannot share your view. I lately read Atlas Shrugged aloud to my wife (cover to cover, except that she asked me to skip over most of The Speech), and while we spotted flaws in the writing, we found it a pleasure to read as well. I think most basically I'd say that it's the single greatest pulp novel ever written—complete with the crucial scene where the master villain explains his great plan to the hero (structurally Dagny Taggart is the hero and John Galt is the villain).
Among other things, I would note the multiple characters who are NOT Atlases, but are treated with sympathy and made attractive—Jeff Allen, Cherryl Brooks (later Taggart), Gwen Ives, Eddie Willers, and Tony (nicknamed "the Wet Nurse"), whose death is a moment of real pathos.
A major part of the point of the book is that inversion, IMO.
Dagny and Hank start out seeing things fall apart and think this is a terrible thing that needs to be stopped. And they do their best! Originally, they think the thing destroying the world is the crazy and destructive set of ideas that are taking over everywhere. They're still trying to right the world by working harder and producing more, and expecting everyone to snap out of it and realize that the dominant ideology is obviously nuts. Hank says something at some point like "it's evil, so it will self-destruct sooner or later." The critical thing is that *if it were just the crazy broken ideology, they might actually manage it*. They don't know about the strike, which is sucking things down a lot faster. But if they knew, they'd oppose the hell out of it. You see this in the way both of them both recognize Francisco as a first rate person who ought to be their peer, and also are baffled by why such a smart and capable man lives the life of a useless playboy.
Francisco spends a lot of time basically giving Hank an advanced seminar in practical philosophy, in a way that is preparing him both to recognize places where he's accepted the crazy ideology of his society, and also to eventually understand point of the strike. But he doesn't tell either one about the strike early on, because they aren't ready for it--they'd both refuse to have anything to do with a strike at that point.
A big part of the novel is Hank and Dagny both ceasing to think in terms of "we've got to push back on whatever this crazy thing is that's destroying the world," and beginning to think more in terms of "why are we helping this monstrous system stay afloat?" And from there to "okay, maybe this strike idea makes sense." And eventually, they both end up joining the strike, after realizing there's nothing left they can save of the things they value in the outside world.
Yes. It's the same kind of reversal that Alan Moore used in the final installment of Watchmen. But Rand did it first.
I also remember reading that when she was writing it, she told Nathaniel Branden that she was writing a scene where the villains were torturing the hero of the novel, and Branden asked, "Do they want him to reveal how one of his inventions works?" And Rand said (probably with a big grin) "No, they want him to become the dictator of the United States." She was intentionally writing a thriller, and she seems to have taken delight in coming up with ingenious plot twists.
The official "slave morality" (to the extent this term makes sense) wasn't in the material welfare or KGB letters. It was in the fact that everything that is important and worthy came from the Collective - spearheaded by the Party - and one could only ever strive and be worthy in serving the Party and the Collective. USSR was not free of lesser personality cults - people are people after all - so a famous actor gets their share of popular worship. But officially, all those achievements happened only - and this was explicitly emphasized at every opportunity, and woe to a popular star that forgets to mention it regularly - because they were parts of the Collective and only because of how well the Party was managing the Collective, and it could not happen any other way. As the popular saying went "The winter has passed and the summer is in - we thank the Party for that!" That approach permeated everything, and it's a diametrical opposite of Randian philosophy. If you could blame Randians for disregarding "non-Atlases", in USSR model there can be no individual existence at all, whether Atlantian or puny - you only exist when inside the Collective Matrix, and outside of it there's no meaningful existence worth being discussed at all.
To be sure, this is not exactly unique to the USSR - but in the USSR it definitely has been a very strong moral foundation. Which consequently necessitated other things - like if the Party says Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania, not only you must believe it - the mere fact you remember that yesterday it was otherwise makes you a deeply immoral person (and if they just declare you insane for that, you must consider it a mercy - a sick person could be potentially healed, a moral-less person has no worth at all).
While it is true that Soviet ideology emphasized collective, "you only exist when inside the Collective Matrix" sounds like a hostile interpretation to me, as Soviet people celebrated many individuals and their achievements. A less hostile interpretation is more like "I wish to thank my family, my colleagues and Jesus" kind of Oscar speech: when you achieve great things, don't forget you didn't do it alone, because no man since times prehistorical ever achieved anything without help of others.
That sounds like common sense to me, not a Christian exercise in humility: one did not avoid standing out, shying of all achievements and ascribing ones that happened to higher forces (which is how "slave morality" defined in this post, at least), but proudly proclaimed good things you did - just without forgetting others who helped you. Well, one must also address the Party thing - which is kind of Jesus, for it permeates all, but unlike Jesus, Party, at least, could be seen actually doing something for you: providing free education and medicine, funding your research, so even in that, it was different from Christian morality. Whether it actually hindered you more than it helped is a detail to be discussed in every case, but that's a wholly different question.
And anyway, that all was the official line. While people paid lip service to it, it barely did penetrate below society's surface - if it did, maybe USSR wouldn't have collapsed. Frankly, I never even heard this discussed when talking about "slave morality" or its cousin, "slave mentality", a very popular Russian liberal meme. Usually, it's exactly about the thing I'm talking about in my original post: that Russians hate anyone who rises above general level, wish to cut them down, and always believe their good fortunes are undeserved, because they could not be achieved through honest labor.
THAT is true, at least to some extent. When I see our former Customs Minister's property that takes several acres of previously free forest near my dacha, I feel a strong urge to join a mob and hang him on the nearest tree. USSR provided Russian people with what they wanted, in that respect: wealth disparity was comparatively small, often well hidden away even where it existed, and rarely inherited. My wife's grandmother worked as an engineer at an aerospace company, and her company's director's dacha was in the same community as hers, and the plot was the same (small) size, and while the house maybe was slightly better, it wasn't an opulent palace. Is this "slave morality" not to wish that nobody ever achieved anything, but to wish that people who achieved more than you in life only received fixed, or maybe linear rewards instead of exponential? By Nietzsche, probably yes, because it's certainly not "master morality", and there are only two variants. By Rand, this is an abomination, for sure. By the court of history, it certainly did not work well for USSR, in the end. But I think that rejection of all achievement and rejection of hyper-rewards are different things, and there is more to morality than Nietzsche saw.
Nietzsche scholar here (bona fides: an academic book and several journal articles on Nietzsche). I just want to note that Nietzsche is often misunderstood as defending master morality, or wanting it reinstated, or something like that. None of that is true. In fact, he describes the ancient nobles as so crude, unreflective, and unsymbolic as to be scarcely imaginable by moderns. After 1900 years of slave morality (Christianity, natch), our psychology is fundamentally altered. He writes in The Genealogy of Morals that “the bad conscience [guilt, a consequence of slave morality] is an illness, but as pregnancy is an illness.” We can’t go back to the old masters way of thinking, but we also need to get rid of slave morality, which he thinks is decadent (=anti-life] and fosters ressentiment. We need to give birth to something new.
One of the things Nietzsche is trying to do is undermine the idea that morality is immutable and absolute; instead moral concepts have changed and altered over time. In fact, slave morality flips master morality on its head: the old virtues of strength and dominance are no longer good, but now are seen as evil. The ancient dichotomy of good (strength, power) vs. bad (weakness, impotence) has been replaced with good (humility, poverty, chastity) vs. evil (strength, power). So when Nietzsche wants to move beyond good and evil, he is not talking about good vs. bad.
Nietzsche calls for a new kind of morality. He wants us to try different perspectives on living, to forge our own categorical imperative, to develop our own virtues. I should add that the idea of the übermensch is a weird one for Nietzsche: it is of utmost importance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but barely mentioned elsewhere. But the idea is of a world-affirming individual who has completely overcome the sickness of Christianity and can live in such a way that at the end of their lives they shout da capo! Do it all over again, without change or alteration. That’s what it means to embrace the eternal recurrence.
I’ve got no Nietzsche bona fides, but I like your reading of Nietzsche quite a lot: the goal is to live a life that one would be glad to live again if you had to live that life again and again eternally. No one can tell you what that life looks like; you have to discover what it looks like by trying out different modes of being and by reflecting honestly—unhindered in your thinking and reflections by the morals and values of others—on what works for you.
Thank you for this comment (and your others throughout this post). Nietzsche requires such a careful reading. His nuances and efforts at definition and specificity are absent in this post and in most of the comments. In our modern world that is his greatest weakness - he can be so easily misunderstood but has so many short quotable passages. Very easy for people to twist his writing however they please.
In Nietzsche, you mean? Well, he tends to pick up a topic, put it down, then come back to it 20 pages later, or even in another book altogether. So there’s not a concise answer. Try Beyond Good and Evil and/or The Antichrist for a taste of his thinking.
"And second, you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too."
Well, no - the actual masters (as in literal masters who own literal slaves, and our thought naturally turns towards 1800s American South here) were rather more concerned with spreading slave morality, amongst their slaves! "Know your place", "don't get ideas" and so on, with the tall poppies cut down quite literally if necessary. In a hierarchical society like this, the whole idea of universally applicable morality would be implicitly or explicitly ludicrous; there's one set of morality for one class, another for the other one, and if this would seemingly conflict with an idea of universal moral values, well, eventually the friction between Christianity and slavery did indeed become too hard for many to bear, leading to a set of well-known historical events.
I'm reminded of an old Soviet joke: "Radio Yerevan is asked: in the future communist society, will we have money? We answer: the left revisionists think that we won't, the right revisionists think we will, but us orthodox communists know that the true answer is that some will and some won't."
I think that an under-appreciated aspect of slave morality in Nietzsche’s thinking, in the contemporary discourse around it, and in this (otherwise great) essay is the disingenuous, spoiled-grapes, ressentiment kind of thinking from which is arises: I can’t take revenge (even though I want to), so I’ll convince myself and others that forgiveness is a virtue; I can’t have sex (even though I want to), so I’ll convince myself and others that purity is a virtue; etc.
By contrast, a “master morality” would be based in the ability to clearly see and act upon one’s desires, whatever they may be … But who says they need to be cruel?!
I LOVE doing kind things for others. When my dad was in the hospital literally dying (I took him off life-support a week and a half later), a co-worker was freaking out because her older dad was having some stomach pains and wasn’t doing so well and probably needed a few small surgeries. My dad had been in the hospital a bunch of times throughout his life (mostly related to his alcoholism); I had some competence with the hospital system and doctors, so I shared some of that competence with her. I have found that Bayesian reasoning is very helpful for mitigating stress, so I walked her through a little lite Bayesian reasoning about her dad’s problems and chances, reminding her that her dad would, in all likelihood, be fine, and that if he wasn’t, well, we all gotta die sometimes, and at least he made it to an above-average-life-expectancy age, and obviously he lived a good life because his daughter loves him so much, and what more could you want from life? and blah, blah, blah.
My co-worker is a very nervous kind of person, so she found this all very helpful both pragmatically and emotionally, and to this day, we are good buddies (and her dad is still with us and doing just fine).
At the time we had our first talks about her dad, she didn’t know that my dad was in the hospital literally, actually dying (and to be fair, I didn’t KNOW if he was going to die either; I only knew that he was in a coma and that the prognosis from the neurologist was grim), and at no point in the conversation did I tell her what was going on. It felt great to be able to be there for my co-worker and add value to her life and help her to manage her emotions, and it felt even better to do that when I was in an analogous and objectively more difficult situation. It felt great NOT to make that conversation about me by sharing what was going on with my dad and just be there for her in the ways that I could.
This wasn’t a distraction from my problems or anything; I was thinking about my dad the whole
time I was talking to her—how could I not? But at no point did I want to bring him up. I wanted to help this person because I thought it would feel good to help her—and it DID feel good—and it felt even better to do so, knowing that my situation was actually worse than hers.
Anyway, my point is this: I happen to feel good when I do good, when I act upon my desires to do good, when I add value to other people’s lives, even when it’s difficult to do so. I don’t think I’m succumbing to slave morality by being kind. I think it’s *closer* to a master morality because I’m doing what I want to do—which just so happens to be acting kindly and generously toward other people, especially those I like.
I find Andrew Tate a repugnant person, but I do so not out of some secret, suppressed envy for him and his money and his Bugatti: I do so because none of those things appeal to me at all. I don’t know Andrew Tate and have no idea about the state of his psychology, but how many people chase the money and Bugatti not because they want them in themselves, not because they enjoy chasing those things, but out of a secret, suppressed envy for something else about the lives of the kind of people that have those things? Isn’t chasing money or women or cars of whatever *despite having a bad time doing so* just as much of a slave-morality move as anything else?
Anyway, I wish I had something deeper to say than “To thine own self be true” to say, but, like, seriously: I think our truest selves and our most authentically held desires—those things that
happen to make us feel good—are, for most of us, much weirder, much harder to follow, and probably much kinder than we give them credit for.
Even more so, I think that it can be VERY hard to figure out what’s a “true” desire and what’s just some internalized or disingenuous BS. But let me give you another example from my personal life: despite building a decent CV for myself, I have recently given up the goal of staying in academia for a whole bunch of complicated reasons that basically come down to me wanting to spend a majority of my time working on intellectual and artistic projects that I want to work on (whether or not they’re profitable or lead to professional success) and not wanting to compromise that goal. So I got a job as a waiter/bartender, moved into my friend’s basement, and now split my time between working at the restaurant (part-time), spending time with my drug-addled friends, working on my dissertation/ research, and working on my artistic pursuits. I live in a low-cost-of-living city in the Midwest, so I’m not acquiring much wealth but I have more than enough money, and I’ve never been happier. I love working in the restaurant, love my dissertation/ research, love my artistic pursuits, love my dirty, smelly, drug-addled, hippy friends.
My mom can’t brag about me the way she used to when I seemed to be on a fast-track toward something that looks like “success” in the eyes of the boring, professionalized, middle-class types that she desperately wants to impress. But to hell with them: I have one life, and I’m going to live it the way I want to live it—which, for me (to my
utter surprise, honestly) happens to involve living in a basement in a small Midwestern city, making art, working on my dissertation, hanging out with my friends and customers, and doing kind, loving things for people that I like when I get the chance to do so.
And that’s ultimately my point, I think: deliberating over what is and is not master vs. slave morality is, I think, misguided slave-morality thinking. If there is such a thing as master morality, I think it involves following the desires one *happens* to have and approaching/ seeking whatever *happens* to feel good. For me, it happens to feel good to be kind and helpful to others, to be a basement-dweller, to be the stereotype of the over-educated humanities scholar who’s waiting tables. And I know from personal experience how genuinely wonderful it is to seek out whatever happens to feel good, regardless of whatever that thing happens to be.
I’d like to pick up on the passing comment, near the start of this post, that Nietzsche thought slave morality originated with the Jews. If that is so, it can only reflect the extent to which his Christian upbringing and cultural environment distorted his (and his followers’) understanding. Jewish morality is very much based on actions, not beliefs, which would put it in the “enbiggedness” camp. And the emphasis on enlittleling (humility, sacrifice etc) is very much a Christian thing, used through the ages to demonstrate their superiority to the Jews that they had replaced — it’s the core of antisemitic supercessionism.
Nietzsche repeatedly and in several places praises the Jews as a group, especially in contrast to German nationalists. He does call out some Jewish individuals for criticism, especially St. Paul, but admires others, like Spinoza and (with some qualification) Jesus.
Plainly false. He wrote next to nothing after the onset of his insanity, and the only thing from that time I can think of that refers to the Jews is "I am having all the anti-Semites shot. --Dionysus"
He's pointedly talking about historical Jews, distinct from Jews of his day.
The argument he makes, to my reading, isn't exactly that they invented slave morality, it's clearly in primitive form the psychology of the downtrodden and weak. Nietzsche says the innovation of the Jews was to invert values, to take the bad in the morality of the oppressor and make it good, and further to tie this to a belief that judgement will come in the afterlife, and one day the world will end and all will come to that judgement.
With this you have a memetic virus, in modern terms, which became Christianity, and has mutated into the pathologies described in the article, spreading and undermining the possibility of pure master morality that could contend with it, or the possibility of transcending that dichotomy.
> The argument he makes, to my reading, isn't exactly that they invented slave morality, it's clearly in primitive form the psychology of the downtrodden and weak. Nietzsche says the innovation of the Jews was to invert values, to take the bad in the morality of the oppressor and make it good, and further to tie this to a belief that judgement will come in the afterlife, and one day the world will end and all will come to that judgement.
I'm not sure how that squares with the foundational Jewish myth that they are the one true God's chosen people, and therefore have a unique responsibility to the world to literally complete the work of God. It doesn't get much more masterful than that.
Note also how Jews were often hated for their *success* in the societies they lived in. They did stuff and they were good at it, too good for their envious neighbors.
I agree it's not self evidently the correct take. I think his reply would roughly be that believing you're chosen but repeatedly getting squashed by the power of the day makes you a little demented. I recall he said something to the effect that they uniquely held out against complete dissolution, where every similar people faded away, by inventing the inversion of values.
He was very explicit in saying he wasn't talking about modern Jews mind you, he praised them for just what you're saying about their successes and denounced the petty envy going around in his day. i think you can easily tease out from the above that the condition he's talking about doesn't apply to modern Jews any more than Frenchman are traumatised by Caesar.
Jewish morality may be about action on the individual level (although often ritualistic action) but the story of the Jewish people in the Bible and in much of history is that of a people who are promised triumph but who fail, and who still believe they are God’s people. This is how the ”slave morality” develops.
Or, to quote a recent New Yorker essay
”And the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is, perhaps, unique on the planet inasmuch as it is, as the scholar Jacob L. Wright suggests in his new book, “Why the Bible Began” (Cambridge), so entirely a losers’ tale. The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts.
…
In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.”
In haste, because this was only meant to be a short visit: what you write has zero resonance. It’s a very Christian take on Judaism. The Hebrew bible had a different text (and translation) than the Christian ‘old’ testament and — most important — the way it is read and engaged with is different. The burden of being ‘chosen’ is not about being winners or losers, it’s about accepting that humans always have a choice and must responsibility for their choices.
Christian as in culturally Christian, and influenced by the ideas/assumptions that become ‘common sense’ when it is the dominant culture. Individual Jews think all kinds of things, they are not a unified block.
Well, it’s an interpretation of history that Christians or Jews or non believers can apparently find convincing at least in parts, so it has more than ”zero resonance”.
A good rule of thumb when reading Nietzsche is that wherever he says "Jews," he is actually talking about "Christians." The whole thing makes a lot more sense if you read it that way.
I think this way of writing was supposed to be provocative, but of course it was extremely common for readers to come away from his books thinking "Yeah, these Jews really are a problem!" Nietzsche knew people would misinterpret him in this way, but he wrote like that anyway because he was more than a little bit of an edgelord. ("haha, look at those idiots who think I'm saying antisemitism is good! antisemites are so dumb, literal lol.")
That would make it make more sense! Perhaps it’s an early example of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ conflation which became more popular in the mid-20th century.
It's also important to remember that "Jews" can mean ethnic jews, judaism as a religion, or judaism as a political entity. Nietzsche switches between these various uses without making it clear which he is talking about.
The post and these discussions want to be big picture groks of the whole world. That's fine. I'm fine with that. We need that type of written work. But the lack of discussion about normal compassion and empathy and, hey, even noblesse oblige is a huge hole. Someone has to have concerns about normal people at some margin. A world which adopts Hanania-ism, or Effective Altruism, Tall Poppyism, or the liberal-Nietzsche compromise full stop is going to get destroyed by its blind spots pretty badly. So I think we need the caveat to this whole essay. We are talking about moving society 10-20% more in some direction, not going FULL GODZILLA on one these -isms.
> "Some kind of shock jock, saying “Note to unattached liberal women above 40: you are ugly hags who have lost your chance with men and all your eggs have dried up and nobody will ever value you anymore, you should either beg for some fat alcoholic guy to take you in since that’s the only man you can get, or resign yourself to being a cat lady growing old with nothing to do but dwell on your regrets and what could have been.” Outside of 4chan, there’s a sort of universal alliance against these people, which the rest of us join immediately and unconsciously. Is this the dreaded “herd” of “slave morality”? If so, long live the herd."
But what if the core of this advice to [straight cics] unattached liberal women above 40 actually is *objectively* far more useful than not?
The herd's rejection of this "bullying" does nothing to "correct" the priorities of the very, very large population of straight cis men who are disinterested in women over 40. The herd might say, "that's mean!", but it doesn't have the power to force straight cis men to be equally attracted to female 40-somethings as they are to female 20-somethings. There are indeed actual women whom *only* fat alcoholic guys are interested in because appealing men can do better with cute 20-somethings, and cute 20-somethings don't need to put up with fat alcoholics.
The herd can object to the sneering tone, perhaps (although the tone itself provides important information about how unapologetically these women will be swiped-left), but it behooves 40 year old unattached straight cis women to acknowledge the reality of the core observation. The herd can't provide any meaningful help to these women, it can only condescend with false hope to make itself feel better about the slow-moving decay of these women's lives.
Signed,
A 44 year old politically-nonbinary not-hard-bodied cis straight unattached woman whose experience dating at 44 is *extremely different and inferior* to dating at 39, and 35.
P.S. - That initial knee-jerk reaction you, Dear Reader, had to the identity of the person writing this comment is proof that the 4Chan bully is essentially correct in his assessment.
I actually don't remember where it came from - I listen to a lot of comedians' podcasts - but my secondary reason for using it is to repel the people who would be offended by it, so I have it on dating profiles and whatnot. It saves time if people who require leftist orthodoxy self-select out before we waste any of one another's time.
No thanks. It's the most literally accurate way to describe myself. Please remember that, unlike the word "mulatto," the phrase has many use cases and isn't exclusive to describing gender.
And FWIW, your hypothetical isn't great; "Politically Mulatto" doesn't work either as a joke or an accurate label (beliefs were imposed by one's parents, are a mixture of two ideologies, and are unchangeable?).
Again, repelling the people who would be offended by my use of the word is a feature, not a bug. Its use is a considered and deliberate choice, as it saves time for everyone. My friends who use the phrase to describe their gender are my friends in part because they aren't the kind of people who would be bothered by me using it both literally and as a joke to describe my politics. I don't want to socialize or become emotionally intimate with the people who would be offended by it.
A couple of things here. Firstly, there's a huge difference between "men find 20-somethings more attractive than 40-somethings" and "no men are interested in 40-somethings, so the only people who will date them are fat alcoholics settling for what they can get". Realistically, in my experience, most people date within a few years of their own age.
Secondly, I don't want to go too far into the lived experience vs lived experience thing, but I'm a man who's about to turn 40, and the women I know who are a few years older than me have not suddenly turned unattractive to me.
Finally: phrasing. In the hypothetical quote above, the speakers abandons all pretence of offering tough-but-honest advice when he uses the phrase "ugly hags". Fuck him.
Everyone is aware there are exceptions to any absolute statement about huge populations. There are lots of anecdotes about successful age gap relationships between younger men and "older" women (although "older" in this context is almost always between 25-40, so not necessarily *old* in terms of visual cues of fertility). It's a very popular porn category (although, again, "step-mom" is usually well under 35).
Sure.
But is that helpful for 40+ women? "Hey, don't worry about this obvious phenomena, YOU could be the exception! Just keep dreaming and swiping!"
There are endless studies and statistics you can find on the topic which support the common sense observation that the older women get, the smaller the population of men want them.
I don't think the situation I'm describing is the exception? I'm not saying lots of men want much older women (I know that situation is fairly rare), I'm saying that most people date within striking distance of their own age. Your source, if I'm reading the graph right, seems to bear this out, with mean age gaps for mixed gender couples (in either direction, I think?), increasing from about 2 years at 20 to about 5 as you approach 50.
That looks to me like people seeing age gaps as less as a big deal as they get older, which seems to work. A 19yo dating a 24yo is noteworthy, a 50yo dating a 45yo is not.
What it doesn't seem to show is middle-aged men in large numbers ignoring middle-aged women so they can date 20-somethings (or at least hold out in the hopes of doing so), which is what you seem to be saying, unless I'm misreading you.
I'm not saying that women don't become attractive to fewer men as they age. I agree that happens. I'm saying it seems to be gradual, and not enough to doom middle-aged women. There's separate data showing a lot of men on dating sites pursuing very young women regardless of their own age, but as that doesn't meet up with observable dating patterns, I think that's about chasing one-night stands (and wishful thinking, in many cases).
If you are a woman who wants kids, biology imposes some fairly harsh limits on you. Biology imposes some limits on men, too, but not so harsh. I think most 50 year old men can have kids without too much trouble, whereas almost no 50 year old women can do so.
Similarly, if you are a woman who wants a romantic and sexual relationship, you're going to be attractive to a much wider range of men at 30 than at 40, and at 40 than at 50. Romance can and does happen later, but it's likely to be harder to find, given that most men react to attractiveness and find the average 30 year old woman a lot more attractive than the average 50 year old woman.
The first part is true, obviously, and places a hard limit on women but not men. But is the second part any less true of men than women? I'm agnostic on this. I guess you could say that facial attractiveness is higher up the priority list for men than women (or for people who are attracted to women than people who are attracted to men?), so that could mean aging is harsher on women in this respect.
You've captured the appeal of 4chan perfectly. It's a place where kernels of truth are exaggerated and distorted almost beyond recognition. I say "almost" for a reason; not everyone can get over the brutish ugliness, but it's a refreshing experience for those who can. Whereas in real life people have to deny offensive truths, on 4chan people do the complete opposite and blow them out of proportion. It's refreshing in a way.
If it helps you feel better, keep in mind that 4chan exaggerates. So while it might be true that your dating experience at 44 is far inferior than it was at 35, it's likely not as bad as 4chan says it is.
Oh, I'm not personally wounded by 4chan, nor the 4chan approach. My young adult social circle was comprised mostly of men, and our bonding ritual was making highly-personalized ostentatiously "cruel" jokes at one another's expense as a kind of perpetual mental-toughness-training-and-trust-fall exercise. I can't even conceive of a personal insult directed at me that would "hurt my feelings."
Scott didn't make it clear if he was objecting to the tone of the shock jock 4-chan types or the observation. The tone? Well, I still think the tone is useful for understanding how emphatic dudes can be when they swipe left; but I can see how it isn't productive.
If it's the observation - if Scott agrees the herd should reject Hoe Math's less sneering and more supported observations (https://www.youtube.com/@hoe_math/videos) merely because that observation is going to be hurtful to many - fuck the herd.
About Tate and wanting to have a negative opinion of him. It’s not like pre Christian ancient people couldn’t have contempt for rapists or criminals or tyrants. Consider the rape of Lucretia, which is the founding story of the Roman republic.
Andrew Tate is a phenomenon of a liberal society that has values like respect for women but is too weak to enforce them. (Well, he is maybe going to prison, but it is taking a long time.)
>But something about Trump’s style makes him wildly popular.
He has the courage to disagree even with his followers. He tells them that COVID vacciness were a great achievement of his administration and he is boosted. They boo and he just does not care.
I'm confused by how you fit architecture into the master/slave dichotomy. Isn't the contempary "starchitect" a Nietzschean master, expressing himself in his buildings, while the traditional architect follows conventions?
"But also, his impulsive temper and fragile ego are bad qualities even by the standards of master morality.
And his violence, misogyny, and boastfulness are bad qualities by any morality with even the smallest consideration for altruism and common decency."
Dear God, I've tried my best to avoid learning anything about Andrew Tate, and now you're forcing me to equate him with Achilles:
"Compare Achilles (master morality) to some of the early Christian saints (slave morality). Achilles wants personal glory. He seeks personal glory by being the best - the strongest, the most handsome, the most skilled in warfare - and by doing great deeds of renown. He had the most beautiful armor, the hottest women, and the best soldiers. When Agamemnon offended him, he was willing to let all of Greece perish to piss him off and restore his honor."
Impulsive temper and fragile ego? Check. Achilles is prepared to let the Greek war effort flounder and fail because he feels slighted.
Violence, misogyny, and boastfulness? Also check. What is the reason Achilles is squabbling with Agamemnon? Over Briseis, his slave that is taken from him by Agamemnon as compensation for Agamemnon's own loss of his property:
"In the first book of the Iliad, during the distribution of the booty, she was given to Agamemnon as a sex slave by unanimous decision, in view of his kingly office. He bragged that he preferred her as a bed-mate to his wife Clytemnestra, because of her figure, her grace, and her skill at domestic tasks. Her father, the priest of Apollo, came to the Achaeans' beachhead bearing the god's sacred symbols and offered the Mycenaean king and his army gifts of gold and silver. Although the other warriors were eager to accept the ransom, Agamemnon rejected it. He treated the old man without the proper respect due to a priest, taunting him crassly with the image of the girl forever sharing his bed in distant Achaea, and sending him away rudely with threats of violence. Chryses, afraid, went apart and prayed on the beach for revenge. Apollo heard his prayer and, by means of his silver arrows, sent a plague sweeping through the Greek armies, so that Agamemnon was forced to give Astynome back in order to save his men from the disease. He sent Odysseus to return the maiden to Chryses. Agamemnon compensated himself for this loss by taking Briseis from Achilles. The offended Achilles refused to take further part in the Trojan War."
"According to her mythology, Briseis was the daughter of Briseus and an unnamed mother. She had three full brothers who died in the sack of Lyrnessus.
In the Iliad, Achilles led the assault on Lyrnessus during the Trojan War, and slew several of the men in her family. She was subsequently given to Achilles as a war prize. In the Mycenaean Greek society described in the Iliad, captive women like Briseis were slaves and could be traded amongst the warriors."
Nobody very much cares about the women as women and wives of others; now they are war booty and can be treated as property, and their feelings or wishes are not taken into account. Were it not that Chryseis was lucky enough to be the daughter of the priest of Apollo, who could invoke the god to help him, she would have to remain as the slave of the king with few to no rights over her own life.
"When Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix visit Achilles to negotiate her return in book 9, Achilles refers to Briseis as his wife or his bride. He professes to have loved her as much as any man loves his wife, at one point using Menelaus and Helen to complain about the injustice of his "wife" being taken from him. This romanticized, domestic view of their relationship contrasts with book 19, in which Briseis herself speaks. As she laments Patroclus' death, she wonders what will happen to her without his intercession on her behalf, saying that Patroclus promised her he would get Achilles to make her his legal wife instead of his slave.
In book 19 of the Iliad, Achilles makes a rousing speech to the Achaean soldiers. He publicly declares that he will ignore his anger with Agamemnon and return to battle. During his speech, Achilles says he wishes Briseis were dead, lamenting that she ever came between Agamemnon and himself.[12] This contrasts his own statements in book 9."
Achilles' sexual reputation wasn't any too noble, either:
"Troilus is an adolescent boy or young man, the son of Hecuba, queen of Troy. As he is so beautiful, Troilus is taken to be the son of the god Apollo. However, Hecuba's husband, King Priam, treats him as his own much-loved child.
A prophecy says that Troy will not fall if Troilus lives to the age of twenty. So the goddess Athena encourages the Greek warrior Achilles to seek him out early in the Trojan War. Troilus is known to take great delight in his horses. Achilles ambushes him and his sister Polyxena when he has ridden with her for water from a well in the Thymbra – an area outside Troy where there is a temple of Apollo.
The Greek is struck by the beauty of both Trojans and is filled with lust. It is the fleeing Troilus whom swift-footed Achilles catches, dragging him by the hair from his horse. The young prince refuses to yield to Achilles' sexual attentions and somehow escapes, taking refuge in the nearby temple. But the warrior follows him in, and beheads him at the altar before help can arrive. The mourning of the Trojans at Troilus' death afterward is great.
This sacrilege leads to Achilles’ own death, when Apollo avenges himself by helping Paris strike Achilles with the arrow that pierces his heel."
Even if you discount the "killed because he wouldn't put out" part, Troilus was targeted for death even though he was very young and a non-combatant (in the temple) and it was by ambush, not a fair fight. So sneaky backstabbing and sacrilege to boot, as well as what is probably actual rape and treatment of women as things not people, *is* "master morality", and Tate is fine by those rules.
"Hanania is terrible at being right-wing. He’s pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, and supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump. As with Donald Trump, he’s living proof that right-wingers will welcome anyone sufficiently offensive without caring about their policy positions."
Well, I always thought I was right-wing, and I can't *stand* Hanania, so I mustn't be Doing Right-Wingedness Right then 😁
Ozy's value about "I want to help others"? That's still slave morality; the master doesn't care about 'helping' others, save as it is in his own interest or part of the web of social obligations of his status to his peers.
Stunned by this paragraph from the Bulldog's post:
>Where do the moral facts come from? Nowhere, just like numbers, modal facts (e.g. the fact that contradictions are impossible), logical facts, other mathematical facts, metaphysical facts, and whatever the first physically existent thing was.
He just... came out and said it.
Brett Anderson makes the point that Bulldog's worldview has no possible explanation for why his beliefs about what objective morality is, and Bulldog responds with "But I don't get why you'd want to be able to explain my moral beliefs rationally. It's obviously better to be a mindless sheep, who can no more conceive the possibility of the ingroup's fashionable values being wrong than of a square circle."
I imagine Nietzsche is looking down and saying "I told you so" right about now.
This is a fantastic piece, and I have nothing smart to say about the actual substance, but I hope it slightly eases one of the conflicts in the middle if I say that Andrew Tate was a mediocre kickboxer at best. Kickboxing "world" titles vary wildly in quality due to the number of promotions, and none of Tate's were good (for one, he beat a 43-year-old who'd won 1 of his previous 7 fights). He also just looks like he kinda sucked. Crisis averted!
(Maybe I'm proving the whole "cutting down the big arrogant men" thing of slave morality, but then I think this also supports that it can be a good thing when they're frauds)
Right, if we're going to admire Andrew Tate for his kickboxing skills then we must also admire the many other kickboxers who are better. And I couldn't possibly name another kickboxer.
Admire Barnabas Katona. Besides winning a lot and even briefly holding a world record at that, when he retired and became a trainer he started training the elderly, fat people, blind people, Downs people because he believes that sport is for everybody.
My understanding is that a bunch of promotions became a lot less important after K1 got big (early 2000s), and ISKA was one of them - after that point, the belts aren't really defended regularly. Also, it's worth noting that his ISKA title was in full-contact - so the ruleset is a lot different from what we understand as kickboxing from the real elites
So yeah, it isn't literally nothing, but in the grand scheme of "guy who tries to sell manhood based on his kickboxing prowess", basically any kickboxer we've heard of had more kickboxing prowess
Once again, Scott verbalizes something many of us have felt, but does so approximately 100 times better than I could have done. In my opinion, this essay immediately enters the SSC/ACX canon alongside e.g. Meditations on Moloch or I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup. Bravo!
Boring technical point that no one else will care about, but Andrew Tate is not a 'world champion kickboxer' or even a particularly 'very good kickboxer'. Kickboxing is famously scattered into dozens of competing tiny organizations, similar to powerlifting, and of course the 'champion' of each 20 or 30-athlete org calls themselves a 'world champion'.
The org he supposedly won a belt in, the ISKA, is definitely one of the smaller and less serious kickboxing orgs out there. They are a branch of 'full contact' karate, not actual kickboxing per se. If he had won a title in say K-1, Glory, or It's Showtime, he would have bragging rights, but instead I'd say he was briefly the biggest fish of a very small talent pool. Here's a comment from someone that follows kickboxing much more than me https://x.com/lucas_bourdon/status/1608501322298363906
On a personal note, I find him hilariously uncharismatic and surprisingly dorky
> Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t.
They're not doing *what* to serve you? An "it" or "that" would suffice, to refer to the previous sentence.
There's also a full stop missing somewhere between sentences, but for the life of me I can't find it again.
I think buried deep in culture of Indian and European society is the idea that the Nietzschean strong ideals come from steppe raiders while slave morality is for farmers/peasants/slaves/natives who do productive work and are connected to nature particularly plant life.
I guess it can tie in with Against the Grain and various parts of Margaret Murray's theories on matriarchal neolithic farmers (though significantly debunked).
A quick read of the Babyeater chapters from Eliezer Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide clearly indicates that any humanlike species could easily end up forming a dominant morality around either
1. Human genetic diversity: the winners of the genetic lottery have something like more RAM or neuron density, and are therefore able to go out into the world and do things, and also think complex thoughts unlike the losers of the genetic lottery, who are doomed to a life of powerlessness and simple thoughts. These winners (elites) are surrounded by the losers (commoners) because genetic diversity implies that unhelpful gene combinations are far more common than extremely helpful ones. Culture forms from elites because they think complex thoughts, and after several generations of being surrounded by roundaboutly mediocre yet self-important commoners, morality ends up revolving around this contrast, and therefore morality ends up thoroughly downstream of human genetic diversity
2. Progress: civilizations with elites and culture that revolves around playing and winning social games (or class struggle) are zero-sum, whereas elites and cultures focused on progress are positive sum. Civilizations are measured by their output rather than how cool their members think their civilization is, so high-output civilizations expand the fastest and they get more stable critical masses of culture, so they're more likely to get intellectualism and logically enlightened culture instead of culture that focuses on the contrast between elite and commoner (e.g. pretty paintings, music, statues, poetry, etc). Morality forms around progress because those civilizations inherit the earth, and commoners also benefit massively from the continuousl OOMs of progress/output because it would be weird for elites to hoard 100% of the benefits instead of 99%.
3. A wide variety of other purity spirals that satisfy the human brain/instincts but in other directions, such as Wokeness.
Wonderful essay, exploring a deep tension in moral philosophy.
As FLWAB noted with a Chesterton quote, the reconciliation between the best of "Master" and "Slave" moralities (and the Terminal Value for which Scott rightfully searches) are found in the person of Christ. He willingly submitted to a horrible death, taking all the punishment deserved for human sin upon Himself -- and God exalted Him to the highest place. He is both the sacrificial lamb and the sovereign lion; the meek rabbi riding a donkey and the conquering King riding a white horse. And every life which the EAs nobly strive to save has value precisely because all men and women are made in God's image. Only those who acknowledge His sovereignty may enter His kingdom, but in that place not one cup of water given to the thirsty will fail to receive a reward.
The renowned philosopher Michael Scott seems to have summed up the utilitarian harm coefficient when he said "don't ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you've been... ever, for any reason whatsoever..." And yet, as a successful business executive, he clearly encouraged risk-taking among his subordinates, as shown by his fondness for that old Wayne Gretzky quote “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Maybe he was the ubermensch all along.
I don't think "Slave morality, except you're allowed to be a particularly good slave" is much of an improvement over anything except "Slave morality, and you aren't allowed to be a better slave".
Compared to that, yes, it's definitely an improvement. But if that's the best deal on offer, well, I'm going back to playing video games.
That, I think, is the thing. The morality can't just be "You're -allowed- to be great." It needs the idea that being great is, well, great; that you can, in fact, build cool stuff for no other reason than that you want there to be cool stuff. As soon as you yoke it to "As long as it makes other people better off" you've derailed the train and we're back to arguing over whether or not it should be allowed - does this person's greatness leave everybody better off, or should we cut them down?
I've come to think that The Fountainhead is the key to Rand's view of Nietzsche. Not just because she originally planned to use a quotation from him as its epigraph, but because of its major conflict between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand. Wynand really is something of a Nietzschean overman: born in the slums, he educated himself, became a successful newspaper publisher, is hugely rich, and besides that, is a lethally skilled fighter and superb in bed. And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power. I see this as the debate between the Nietzschean Rand and the Aristotelian Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged. (If you read Aristotle's account of the megalopsychos or "great-souled man," it's almost a perfect fit to what Rand says about Roark.)
I'd also note the scene where Roark asks Wynand to move so that he can have the sun on his back. That seems plausibly like the famous meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes, with Wynand as Alexander, the conqueror, and Roark as Diogenes, the self-sufficient man (though fortunately Roark doesn't have some of Diogenes's less attractive habits). I suspect Rand of making a little joke . . .
>And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power
No, the point is exactly the opposite! Roark is a model overman, embodying will to power -- not power in the vulgar sense of political influence, but in the Nietzschean sense of mastery over his own will. Wynand represents a *failed* overman, who had a mind capable of transvaluing all values, but instead chose to debase himself and become a slave to public opinion.
I think that's making too fine a distinction. It doesn't seem to be the case that will to power is characteristic only of the overman; will to power is characteristic of the masters, and even of the slaves—slave morality being a means for the slaves to gain power. I'm tempted to say that in Nietzschean terms, Roark represents sublimated will to power, and Wynand represents the unsublimated form. But isn't it the case that both master morality and slave morality are forms of the self-overcoming of will to power, and thus are already sublimated?
But I don't think Rand is thinking in Nietzschean terms. I think she understands "will to power" much more straightforwardly, as the desire to control others; and she sees Roark as someone who doesn't have that desire, not as someone who has it and has sublimated it. For all that Sciabarra analyzes Rand as a dialectical thinker, I think Rand is a less subtle thinker than Nietzsche, and all his dialectics is alien to her.
That was also my interpretation of Gail Wynand when I read The Fountainhead. But, and it surprised me to learn this, Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand's heir) said in no uncertain terms that Wynand isn't supposed to represent Nietzsche's philosophy. Because, he says, Nietzsche rejected the validity of reason while Wynand doesn't. Wynand just thinks it doesn't apply to human beings at large. Which would also explain why he runs a trashy newspaper.
I’m glad you had a footnote about sports being a clear exception needing likely expansion. When I was young, I loved the Olympics (16 Days of Glory about the 84 games is amazing and worth watching even now). I then fell out of love with them (and lots of other sports) and only in my burgeoning middle age do I find myself attracted to both once again. Watching Olympic highlights the last couple of days with my 3 and 6 year old kids has been incredibly joyful. Watching excellence and competition and seeing it celebrated really is an antidote to much of what we experience in the modern world.
You’ve also done a masterful job of explaining Yglesias’s appeal. He isn’t self loathing, like so much of the left. Good things are good and 1 Billion Americans are so antithetical to the degrowth mindset that Yglesias was outcast from the mainstream left and yet is more popular than ever. He intuits the basic human desire for greatness and pairs it with specific policy proposals that would allow us to grow and achieve more.
Yglesias wants to combine European scholastic welfarism with mass low iq immigration to create a giant Venezuela out of America.
He wrote gigantic essay on education reform that didn’t mention the null hypothesis or IQ and concluded that you know that status quo is good just some minor changes that wouldn’t piss the teachers union off much and definitely we can’t have school vouchers.
He barely managed to squeeze out one kid with his frumpy wife and he’s criticizing men with many kids and hot wives. Apparently his “growth mindset” doesn’t even apply to growing his family.
"After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?), something flipped"
I think it was brewing for a while in response to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution -- the Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, after all. The double whammy of WWI and the Great Depression made "slave morality" mainstream. In the US I think there was a brief period of resurgence of "master morality" after WWII, when it seemed like limitless energy and flying cars were right around the corner. The threat of nuclear war, the growth of environmentalism, and the failure to achieve some of the more fanstastical technological feats (where are those flying cars, again?) put an end to that resurgence.
I thought I had been clear that when I talked about "Übermensch", I was talking about an A.I.:
"I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just the same shall man be to the Übermensch: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any ape. Even the wisest among you is only a conflict and hybrid of plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants? Behold, I teach you the Übermensch! The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a going under."
I really like this post. I'm not sure I agree with all your interpretations of Nietzsche, but that's not really what you're writing about. It reminded me of two books that you might find interesting and directly relevant to this problematic, without so much Nietzsche baggage.
First, Alisdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue," which in a rather interesting way makes a compelling case for a similar ethical transformation in Western culture without the master/slave meta-narrative. "Good things are good" would be a decent subtitle.
Second, Max Scheler's "Ressentiment," which is the book that might have been my decisive break with "leftist" politics of my educated/academic/humanities mileu--along the same fault lines you address in the post. If the title doesn't make it clear, he's explicitly thinking about Nietzsche, though Scheler's connection with phenomenological tradition can make him a bit opaque without that background.
I found the discussion of dead people's life goals valuable.
It reminded me of another "dead man's goal" which I found within myself when learning to manage my anxiety and dealing with the consequences of my PTSD: "I want to be absolutely safe at all times". The desire to be perfectly safe at all costs is, at some ironic level, a force that wants to bury you, or at least lock you up in your own house and never let you out, because going out and meeting people is not safe - doing anything that a dead person can't do isn't perfectly safe, really.
Also, when I started therapy, I intuitively expected that since anxiety is what ruins my life, I would learn to, uh, shut it down I guess (hey, I know it sounds stupid, but give me a break). Instead the focus of therapy was something like "anxiety is a valuable emotion that's crucial in life, but in your case it turns on at the wrong times, so you need to befriend your anxiety, and explain to it, from a place of friendship, when is an appropriate time for it to turn off and when it isn't". I just realized that this distinction is also well-described by the "dead people's life goals" concept. "I want to stop being anxious" is a dead person's goal; "I want to learn to manage my anxiety and make it adaptive instead of maladaptive" is not.
"But if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes?"
I've often said that we should build monuments to ideas, not people. But, for better or worse, I think most people are psychologically hardwired to prefer a personification of their virtues over those virtues' Platonic Forms.
I've been reading & linking to Hanania ever since his Tetlock & the Taliban. And I'm an emotivist/non-cognitivist/subjectivist who doesn't believe in objective morality/aesthetics/etc. I just have that view as a modernist (rather than post-modernist), who takes very seriously the Humean distinction between "is" & "ought". I don't think an appreciation for things you regard as "good" needs any more justification than liking vanilla icecream (if that's what you like). I never read Nietzche, so my German philosopher of choice if instead Max Stirner. Stirner doesn't need to believe he's any kind of Superman, the Ego/Individual is just indexically significant in that it's him, and that's justification enough.
> But “I suck” isn’t a psychologically stable proposition.
Why do you think that?
> After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?)
Usually the 70s are supposed to be when that changed.
On modernist architecture, Scott Sumner chimes in on it being the market's response to consumer preference here:
> Also, if you defeat the Gallic armies enough times, you might find yourself ruling Gaul and making decisions about its future. Don’t you need some kind of lodestar beyond “I really like beating people”? Doesn’t that have to be something about leaving the world a better place than you found it?
The Romans actually did just that sort of thing for quite a while before converting to Christianity.
>Usually the 70s are supposed to be when that changed.
That is my impression as well.
In terms of the overall emotional tone of our culture, I suspect environmentalism had more of an impact than gets generally discussed. Changing from "Here is a landscape, imagine the possibilities!" to "Here is a landscape, take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints." was a very diminishing transition. And then, later, Woke was even worse...
I haven't finished the post but I need to pick at this (I assume it affects downstream arguments):
> So another way to think about slave vs. master morality is as coefficients on the normal utilitarian equation, good = benefits - harms. Master moralists overweight the benefits term; slave moralists focus on the harms.
This is not an accurate representation of master/slave morality. Nietzsche emphasized that these two systems are not commensurate at all (indeed, one is "good and bad" and the other is "good and evil" - they don't even agree on the most fundamental terms). A rabbit doesn't look at a hawk and think "benefits".
Really, both the positive and negative aspects of utilitarianism, as you describe them, both fall under slave morality. Saints are venerated just as much for their positive actions, as for their own personal asceticism. You can slide all across that spectrum, but as long as you're benefiting (either helping or blending in with) the herd, it's slave morality
This is exactly the sort of derangement you should expect from people who don't even know about the art of scope sensitivity, let alone progressed further along mastering the art.
I don't think it's a coincidence that ancient Greek literature, in addition to talking a lot about Golden Age heroes, also talked a lot about their downfall. And their downfall was almost invariably due to hubris.
They didn't cut down all the Tall Poppies, but the gods or the Fates cut down the ones whose aspirations were too big for mere mortals.
In other words, even Bronze Age master moralists believed in moderating virtues.
> Even extremely flawed or limited human beings can still have much to contribute to society due to the miracle of the division of labor. There is thankfully no need therefore to turn towards ideas that involve incapacitating or repressing large numbers of people
It comes as a relief that the author and his followers are not contemplating self harm.
This is a very interesting piece. Years ago I read the book *The Future and Its Enemies* by Virginia Postrel, and her dichotomy between dynamism and stasis provides a useful lens for understanding a bunch of disagreements that we see in the world. I think the people who broadly fall into the dynamism/stasis camps overlap a lot with with people in the master morality/slave morality camps, respectively, but a stasis mentality doesn't really explain some of the strategies in section IV (or even the healthy, steel-manned versions of them). I'm sure I'll be thinking about this one for a while. Thanks for writing it!
Something that's always puzzled me a bit is girl-power pop-feminism. They've internalized a lot of Randian/Nietzschean/master-morality ideas (be strong/powerful, don't apologize for who you are, make time for yourself, don't make yourself smaller to make other people feel better, etc.). And yet their ideal doesn't look very much like Dagny Taggart. Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is, and possibly writing a pop anthem about the experience. So there seems to be some kind of strange disconnect (juxtaposition?) going on there.
(Maybe the vague unacknowledged Randian current in pop-feminism comes by way of Nathaniel Branden's popularization of the psychology of self-esteem? Idk.)
It's the difference between doing and branding. Corpse morality serves capital - your value comes not from your accomplishments (doing stuff is being a capitalist bootlicker), but instead from saying stuff and expressing yourself (buying stuff and using social media is clearly sticking it to the man).
I don't think the impulse to say "but it's eugenics" in response to advocacy for genetic modification springs from slave morality. Any kind of deliberate influence on genetics is going to be associated with the Nazis and their form of eugenics (at least as people perceive it), so when you say something like "I think genetic modification of human embryos would be good" people are going to expect the next few sentences to be something like "here's why it's better if everyone is white and has blonde hair and blue eyes."
Imagine two public opinions polls held in contrast, one that asks "Should we genetically modify human embryos?" and one that asks "Should parents be able to remove the genes responsible for Huntington's disease from their child's embryo?"
"Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms."
Liberalism doesn't reject deontology because equality before the law requires law. Liberalism doesn't allow utilitarian calculus to override the law, either, as SBF discovered. The finite calculus would suggest he saved more lives than he took, which did him no good. Maybe there is a utilitarian justification for taxation, though
>there isn’t a single functional society without organized crime.
Huh? When I think of organized crime, I think of something like the Mafia, with e.g. at least two levels of management. Was anything like this present in e.g. colonial America?
Many Thanks! _Partially_ agreed. A government stationary bandit typically has (or at least claims) a monopoly on some geographic area. The Mafia / Cosa Nostra typically operates within an area that _also_ has a government stationary bandit. AFAIK, this is a less common situation than having a single stationary bandit.
There were perfectly functional pre-agricultural societies without taxation. Arguably, everyone in those societies also had a better quality of life until the last couple centuries.
Neither point is relevant to the functional nature of society without taxes. I think through a large swathe of history, living in a hunter-gatherer society would be better than an agricultural one. States can be better at marshalling resources to conquer people without being better places to live.
What they didn’t have was civilisation. I’ve heard that argument - the fetishisation of pre agricultural societies - made by naive communists as well. Look they say, a functioning world without money and with near equality.
I assure you I don't harbor any communist fetishes. Hunter-gatherer societies were generally healthier than their agrarian successors. Briefly, their varied diet was more nutritionally complete, with each of the major staple crops lacking important nutrients. Well-fed mothers breastfeeding their children was also much better developmentally than the largely solid food diet of agrarian peoples. They also don't have to worry about a bad year ruining their harvest and leading to starvation.
If there is a hypothetical where I have to choose between living in a hunter-gatherer society or any agricultural society in 1800, I would choose 1800 every time. But if the choice was hunter-gatherer or 1300s farmer, I think the 1300s loses. I don't think being a hunter-gatherer would be a good life per se, but being a subsistence farmer throughout most of history sounds quite awful.
> Hunter-gatherer societies were generally healthier than their agrarian successors. Briefly, their varied diet was more nutritionally complete, with each of the major staple crops lacking important nutrients
I know this has been repeatedly suggested, but I don't believe it. Two thousand generations after the first people arrived in Australia, the whole continent supported a population of just 200,000 people. The only way I can imagine such a small population existing for such a long period of time is if they periodically died off in massive famines, classic predator-prey dynamics with all the available food sources.
Some hunter-gatherers ate well, some of the time. Some of the time there was no food and they starved.
Calories are very distinct from nutrition. Farming can be both hugely better at creating calories/acre and worse at general nutrition. It might take 50 acres to support a single hunter-gatherer, where the same acreage of farmland might support dozens of families. The hunter-gatherer would have a better diet while the famers would have populations orders of magnitude larger.
I'm not confident about the rate of famine among hunter/gatherers vs farmers. In theory, the farmers are tied to the land and any disruption like droughts or blights would ruin them. The gatherers could move on to greener pastures. Large-scale events like volcanic eruptions would be equally devastating to both groups.
There was only "not taxation" in the sense that the tribe was too small for it to be called "taxation".
But if you went out and hunted a mammoth/buffalo/sloth/kangaroo and you didn't share it with the tribal big men who were too busy being important to go out hunting, that wouldn't end well for you.
I've never heard of any hunter-gatherer society that was based on pure private-property anarcho-capitalism, there's always an enforced obligation to share things with the group.
I'm no Calvinist, we can disagree about the relative proportion of master/slave dynamics within it and perhaps Scott underplays the master element. But I think it's qualitatively different from master morality as Nietzsche would have it. There's an essay in Also Sprach Zarathustra about how a man should become a camel, then the camel should become a lion, and then the lion a child. A man becomes a camel by becoming a beast of burden and taking on as many moral responsibilities as possible. This is an ambiguous position, on the one hand demonstrating mastery over one's body, on the other hand we end up as slaves to our conscience. So, we have to become a lion - grrr - and violently tear off the shackles of our moral responsibilities. This seems anarchic, but there is still a kind of duty going on, which ultimately eats itself in order to give way to the final state where we achieve a kind of equilibrium where we are just playing, like a child - neither good nor evil but a kind of anarchic synthesis. Puritanism seems like camel morality par excellence, yes we are choosing to rule ourselves but it's ourselves we are ruling over and that's not good enough for Nietzsche.
>Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
Great to see Rats persisting in their hilarious lack of Theory of Mind.
Sorry Scott, but not everyone is an autistic Jew in California, and the vast majority of people quite rightly see *your* values as bad.
Ingroup preferences are entirely legitimate. Vital energy and productive conflict are essential for civilizational success—far more so than “happiness.” And Effective Altruism is a repulsive peasant ideology that promotes a monstrously dysgenic misallocation of resources.
Your Honor, the prosecution rests.
I read a long, excellent post. I think to myself “Bismarck would be livid at this”… and then the thought is supplied instantly. What a wonderful world.
Sounds like you're giving too much thought to Bismarck.
Yes, I emphatically disagree with your values and think they are bad. You don't get to simply assert that your own values are universally applicable and that anyone who substantively disagrees is "not interested in morality." That's not how philosophy works.
It would be one thing if you could meaningfully ad baculum, but rationalists and Effective Altruists are substantially weaker than tribalists and ingroup preference enjoyers, so to anyone outside your bubble this tendency just comes off as impotent sneering.
Anyway if you want to debate any of this live name a time and I'll make it happen.
I'll stand by "bad and cruel".
"Cruel" is a pretty simple term and I think can be adjudicated without having to resolve deeper moral disagreements. I think when you say (I interpret this as approvingly, but tell me if I'm wrong) that people "don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones", that's describing cruelty. Insofar as you support that kind of reasoning, it's fair to describe you as liking cruelty.
I agree "bad" is a value judgment, but it's one that I'm making now. According to my values, your values are bad. I accept that according to your values, I'm bad. I support my values, which is why they're my values, and why I use them to make value judgments. We could try to figure out whether we have enough shared values that we have a factual disagreement (in terms of how we cash our our shared values) rather than an irreconcilable difference of premises, but having seen how you behave when debating other people doesn't make me particularly excited to embark on this long and probably fruitless journey.
That probably comes across as harsher than I mean to be. I'm less against the content of your values (which I interpret as supporting personal and civilizational strength) than I am against your aesthetic (which seems to carry an assumption that being nastier, more callous, and more dishonest is a better way to build that up). I think civilizational strength is part of the good, but not all of it - see section 11 of this post for more about my thoughts of this.
But also, I do think you *might* be wrong about how to get civilizational strength. We're not having this discussion from the Roman, Viking, or Mongol Empires - on the broadest scale, civilizations/religions/subcultures survived and contributed to the current hegemonic culture in proportion to how much they embodied values of compassion, universalism, civility, honesty, and reason. I think your project is likely to be a flash in the pan compared to mine, precisely because you're too obsessed with the idea of winning (sort of; I also think there's a sense in which you're not obsessed enough, but that's another 10K word post). The people who actually win, long-term, are all some variety of religious nutcase who wouldn't know winning if it kicked them in the balls, who just pursue some deeply held vision of Beauty or The Good.
( see also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/ )
It was not so long ago that cruelty was measured by distance. Needlessly kicking a dog in the street can easily be explained as cruel. Caring about some amount of dead children somewhere dying somehow in a great inscrutable chain to produce iPhones is a very Mrs. jellyby thing to focus on!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/
You're kind of assuming that producing IPhones is a mysterious process, that requires some amount of faceless dead children as its input.
Not caring about some random suffering plantation that has nothing to do with you is fine in my book, but if you're sipping the sweet product, in an unnecessarily cruel chain, you're cruel, and aesthetically repulsive.
Glorifying the amount of dead children produced by industrial processes is not a common take I have seen even in the far right. I can see it being used as an aggressive rhetorical pushback to benthams piece specifically, but that’s because Bentham has a very infuriating woke adjacent rhetoric of his own where he will demonize anyone who falls on the wrong side of his arbitrary morality trolley scenarios.
> You're kind of assuming that producing IPhones is a mysterious process, that requires some amount of faceless dead children as its input.
That's exactly how modern capitalism is organized, perfectly optimized to hide from you, the end consumer, exactly how much sentient suffering is hidden in the tendrils of the production chain. If we've heard about iPhones and coltan, it's only because some people have gone out of their way to dig the information out. When you buy stuff out there, there is no exhaustive list of components and their suppliers and their methods of production, so you literally don't know. That doesn't make you cruel and aesthetically repulsive, just a random member of the public.
Of course you can buy your veggies from farmer's markers and your spices from fair-trade organic sources, if you have the time and money. But I've yet to see an organic, fair-trade server rack or industrial HVAC machine, so the approach only goes so far.
It's said "ignorance is bliss". Not knowing anything about children dying to produce my iPhone doesn't make me cruel in the least.
Now you tell me about children dying in order to produce my iPhone. I had nothing to do with the children dying, but now you blame me for it. What is the solution now? I do without an iPhone (iPhone's aren't fungible) because someone told me cruel things happen to make it possible to own one?
The morally correct thing to do is ask Apple to stop exploiting children, because it is cruel. If Apple didn't know, then it is the same situation I'm in, and you need to go to whoever is performing the actual cruelty. If THEY refuse to change, then you go to Apple, and say one of their suppliers is being cruel. Now, what's Apple supposed to do? Stop buying from their cheapest supplier? Lean on their cheapest supplier to stop being cruel, forcing them to employ more expensive methods for getting their cobalt, and thus being no longer the cheapest supplier? For someone willing to cruelly exploit children, that doesn't sound like a course of action that's going to happen.
Unless they are actually forced to work in the mines/plantations, caring about them specifically because you use their product is Copenhagen ethics, as buying their product doesn't make them worse off, it makes them slightly better off.
Perhaps we should distinguish between cruelty and callousness. Not caring about suffering one way or the other is callous; deliberately causing suffering is cruel. (Or maybe "unnecessary" suffering, since there might be times when it's necessary to cause suffering, e.g., yelling at a child for running across the road without checking for care.)
Yes, I think this is worth exploring.
If I ignore the suffering of others, I am callous. If I enjoy it, I am sadistic. If I engage in it, I am cruel. If I support others engaging in it... I think that's a little cruel but mostly callous?
Yes. Walt is not sure about 1) whom to be harsh against and 2) why. If being harsh to the outgroup (which may feel intuitively right) makes the outgroup stronger and thus more dangerous for the ingroup, that is not wise. On the other hand, doing the opposite, making the ingroup strong by being very harsh on them while keeping the outgroup weak via welfare sandwiches, would feel intuitively wrong.
It's not that I *like* it--I merely see it as an inevitability, because I recognize that any scalable production chain will necessarily involve the brutal exploitation of various asymmetries. Everything about our modern lifestyle--from our food to our phones to our porn--is facilitated by mass exploitation and cruelty, and the vast majority of people (even EAs) ignore most instances of this because reckoning with the totality of it would prove psychologically unbearable. The point is that focusing in on buying malaria nets etc. is a colossal misallocation of resources that should obviously be used for initiatives like colonizing Mars.
Regarding aesthetics--I'm certainly more provocative and theatrical than most rationalists will find acceptable, specifically because I grew up on 4chan and developed as a propagandist and metapolitical theorist in the Alt Right of 2015-2016. But I also suspect you misunderstand where I'm coming from because of certain generational and subcultural differences that aren't necessarily indicative of intractable differences in temperament. My exchanges with BB in particular will certainly come off as meanspirited to people outside my specific cultural ecology, but they need to be understood as frattish intellectual locker room talk and unrepresentative of my overall public posture.
For instance, if you listen to the podcast I did for The Motte with Trace and Yassine you'll see I'm entirely able and willing to engage in a respectful and good faith dialogue with mostly adversarial interlocutors who are generally aligned with your own worldview:
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/i-spoke-about-leaving-white-nationalism
Anyway, I write in this provocative style for a number of reasons.
First and foremost it's incredibly important to me that I remain an unapologetic champion for angry and disenfranchised young white men who hardly need yet another finger wagging in their face demanding they come to terms with the many indignities of liberal modernity. It's precisely that sort of schoolmarmish impulse that negatively polarizes young men into giving Andrew Tate power and cultural clout. Young guys want to follow someone who calls things gay and retarded and will brutally insult people who approach his spaces in bad faith, and that's why I've grown so explosively on Substack. It's certainly not for everyone, but neither am I.
The second reason is I believe that the aggressively honest, direct, and somewhat autistic rhetorical style employed by most rationalists is counterproductive in many conversations. To properly engage liberal mean girls who mostly communicate in bad faith status games you occasionally need to argue obliquely or somewhat theatrically. I've written my thoughts on this more comprehensively here:
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/feminine-power-and-the-hegemony-of
The third reason is I have zero respect for liberal institutions or our mainstream egalitarian culture, and generally seek to cultivate an avowedly piratical mindset in young intellectual right wing white men that gives them moral permission to let loose on the world and assert their Will to Power. That's also why I'm building alternate power structures that very deliberately exploit the asymmetries and inefficiencies of modern capitalism to help my men rapidly build wealth:
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/bismarcks-buccaneers
Anyway, I have more nuanced and complex thoughts on "winning" and the long term prospects of our respective projects, but to my mind that topic is better discussed in a more conversational setting. Suffice it to say I'm eager to have a good faith dialogue with you, and am confident Trace and Yassine would vouch for my character and intellectual honesty.
Let me know if you're interested and we'll schedule a time.
You actually like it. I understand that. Aesthetically it is cool. Pirates are cool. I've seen like 10 pirate movies myself and kept playing videogames of that kind. Vitality has an inherent coolness, and what better way to prove that than to form a small band and take on empires.
It is even understandable that you like it. Autistic California Jews on LessWrong.com spent a considerable time figuring out what our terminal goals should be. Suppose a Machine God will grant our deepest wishes. What to wish for? Infinite happiness? We might get a lotus eater society. Etc.
Turns out, truly terminal goals are kind of hard. We just rarely think about them, because there are so many intermediate goals.
It is even harder to come up with a truly rational justification of a terminal goal. If we want to be honest, our truly terminal goals are rarely rational, we just like them.
A thing likeable in itself is an aasthetic. Heroic vitality is obviously likable, that is like 90% of Hollywood and 100% of superhero comics.
When it is called bad and cruel, it is because we really prefer to mix a lot of compassion into the "likeable things" mixture. We prefer our heroic vitality the Superman way, all that strength used to save babies from burning buildings.
I will be honest with you. I cannot speak for other people, but I think my compassion or empathy might come from a place of weakness - feeling helpless humans need being saved from burning buildings because I might one day be a helpless human needing that. I certainly needed a lot of help in my life so I am in favour of a society that helps people. Though not necessarily people across the planet -just adding to Africa's overpopulation does not seem so effectively altruist to me. But psych yards for the homeless in the West, yes. One day I could end up there.
I do not think suffering builds character and makes people stronger. The discomfort of hard work does, but one must do it from a place of health. Being unhealthy, both physically and mentally, never made me stronger. And I learned how very easy it is to become unhealthy.
I'll spare you the annoying argument on how we've vastly decreased brutality and cruelty over the past century or two (eg banning slavery, banning child labor, mandated overtime) with little damage to capitalist production, since it's an overdone argument and I can already predict the answers.
But I think if you take your own position about strength seriously, you end up 90% allied with EA (I think this is where Richard Hanania has ended up). You might not be on board with the malaria nets, but stuff like ending pandemics, promoting polygenic selection, preventing x-risk, and permitting/licensing/FDA reform are all basically the result of taking "strengthening the human race" seriously and trying to figure out where that ends up. All of these seem like much better uses of your time and energy than trying to lead a sub-faction of the alt-right. I even think the global development stuff, viewed properly, looks pretty good by these lights - turning 3rd world countries into 1st world is about as pure an example of strength and vitalism as you can get, and even if you're skeptical about the strong version for race realist reasons, there's a world of difference between Sudan and Kenya which race realism doesn't rule out and which is probably based on institutions, capital, and other changeable things.
When you're instead viscerally opposed to EA, such that the malaria nets make you really angry despite the many good-according-to-your-values things we're doing, it makes me think you're coming more from a place of really hating the weak (or at least hating the idea of helping the weak) as opposed to loving strength, which I think is a morally dangerous place to be.
I have a hard time figuring out what you truly want, because most of what you post is strategic and not really about what the final goal of all your strategizing is. You mentioned "Mars colony", but this is a trap. By all means plant the flag on Mars to show we can, but we're not going to get mass colonization before we can terraform it, because right now if you want to live somewhere cold and lifeless, you can go to North Dakota, which is cheaper and has oil, and Mars has zero advantage over this. What will actually happen is that we'll have some kind of intelligence explosion (either from AI or genetic engineering) and go straight to building a Dyson sphere. This is kind of a petty objection, but my point is that I don't think you've thought about your end goal at all compared to the vast amount of work you've put into strategizing, and I think if you ever did think about your end goal enough to make it coherent, you would find that forming a new edgy sub-faction of the alt-right isn't the best way to achieve any of the actually useful and glorious stuff, and you would end up doing something that looks more like EA. This makes me think that on some level you just like leading an edgy sub-faction of the alt-right. Which honestly does sound really fun, but again makes me suspicious of your morality. And everything else (the locker room talk, the disdain for autistic philosophy) is downstream of your decision to lead an edgy sub-faction of the alt-right.
> "I have zero respect for liberal institutions or our mainstream egalitarian culture, and generally seek to cultivate an avowedly piratical mindset in young intellectual right wing white men that gives them moral permission to let loose on the world and assert their Will to Power. "
I don't really see the difference between this and the commies who say it's okay to shoplift because capitalism is bad. "If I don't 100% agree with the politics behind institutions, I don't have to follow the rules" means nobody ever follows any rules (since people will never agree on politics) and then civilization becomes impossible. You can either become North Korea where everyone's being watched at all times, become San Francisco where half the stores have left and the others have bars on every window and keep all their items in locked cases, or you can try to cultivate the civilized virtues, one of which is some form of obedience to law.
(see eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/19/the-dark-rule-utilitarian-argument-for-science-piracy/)
> "That's also why I'm building alternate power structures that very deliberately exploit the asymmetries and inefficiencies of modern capitalism to help my men rapidly build wealth:"
Some effective altruists tried that too one time. They made $30 billion in a year or two, and it wasn't worth it. That part of the movement has been thoroughly purged, and good riddance. When I talk about Vikings and Mongols and things that are short-term good vs. long-term Good, it's coming from many experiences like that one and trying to think about what people could have done better.
(you could also try not to get caught, but since you're announcing your plans to defraud the disability system on a public Substack, I think that strategy probably isn't a good match for your style)
I appreciate that the version of you commenting here is much easier to talk to than the version I see elsewhere, and apologize for suggesting you were incapable of good discussion. I don't do live debates, but thank you for the offer.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply--very interesting thoughts!
I'm not *against* any of the specific initiatives you mention, but none of them really animate me. Obviously it'd be preferable on net if we could turn DR Congo into an enormous Botswana or make Haiti more like Jamaica. But ultimately I don't care enough to invest any of my own energy / resources into that just to help a bunch of subaltern primitives who'd probably hate me.
This is because I differ from EAs in two important dimensions:
A) I have a much stronger ingroup preference and reject proximity-agnostic universalist ethical systems that tend to stem from abstract moral principles instead of personal honor and private duty-bonds
B) I contend that frequent and negative sum high stakes conflict is necessary to maintain social vitality, reset hedonic treadmills, and legitimize status hierarchies.
I think these differences are mostly temperamental and not especially worth litigating. They likely stem in part from me being 15th percentile in trait agreeableness and of Scotch Irish heritage. But they *also* likely stem from a colossal proportion of EAs being autistic Jews from California who are culturally predisposed to cosmopolitanism and reductive ethical systems and are oftentimes genuinely incapable of empathizing with people from a patriarchal tribalist honor culture (i.e. your comments above on Caesar and Gaul).
Ultimately I'd submit that the median American is somewhere between us in both tolerance for ingroup preference and reverence for aggression, but that they're also *much closer to me*. Universalism currently enjoys disproportionate clout specifically because culturally significant industries are demographically unrepresentative, and that creates a massive asymmetry that men like me can and have used as a tremendous source of power.
>This makes me think that on some level you just like leading an edgy sub-faction of the alt-right.
This is entirely correct! But per my comments above this is a perfectly natural objective. I don't really have precise object-level goals and generally reject that approach to politics. My specific thoughts on things like tariff policy etc. will vary with macroeconomic/geopolitical developments and technological innovations or in response to to coalitional pressures.
Ultimately my fundamental goal is for fellers like me (by which I mean all components of identity and not just race) to have as much power as possible. I want to maximize our slice of the pie. That is what matters to me and my actions are entirely sensible within that framework.
>I don't really see the difference between this and the commies who say it's okay to shoplift because capitalism is bad
The difference is in form.
I would never advocate something like shoplifting that promotes squalor and chaos. But job stacking / overemployment is entirely harmless when done right and by my reckoning actually pro-vitalist in the sense that it demands substantially *more* from people: more effort, more agency, more excellence.
>Some effective altruists tried that too one time. They made $30 billion in a year or two, and it wasn't worth it.
The difference is SBF actually broke the law in an unsustainable way that directly antagonized state institutions. What I advocate is 100% legal and a lot more decentralized, which is what enables me to advertise it so openly.
>When I talk about Vikings and Mongols and things that are short-term good vs. long-term Good, it's coming from many experiences like that one and trying to think about what people could have done better
I mean the Vikings objectively brought back a lot of wealth and hot women to Scandinavia and spread their cultural influence everywhere. Yes they civilized eventually and fell to the Cross, but that is always the goal of things like this. You raid and plunder when you start at a disadvantage and opportunities abound and then you parlay your spoils into a more settled institutional power as things close down (as the remote work environment inevitably will) and you become the hoary old king defending his turf from the hungry young bandit.
Such is the eternal dialectic of generational struggle that I maintain is essential to civilizational vitality and must be emphatically embraced.
Anyway I'm not Tony Soprano and would never try to defraud big public institutions in an organized way. I'll certainly help my guys individually exploit certain loopholes (especially in juicy corporate short term disability policies where this sort of thing is already priced in) but it's incredibly important that everything remain technically legal and above board.
That said I'm also building a polycentric structure for ultra-agentic and highly disagreeable guys who eat what they kill and take full responsibility for their outcomes while operating under total anonymity, so the downsides to public advocacy are significantly reduced and give me lots of space to be a touch self-indulgent as a propagandist.
We'll see if it blows up in my face, but so far things look fantastically promising.
Thank you as well, my good man. Enjoyed this exchange and hope to at some point engage with you more thoroughly in longform.
I don't think earn-to-give has been discredited. The insane approach to risk SBF took has been though.
'That part of the movement has been thoroughly purged, and good riddance.'
This has not been my impression. The movement seems to have avoided any serious investigation into what happened and who knew what when. There was a lot of talk, but it staid talk. Actual action seemed to instead focus on preventing bad PR.
The rumour mill goes people involved with FTX shady actions and history are still around as community members in good standing. Not because the community investigated and cleared them, but because there was no investigation.
All the soul searching and self flaggelating EA Forum posts in the wake of FTX seem to have amounted to "We will change as a movement so nobody can credibly connect us to something that might cause bad PR ever again." Instead of "We will change as a movement so something bad doesn't happen again."
These things are not the same. They're almost the opposite! More focus on PR and not looking bad means the next time some people have some circumstantial evidence and vague bad feelings abut a major EA org or figure, there'll be even more pressure to keep quiet and not rock the boat than there was last time.
Isn't it unclear whether SBF was actually doing it for EA reasons? He only donated a tiny fraction of the money he made after all. Seems to me that the naive utilitarian "dark EA" approach would be to donate *all* of it and then collapse intentionally, using a bunch of legal obfuscation or routing through crypto tumblers or whatever to make clawbacks impossible.
>we've vastly decreased brutality and cruelty over the past century or two with little damage to capitalist production
You have the direction of causality reversed here. Brutality has decreased _because_ of capitalism not in spite of it. That's because, to first order, people are always treated according to their economic value; capitalism increases an individual's economic value and therefore individuals in capitalist cultures are treated better (you stop whipping your employees when you can get more value out of them by putting them in front of a computer). Just look around at the most/least brutal environments and see which ones are more and less capitalistic.
Places where capitalism interacts directly with underdevelopment (e.g. iPhone factories) may be local maxima of suffering, but that's like pointing to a surgeon's scalpel penetrating flesh and saying it seems worse than the tumor he's trying to remove. Sometimes you have to cut to cure. The painful conditions in the iPhone factory will lead directly to long-term health of the areas that surround them in a dose-dependent way. This is consistent with the positive correlation between length of colonial occupation and modern GDP, as colonialism is an extreme example of the same principle.
You could have brought more unambiguous examples of progress. Child labor went away because economic efficiency grew so people could make a living without sending their children to work (which is what made it realistic to ban it), not because we banned it. Work hours decreased because efficiency grew so people could make a living working fewer hours, not because we limited work hours (or banned "mandated overtime", I guess a worker's right to agree in advance to be available for long hours?). Most "achievements" of the labor movement were made possible by technological or perhaps organizational improvements. At that point, workers could've just offered to accept a lower wage in exchange for better conditions; instead, they pressed the government to mandate better conditions, which likely resulted in the same lower wages on the long run, just removed people's option to choose to make more money under worse conditions. You tend to say you lean libertarian; you should think through these kinds of things from the standpoint of libertarian economic theory and at least address its objections before you bring illibertarian measures as positive examples, or just bring different examples if economic policy is not the main topic.
Getting cobalt suppliers to stop employing child labor is the same sort of thing as the reformers who got cheap low-quality housing banned on the grounds that it exploited tenants, or who try to ban gig work without employment protections, to bring examples where you agree with the equivalent counterargument.
I don't understand what you wrote:
You wrote that cruelty is not worth opposing because it's inevitable.
To me that's like saying it's not worth going to the doctor when your sick because death is inevitable.
Even if suffering is inevitable, the specific suffering caused by preventable malaria deaths is not inevitable.
You also write that malaria nets are a misallocation of societal resources. How can something that accounts for less than one one thousandths of one percent of global GDP be worth talking about in that way? Societal resources can go to whatever projects you think they should go to and also have left over for nets.
Or maybe you are not really anti-malaria nets per-say, but don't want us to spend money on them because that would force us to recon with global economic inequality about which you say
"reckoning with the totality of it would prove psychologically unbearable"
But that would suggest a principle of "never making incremental progress towards lofty goals when doing so would force you to consider the magnitude of the problem since that's psychologically unbearable"
But in advocating for that principle you are making incremental progress towards the goal of "destroying altruism" which forces you to consider the magnitude of the phenomena of "people doing altruistic things" -- why is that not equally psychologically unbearable?
I think there are a couple different valid answers to your questions. (Why not oppose cruelty?)
1. There is a difference between opposing cruelty *in principle* versus opposing *specific cruelties*. There is a good argument that can be made about how the former stance leads to a bad set of values and outcomes (e.g., worshipping malaria nets), whereas as the latter doesn't nearly as much (e.g., preventing my neighbor's daughter from being abused by her father). Namely, because –
2. Sometimes, it takes cruelty to oppose or drive out cruelty. Contrary to Christian morality, I believe it's true that sometimes Satan *can* drive out Satan. And that this is desirable, i.e., results in More Good. Yes, this always runs the risk or devolving into an endless cycles of Girardian memetic violence.
But, often times, it just ... doesn't? I smack you in the face for insulting me, and then we both move on with a blank record – but not necessarily because you forgave me in a Christlike manner or whatever.
3. Related or extending from #2, but slightly different, it the idea that Cruelty Is Necessary For The Good. Not always, and not fundamentally, but incidentally in the right ways. I think this is actually one of the main theses of Master Morality.
If you accept that cruelty is not definitionally Bad, but only contingently Bad, then you can acknowledge that Bad, e.g., cruelty things can (and maybe even ought to) occur in service of Good.
This is a step away from saying cruelty is *necessary* for the good. But the way to get there is to point out that for the rest of eternity, there will always be instances where a specific instances of cruelty are needed to produce good.
Going to the doctor wasn't worth it for most of the history of medicine, but people (who could afford it) went anyway. At some point in the 20th century it switched pure pseudo-science to adding value. Nowadays it's wasteful on the margin in the US, but still has infra-marginal value.
> You also write that malaria nets are a misallocation of societal resources. How can something that accounts for less than one one thousandths of one percent of global GDP be worth talking about in that way?
It's worth talking about, if you're talking directly to the people doing the misallocation.
The fraction of the world's dollars that go into EA is negligible. But perhaps the limited resource is the time and energy of smart young independent-minded people with free time. If all the EAs became master-morality job-stacking Greeks-speaking nudist bodybuilders, spending their time and money on awesome instead of mere good, then we could slightly increase the amount of faraway suffering in the world but greatly increase the amount of nearby awesomeness.
"The point is that focusing in on buying malaria nets etc. is a colossal misallocation of resources that should obviously be used for initiatives like colonizing Mars."
Colonizing Mars would be a colossal waste of resources considering how underpopulated the present-day Earth is.
How many people does earth need to not be considered underpopulated?
Pirates are the enemies of all humanity. Caesar crucified the pirates he captured, though he was merciful enough to also slit their throats.
Propagandists are bullshitters. Being a propagandist, and for a cause as unworthy as Trump, does not make people inclined to take what you say seriously.
Did Walt Bismarck endorse Trump?
> who are generally aligned with your own worldview
I don't know that Yassine and I are generally aligned with each other's worldviews, even, much less Scott's. I love Scott's writing and have been tremendously influenced by it, but even while I feel like my meta-worldview is quite compatible with his, I tend to interact as a friendly critic of things like effective altruism and utilitarianism that are major parts of his frame.
In particular, I accept Copenhagen ethics:
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1711050089282621789
In many ways, I wind up closer to what Scott describes as Nietzschean morality in this post than to precisely where Scott lands.
If this all sounds quite nitpicky, it shouldn't, necessarily. I think that's what differentiates Scott's reaction to you ("but I like being bad and cruel") from mine ("badly wrong about some important things, but headed in an interesting and often worthwhile direction").
yeah I suppose I somewhat lazily lump all three of you together as “rationalist types” in the same way normies will pigheadedly insist I'm still a white nationalist even though the differences are incredibly obvious / salient to me and actual WNs tend to think I'm a sleazy prevaricating grifter
I also tend to think of people more in terms of their meta-worldview than worldview simply because my own metapolitics are a lot more interesting than my object-level politics. The point was more that if I can productively engage with you guys I can also do so with Scott.
But yeah listening again to that Bailey call it's actually quite interesting how effortlessly you were able to steelman my positions on e.g. the inescapably racial nature of crime politics in a lot of instances where Yassine and I were intractably gridlocked. Meanwhile a lot of our more dramatic confrontations in the middle of that convo were positively Shakespearean.
There's something fantastically archetypal / primordial that emerges when you lock horns with a thematically appropriate foil and that's a huge part of why I'm so committed to overt conflict as a positive good.
Sorry if this violates The Three Rules, but
> Regarding aesthetics--I'm certainly more provocative and theatrical than most rationalists will find acceptable, specifically because I grew up on 4chan and developed as a propagandist and metapolitical theorist in the Alt Right of 2015-2016.
is just hokey, unless you mean you like old buildings and art. Which Scott also vastly prefers over today's preferences. Or maybe you mean arthouse mumblecore?
I disagree about indifference being cruelty. I doubt you spend much time thinking about whether plants suffer, or whether aliens on a planet many light-years from us do. We have a limited amount of attention, and that doesn't make us "cruel" to everything outside that.
"I doubt you spend much time thinking about whether plants suffer."
Spoken like someone who has never encountered the shrimp welfare people.
(plants don't have nervous systems, but see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bugs and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/27/bottomless-pits-of-suffering/)
I think my stronger objection is that if someone did worry about these things, I wouldn't hold them in contempt or try to argue them out of it. I think most forms of suffering will have to wait for extremely powerful technological solutions like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative and maybe the Singularity, but I respect anyone who has the energy to put a little effort into working on them before that.
I agree. Holding people in contempt for that is a waste of contempt. Not caring about such people is just as valid as not caring about whatever it is they care about.
Arrgh. Okay, I have tried to gesture at this elsewhere, but here's the key to understand Nietzsche's defence of master morality. "Slave morality" in the end isn't everyone holding hands and being nice. It is ultimately universal slavery. Where it doesn't matter how much you struggle, how much you work, you have no chance to rise until everyone else rises too. And, yes, we have seen that in practice in places like the USSR and Mao's China.
Nietzsche's philosophy is more emotional than intellectual. It is a furious rejection of this - and he defends masters, conquerors more or less by default. Better a world where some are free to be heroic, live lives worth emulating, than a world were all are slaves, all are chained to all.
Now, there is a way out of this insane dichotomy, but it does involve listening to the most despised and misrepresented philosopher in history.
What's the way out?
The false choice is between Slave and Master. People imagine Masters to be free, but they aren't. Power consumes those who wield it. Tyrants die by murder, and before they do, they are constantly struggling to avoid it.
There is a third alternative, the only one that allows liberty, and that is to be a Trader. To live on equality with others, relying only on their unforced, chosen cooperation.
I wrote the following dialogue, posted it elsewhere here:
"
Russel-Buddha: "Look on this earth and see the suffering that all men endure. Lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourshiment; the wounded in battle, dying in slow agony; the orphans, ill-treated by cruel guardians; and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow, a way of salvation can only be found, and this salvation can only come from love"
Nietzsche: "Good heavens, man, you must learn to be of tougher fibre Why go about snivelling becausetrvidial people suffer? Or, for that matter, because great men suffer? Tribial people suffer trivbially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted because they are noble. Your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be completely secured by non-existence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor Frederick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while."
Russel-Buddha: "You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal a purely negative one. True, it includes a negative element, the absence of suffering; but it has in addition quite as much that is positive as to be found in your doctrine. Though I have no special admiration for Alcibiades and Napoleon, I too have my gheroes: my successor Jewsus, because he told men to love their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the orces of nature and secure food with less labour; the medical men who have shown how to diminish diseas; the poets adn artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine Beatitude - "
Ayn Rand: "You are both wrong. You, R-B, in your creed, you, Nietzsche, not in your revolt, but in your banner. You, R.B., make a world of suffering, in your creed there is nothing but suffering and the relief of suffering, the negative and the zero. You would make all life one vast hospital. Your vision is only of wounds, of sickness, of hunger - and you banish utterly from man's lot the laugh the joy, the bright eyes directed to the future, the happiness of friends, the exaltation of the explorer. To you the conditions of *death* are human, are natural, but those of *life* are not - and you hold that there should not be one man free to find one moment of joy until all the rest of mankind is freed from their sufferings! You would have all slaved to all, for all time!"
Actual Buddha: "In point of fact, unlike this imposter, I did not teach any of this, and sought to show men how they might be free, what limitless power is available to them -"
All three: "Quiet."
Ayn Rand: "And you, Nietzsche, you revolt against this slavery, but what is your ideal instead? Those robbers on the grand scale are no different from those on the petty scale. You heap scorn on those who slave themselves to others sufferings - but those who *inflict* them are lower still, the very least of men. You would hold a leash, but that is only a rope with a noose at both ends. You think the tyrant, the king, the thug is free? No, he lives in fear, fear of one who shall cast him down, and even more, of his own mind, of his own knowledge that he is less than those he tramples and could lose all at any moment."
R.B. & Nietzsche: "What then do you propose?"
Ayn Rand: "This life is not a vale of tears; it is the highest and most joyous thing. Your life is the singular glory that nothing can ever replace - life is good, and the good is to live it. *Suffering* is the unnatural, the improper; *Happiness* is the right, the proper, the true state of mankind"
"And Man is not to be slave nor slaver. The sufferings of one are not a claim on the life of another. To be truly free, one must reject both ends of the leash - to treat with others as equal beings; not as beasts of burden or as objects of charity, but as equals, with whom you can trade and share in all the goods of this life.
And the heroes of *my* creed are not the chronic seekers after pain, nor the robbers and tyrants, but the explorers and adventurers, the builders and the makers. And *they* are not 'higher' forms of human life, they are the only truly *normal* humans on this good earth."
I went to "like" your post because I think its better then Walt's, but it turned out to be the reply button.
"civilizations/religions/subcultures survived and contributed to the current hegemonic culture in proportion to how much they embodied values of compassion, universalism, civility, honesty, and reason."
This obviously isn't true. The societies that most contributed to current hegemonic culture gave us manifest destiny, colonialism, and century long IQ raising because the strong let the children of the poor starve to death.
Perhaps they were less cruel then the Mongol's, but they were certainly more cruel then Yglesias.
Even Ayn Rand argued that Native Americans and Palestinians deserved to be conquered and displaced because they weren't worthy.
I take a less cruel stance in the modern day, I think they should be barred from immigrating and have to find a way to build their own successful societies (if they can).
The goal of Yglesias-ism is not a pretty one, and that's if it works out as well as they hope. One Billion Americans could easily end in Venezuela rather then Average is Over.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-toady-class-on-average-is-over/
---
Random notes from a discussion of Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over:
Michael Mandel is optimistic. He thinks that the baby boomers are about to retire in droves (in part because of health reasons), helping to solve the unemployment problem of the young. Tyler, Robin Hanson, Megan McArdle, and I are unpersuaded.
Tyler pictures an economy evolving over the next twenty years to one with a slice of high earners (the 20 percent or so whose skills complement the ever-expanding power of computers) and then a large group that lives comfortably but without a financial cushion to protect against adverse shocks to health or other major risks.
Matt Yglesias wonders how, in a world that requires technical skill and social skills, those of us in the room have survived. It seems that most work for think tanks, newspapers, and other non-profits. Tyler replies that our presence in the room is indicative of marketing skills. Each of us has proven adept at marketing, with wealthy donors as our consumers in most cases. Steve Teles points out that as society’s rich accumulate wealth beyond what they can consume, their philanthropic ideas will, for better or worse, allocate society’s resources. Afterward, it occurs to me that this suggests that there will emerge a toady class, meaning people whose work in one way or another flatters the wealthy.
James Manzi points out that many people work in fields where output is hard to evaluate, such as education and health care, and I would add that entry to these fields is restricted by credentials. Tyler thinks that as we gather more data we will overcome our inability to evaluate performance sooner than people expect. If that is correct, then the credentials cartel would seem to be destined to fall. I believe that a lot of the thesis of his book stands or falls on whether such data-driven evaluation systems pan out. He would agree that we are far away right now, but he would argue that progress is fast.
What most concerns the discussants, including McArdle, William Galston, Jonathan Rauch, and Brink Lindsey, are the social implications of losing the middle class. (Hanson comments on this focus.) Tyler insists that societies will not fracture, nor will redistributionist demagogues take power. Factors favoring stability include aging, surveillance technology, the skill of the rich at controlling the political environment, nativism, NIMBYism, and the basic comfort achieved by the lower class. He points out that Britain and Germany are farther along than the U.S. in the growth of the new lower class, and their societies appear to be stable–Merkel just won re-election by a wide margin.
Tyler says that in the long run mood-altering drugs may be a solution. Teles suggests that Tyler’s next book will be The Great Medication.
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It's not consistent if you consider all people equal. It's consistent if you consider some people essentially subhuman and not worthy of the same rights. Rand doesn't out and out say this (she makes aspirations about their "culture"), but its not so surprising that two low IQ dysfunctional groups make the list of people who can be displaced by better men.
Western countries dominated non-western ones because they are eugenically superior. East Asians have the genetic chops but did have a period where they needed to catch up (it's worth noting that Japan didn't get colonized and China never got fully colonized).
You couldn't get a much wider eugenic gap between Jews (worlds highest IQ) and Arabs (some of the lowest). It does not surprise me that the Jews defeated the Arabs over and over despite being heavily outnumbered, they are just better people.
>Ayn Rand’s stance on Native Americans and Palestinians really cannot be squared with her prohibition on the initiation of force and belief in the inviolability of private property rights.
You understand that that's perfectly consistent, right? Property rights are internal to cultures while wars happen between cultures. It's the same thing as thinking that murder should be illegal but still advocating for war with another country.
(It's important to note that actually, we are having this discussion from the Roman Empire— nearly the entire world has been influenced heavily by the Roman legacy. Crucially[in a very literal sense], this happened only because of the best of the Roman legacy being preserved by Holy Mother Church, the organization perhaps most blamed for slave morality, whereas the Mongol legacies have mostly faded, and the Vikings were not really an empire in the same sense).
I think "bad and cruel" is borderline uncharitable and in my opinion you're failing to properly Steel Man the Randian/Nietzchean/rightwing position. I'd like to sketch what I believe that to be. I don't know if you've never seriously considered it before or if you've considered it and dismissed it, but if it's the latter I'd appreciate hearing your reasoning because I think it's the obviously correct one.
To make this persuasive would take 5,000 words but here's the sketch. Economic development is the only way to actually help people en masse, and that is done by engaging with them in ordinary self-interested economic ways (give a man a fish vs teaching him to fish, etc). That's because charity, defined as any diseconomic activity designed to help others, almost always ends up being exploited by bad actors. This isn't simply a matter of being 'effective' either. It's a fundamental problem of poor incentive structures and is the same reason communism never works. This should make some intuitive sense because charities are essentially central planners: they presume to know how to allocate resources better than the market. History should tell you how that generally works out.
(FWIW, I believe that charity can be effective but only in high information situations of the type which only exist in close social relationships: family, friends, or culturally homogenous small groups like religious congregations. Strong social norms are required to both identify and disincentivize free riders.)
I acknowledge that the economic realities of the world put third-world workers in an unenviable position, but I would argue that the only thing (the only postive-value thing, anyway) you can do is accept that that's just the way it is. They were already in an unenviable position and anything you do to 'help' will actually just detract from the natural path of economic development which is already helping the third world ~as fast as it's possible to help them. As Shakespeare said, things without remedy should be without regard. I understand the emotional impulse to view this as callous, but consider that our emotional responses were evolved to help us navigate small tightly-knit groups. They fail utterly when applied to complex systems like global economic policy and international development. I would therefore urge you to maybe regard your instincts here with skepticism, particularly if you're a naturally emotional thinker.
Here's a simple, probably reductive, analogy that illustrates my position. Accept, for the sake of argument, that ordinary free market economic development is actually the best way to help the third world in the long run. Economic development, then, is the benign well-intentioned country doctor ready to treat all of his third world patients. Imagine him ready to operate on a painful suppurating tumor on a poor suffering child, but the child's mother is ignorant of medicine and views the surgeon as a butcher who only wants to carve up her beloved son. Instead of using her meager savings to pay for a life-saving operation, she spends it on pain medication and a visit from the local shaman. In my view EA - all charity, really - is the mother. It takes resources from the one thing that could _actually do good_ and reallocates them to palliatives which at best do nothing. Likely they make the problem worse. Sure, surgery is unpleasant and doesn't always work but it's the best chance the child has. Just like the mother, I would invite you to look past your emotional reactions and try to grapple with the possibility that the option which feels most barbaric to you is actually the best way to achieve your long term goals.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as patronizing. Anyone who wants to engage with this please do. Like I said this was just a sketch. I'm confident my position will stand up to scrutiny, so if something here seems obviously wrong then by all means point it out.
Yes, there's a generational political realignment underway and the GOP is becoming the party of the working class. My comment isn't about domestic politics. I'm using "right-wing" in the traditional libertarian free-market sense, not in the Republican vs Democrat sense.
I don't think your analogy maps onto reality that well. I agree with the opening bits, economic development is probably the best and fastest tool to genuinely help people in developing states. But EA and economic development don't need to be exclusive. Consider something simple like buying malaria nets. How are people supposed to go to work and build capital and make their society better when they have malaria? Building a skilled and educated workforce is a lot harder when people drop dead from preventable disease, or worry about their children dropping dead.
The same principle applies to something like donating rugged water filters to people without access to potable water. Of course it would be better if their country had a working water distribution and treatment network with modern plumbing. But it's even less likely they manage to build something like that when they have cholera from drinking contaminated water!
I don't see how EA or charity directed like this is anti-development. In fact it seems quite the opposite to me. Unless your position is that EA/charity is actually all like the shrimp suffering people instead of the malaria net people.
>How are people supposed to go to work and build capital and make their society better when they have malaria?
I think the better question to ask is how are people supposed to build capital when they can't even get it together enough to buy bed nets. How do you expect them to be able to solve the hard problem if they need you to solve the easy one?
Allow me a rambling analogy. No-go theorems (no faster than light travel, no communication via entanglement, no cloning, etc) are the party poopers of physics. They kill your super-cool inventive idea and usually they don't even give you the satisfaction of understanding some interesting new principle: just a dense mathematical proof that your idea violates some conservation law in an esoteric way. Boo, right? When I was learning relativity in undergrad we all had fun with the various paradoxes and figuring out exactly how time and space bent to preserve the integrity of causality. People would come up with FTL communication schemes that seemed plausible until the professor pointed out exactly what was wrong with it. Sometimes the reasons were really subtle! The takeaway is that even if it's not immediately obvious where the flaw in your FTL machine is (or your perpetual motion machine, for that matter), you can rest assured that if it breaks the speed of light (or gives you energy for free) then it's wrong. Doesn't matter how clever it is, it's 100% wrong. /ramble
The Randian/Nietzchean version of a no-go theorem for this context is: Price-driven market mechanisms are the only non-violent way to manipulate populations, and any intervention that tries to circumvent price signals at scale is guaranteed to fail. The specific reasons are in general subtle and complex and will vary from situation to situation. Simple-seeming problems in complex systems rarely have simple solutions. That’s because surface-level features (like, say, not having bed nets) are emergent phenomena. They’re equilibrium points of complicated interacting social feedback loops that involve millions of independent incentive-driven agents. That’s why solutions to social problems can't be directly engineered.
Take one of your examples: bed nets. I can think of many reasons why supplying them won't matter. For starters they might not even have positive expected value! If you assume these people are capable of rational economic behavior (which you are because the long-term goal of your intervention is to get them on a path to first-world status) then maybe not using nets is actually economically rational for them. The overhead of distribution channels, proper use, maintenance, etc might actually be higher than the value of the lives they're supposed to save. Or, you know, this could happen:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-nets-for-malaria-spawn-new-epidemic-overfishing.html
The point is that unintended consequences always dominate. Always. This is a universal rule and a direct consequence of the Randian no-go theorem of development above. That's because direct solutions only work for systems that can be analytically modeled. In complex systems like societies, solutions have to be evolved. They can't be designed (unless, of course, you use economic principles). Again, this is why communism never works. The traditional mechanism for evolving solutions for complex social problems is called culture. This is why right-wing types are so adamant about preserving culture. It's not arbitrary, it carries centuries of practical wisdom and represents the most-efficient set of tradeoffs for navigating the economic realities of the society which carries it. It is social technology.
The problem with EA is that it's the naive mother who just buys palliatives. They don't help (or, as in the bed net example above, actually hurt) and they make people feel satisfied that they're doing something when they're not. Bad solutions are worse than no solutions because they distract people from doing better things. Plus also there's the straightforward economic argument (from Robin Hanson) that it's provably suboptimal because of discount rates and compounding economic growth: saving N lives today always comes at the cost of investing that money and saving 2N lives in ~7 years. Lives saved by charity is a linear function of wealth and wealth is an exponential function of time. Trading exponential for linear benefits is always a mistake. A rising tide lifts all boats. It's far better to just let that happen than to build some retarded block-and-tackle pulley system that lifts boats by hand *especially* when doing so also interferes with the tide coming in.
> that people "don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones", that's describing cruelty. Insofar as you support that kind of reasoning, it's fair to describe you as liking cruelty.
To me it's less like cruelty and more like consistency.
There's a lot of faraway suffering in the world and I can't possibly care about all of it as much as I'd care about suffering that happens close to me. If I started caring about Congolese cobalt miners as much as they perhaps deserve then I'd have to start caring about a whole lot of other things too, and the emotional burden would be too great for me. If I'm going to stay sane, I have to filter out the vast majority of the suffering in the world.
A few years ago I went down the path of caring about everyone equally. I quickly became too stressed out to do anything and had to stop reading the news. I still care about the suffering of others outside of my immediate life, but I mentally place it back where it was before - a distant suffering, not a proximate suffering.
I think that's the only possible way to live at this point.
> We're not having this discussion from the Roman, Viking, or Mongol Empires - on the broadest scale, civilizations/religions/subcultures survived and contributed to the current hegemonic culture in proportion to how much they embodied values of compassion, universalism, civility, honesty, and reason.
You are having this discussion from a post-Roman civilization, writing in the Latin script in a country governed by a Senate whose main religion spread through the Roman Empire. This would not have existed if the small city-state of Rome had not had engaged in ruthless military conquest. And the US would not exist if it the colonists had respected the natives' right to their lands (or would not be a superpower if it had started doing that at independence). Softer values do succeed and spread sometimes in some ways, but there is no general rule.
I don't know if you meant it that way, but if you say you should care about kids dying in cobalt mines specifically because they contribute to making your iPhone, that sounds like Copenhagen ethics, unless they are actually forced to work there.
I'd also reserve "cruelty" for actively harming people, not merely failing to help them.
You could have brought examples of cruelty where there would be a broad consensus for your point and against Walt's (ones where the victim is actively harmed and/or the victim is in the same country as the perpetrator), I don't see why you brought the sort of example that can be questioned by many people from several angles, and which only a small ("autistic Californian") bubble cares about as much as you do.
Well, I don't know how if Walt would endorse any example of cruelty where the victim is actively harmed. But as far as I understand it's a form of slave morality to be concerned even about the powerful actively harming (e.g. enslaving) the powerless; if Walt would oppose that, he may not be all that opposed to slave morality.
(Child laborers may not make voluntary decisions themselves, but I assume parents generally put a high priority on their children's interests, and if they decide their least bad option is to send their children to the mines so they can at least eat something, I don't pretend to know better than them from 5000 km away.)
Scott, when you consider the affects of rationalism has affected society, the way we view the world, subjective well-being, even access to the most basic human requirements for happiness, is it not cruel? It seems to be a passive eugenics for people who thrive in the new world.
Behold! "the vast majority of people quite rightly see *your* values as bad" is simply asserting that your own values are universally applicable and that anyone who substantively disagrees is "not interested in morality".
Cuck.
Philosophy doesn't work via ad baculum. How is it you claim to know how it works?
He’s right you know. You set up right wing straw men to knock down. And effective altruism is neither effective nor altruistic.
Why don't you actually make that argument about effective altruism?
If you're interested I made this argument (as I have many many times before). See my comment elsewhere in the thread (in response to Rothwed) and by all means please engage with it.
Do you mean this comment by Rothwed? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean/comment/63874090
Yes.
Oh, good grief, it is Walt Bismarck. I though this guy was over and done.
N.B.: I actually do understand Nietzsche, and essayed a little dialogue. I hope this explains things a bit better.
But seriously, even from this short exchange it's obvious - at least obvious to me - that Bismarck objects to your principles not because he "likes being bad", but because he thinks (could be entirely wrongly, but that's what he professes to think, and I see no reason to doubt it) they lead to a greater evil in the long run, e.g. decline and destruction of the civilization. Maybe he's completely mistaken, maybe every single argument he provides to prove it is utter bullshit, maybe every factual claim he bases it on is an actual lie (I don't say they are, but even assuming this extreme case) - that still would not make “but I like being bad and cruel” an accurate description. A psychopath that just wants to be cruel has no reason to worry about civilizational advance or misallocation of resources - what is in it to him?
Hmm, I hadn't even noticed that. I didn't bother to look past the arrogance and rudeness.
It's easy to dismiss an arrogant and rude opponent without even bothering to consider what his argument actually is. Maybe it's even what they deserve, sometimes. But for people that pride themselves on being rational and seeking the truth (or at least the correct argument and not just the one that feels good) and not on winning internet points by "owning the outgroup" it's not exactly the on-brand behavior, I think. I hope for something better.
But in that case he could make the case from a consequentialist framework and slave morality terminal values, making the case about why this or that cruel-sounding decision increases happiness on the long term, instead of dissing those autistic, utilitarian Californians. Those autistic Californians, at least Scott personally, are quite open to considering counterintuitive suggestions as long as they are made in that framework.
FWIW, I was greatly disappointed by the last post, about "hey Righties, remember to never ever fight back :)" — but this post made my heart swell with love & appreciation for the (return of the) Scott Alexander I have remembered all this time, the one with whom I end up agreeing very nearly 100% of the time.
"You either see it or you don't." That was the point I suddenly realized: oh my God, he *does* still see it!
Great post. Thanks for this.
ok i finetuned a model as Scott (2014) - he'd have replied this:
>Scott Alexander responds:
> I’m confused. You’re saying that you like being bad and cruel, but also that that’s not bad and cruel because other people are bad and cruel, which sounds like an interesting combination of Nietzscheanism with slave morality.
how realistic do you think that is?
this one is insanely realistic lol:
> Sorry Scott, but not everyone is an autistic Jew in California, and the vast majority of people quite rightly see *your* values as bad.
Who are these mysterious people who “quite rightly” see my values as bad?
Is it the vast majority of the world’s Christians, who agree with my belief in altruism, charity, and humility, and disagree with your belief in “productive conflict”?
Is it the majority of the world’s Muslims, who agree with my belief in “happiness” as a terminal value, and disagree with your belief in “vital energy”?
Is it the majority of the world’s Chinese people, who agree with my belief in intelligence and productivity, and disagree with your belief in peasant blah blah blah?
Who are these people who have the right to claim the vast majority of the world on their side opposing my “repulsive peasant ideology”?
You’re right that I’m an autistic Jew in California, but you seem to have confused “I don’t like this person” with “this person is part of some kind of tiny, doomed-to-failure fringe”. Autistic Jews have built world-spanning empires before, have had their beliefs sweep entire continents, and generally have a better claim to being the default cultural and political paradigm than any of the ten people who read your blog.
Can we steelman you so as "I want people stronger, not happier?"
But the question in that case is whom? If you want the outgroup to be stronger, that is dangerous to your ingroup. If you want the ingroup to be stronger, you have to be harsh, almost cruel on the ingroup while spoon-feeding the outgroup into a Wall-E.
This is where you are inconsistent, you decided harsh is good, mostly aesthetically, but cannot really decide 1) on whom and 2) why. Random harshness on the outgroup just makes them stronger and more dangerous to your ingroup, while if you want the ingroup to crush everybody under the caligae, you have to be three times harsher on them than on anyone else, which is a strange way of showing love, and in fact you should be demanding welfare sandwiches for the outgroup (as it makes them weaker) while denying them to the ingroup.
I want the ingroup to be stronger, which is why I mostly support elite immigration.
I think it makes White people a lot more capable / vital / "Faustian" if they need to actively compete with Brahmins and Jews for power and resources. That is the main sense in which I'm harsher on my ingroup.
But I have also argued for e.g. buying off black people with a reparations scheme to politically disempower them and simultaneously engender significantly greater ingroup sentiment in White people:
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/the-pro-white-case-for-reparations
There have been less world fairs, skyscrapers, and rocket ships correlating with more elite immigration.
The skyscraper thing is because the NIMBYs won't allow them to be built.
Be that as it may, elite immigration isn’t doing anything to fix the NIMBY ‘problem’.
the short meme answer is because Robert Moses singlehandedly bulldozed minority neighborhoods and put highways there, and now that's why we cities elect idiots as supervisors. also NEPA/CEQA.
but. skyscrapers are getting built. see billionaire's row in NYC. and see how B1M the youtube channel/community is absolutely deifying them. (even though they are pretty small, and weak, and disappointingly they are not the foundations of a future arcology. :( )
the problem is that elite migration is targeting those weak elites who desire suburbia. sure, they fit right in, and they are more GDP-productive than the local poor, but they are culturally meh. otherwise they wouldn't put up with all the shit you need to put up with living in the US.
One question is why you feel the need to define "White people"* as your in-group. That is hardly something given by nature. People have a variety of identities, and which one they most strongly perceive to be their in-group is highly malleable and contingent.
*Or, apparently, just Christian white people.
You might not see yourself as competing with Brahmins, but the Brahmins absolutely see themselves as competing with you.
yup
Brahmins in India mostly marry within caste (which is how caste persisted there). But not Indian immigrants to the US. Indians raised in the US tend not to even know what their caste is.
Maybe I do. I think it is standard European or worldwide nationalism projected to America. When you are half Scottish, quarter Swedish, nearly quarter Irish and sure as well 1/32 Anishibe, how can you make sense of your ethnic identity? It is hard to make sense of your roots, and without roots your culture is basically just consumption.
These white-identity people do not simply mean it as pale-skinned, they mean it as a mixture of Northwestern European Protestant cultures.
Given how common it is, I understand it. But it is highly contingent, in many respects. I seem to recall reading that at one point the Boston branch of some national white people's organization banned Irish members, but the president of the SF chapter was Irish. And while someone from northern Laos might define themselves as in a different in-group than someone from southern Laos, you can bet that if they both immigrate to Peoria they will likely identify as "Laotian" or even "Asian" (but probably not as Asian if they immigrate to San Francisco or Orange County, or anyplace else with a large non-Laotian Asian population).
Which organization was this? The Irish have always been legally white. There have been other white people who didn't like the Irish, but then their focus wasn't on whiteness but some other category the Irish fell afoul of.
lol I'm an atheist
anyway race is merely one of many salient facets of identity
My point is that it is salient to some, but not to others. The question is, why is it salient to some, but not others?
The best practical reason for defining white people as your ingroup is the number of other people who define white people as their outgroup.
That's been very weird to me. If the left/social justice wanted to eliminate white privilege, the best way to do that would be to undermine the concept of White. Blend in non-white people and draw lines along different axis such that skin color is not the defining aspect.
Instead, they seem driven to make White a distinct group with its own identity, which is incentivized to vote for White politicians (who support White goals) and become more and more racist.
This could be on purpose to create an outgroup for the minority coalition the left wants to build. I think that's both a dumb own-goal and directly contradicts their publicly stated purposes, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect.
>If the left/social justice wanted to eliminate white privilege
That is very definitely NOT what the left wants to do. White privilege is their bread and butter - or at least the perception of it is. The left wants to maximize the *resentment* of white privilege because they profit politically by marketing themselves as the ones who can fight it.
""I want the ingroup to be stronger, which is why I mostly support elite immigration.""
Shouldn't you want the strongest group to be strongest? Why overly support the 'in group' which could be weaker? It is entirely possible that current 'in-groups' are no longer 'stronger' and are simply 'coasting' on their inherited wealth. But if the board was re-set, they would flounder.
This is obviously wrong. There is something special about white people that makes us take risks and live in a very open, exploratory, and novelty-seeking way that isn't usually seen in other races.
But even if this weren't the case I don't need there to be a reason. I love my family more than other families because they are mine; likewise with my race.
Surely this is a joke? "Special about white people". Is this troll bait? What is 'white'? Are Italians White?
I think there are sufficient number of articles about the confluence of factors geography, water access, coal, demand, etc... needed to start the industrial revolution, or how different countries grew/fell over thousands of years, to dismiss this assertion.
Or, plenty of articles on how 'white' people have less melanin, because they live in colder northern areas, which also have less diseases than in tropics. It could all be weather, nothing to do with skin.
Objectively wrong. Educate yourself on HBD.
Just FYI, I'm not a Walt Bismarck fan or anything — no idea who he even is, I must shame-facedly admit — but this actually IS objectively wrong.
I don't mean that in a hostile way — I'm glad to discuss it, if you've an interest — just, as I said, FYI, in case you view yourself as adhering to the rationalist motto of "if I'm wrong, I wish to believe I am wrong" & would like to know that more research might be needed.
(I offer this mainly because I think I can tell that you don't debate this particular issue very often: these are what you might call "first level" arguments, if you know what I mean; like, as if someone came in and told Scott/ACX readers "effective altruism? ah, but did you know that SBF was into that stuff?!" — i.e., THAT specific point was settled to our satisfaction many, many moons ago... isn't exactly a thunderbolt to the whole worldview, so to speak.)
>Shouldn't you want the strongest group to be strongest?
There exists some subset of the population that, if superadvanced aliens arrive, would immediately sacrifice themselves to the aliens upon request. Many rationalists are in this group, actively trying (or claiming to be actively trying) to develop a "machine god."
The vast majority of humanity, on the other hand, wants themselves and "their people" (however defined) to be safe and comfortable regardless of who is strongest on the other side of the Rawlsian veil. Not many people are utilitarian to the point of self-destruction.
Why not just, like, consider all of humanity as your ingroup? It's really not hard, and then everyone would like you and you'd be on everyone's side and you could channel all this energy into something good instead of stirring up shit...
Human groups give preference to their own and kill other groups.
Says who? Personally my morality extends to all humans. Almost everyone I know feels the same way. What's weird is the people who still think they way you describe. Like... it's 2024. Including all humans in your morality is well overdue.
Wars and low scale violence still occur all the time. I see no reason to extend any morality to people who would hurt me.
>Risky Kvetch
Lots of people seem to really, really dislike those who have decided to consider all of humanity as their ingroup. The former are sometimes called "somewheres" or "localists", the latter "nowheres" or "globalists".
I think they're denying the possibility of all people simultaneously being part of their in group. They might point to Russia and Ukraine and ask which one is part of your ingroup? You can say something about caring for people on all sides, but when push comes to shove, you can't actually support both sides of a conflict.
Or, for a more obvious and extreme version, you can't support both Hamas and Israel, or Al-Qaeda and the West.
Lots of people dislike it? So what? It's still morally right.
I was specifically responding to your claim "then everyone would like you". No, they would not.
Why not just, like, consider all animals as dogs? it's really not hard, and then tigers would let you pet them without attacking you and elephants could live in your house without wrecking it and
Why would I consider all animals as dogs? That's a different thing which is basically unrelated, stupid, and not morally right to do. This is a very low-effort reply.
It seems to make a good point to me. Why not consider all humans, etc? For the same reason you don't want to conflate other different things with each other. 🤷♂️
Pretty offensive that you didn't even think to include the Han in your list of racial boogeymen.
Yoruba immigrants outperform whites on average in the US. Should we deport the low-performing whites?
"Dysgenic?"
You callin' me dysgenic? Them's fighting words.
I don't think Scott actually argued against ingroup preferences. I'm sure he spends more on his own children than other people's children.
"autistic Jew"
Hi Walt, you know how every iteration of white nationalism always circles back to George Lincoln Rockwell trolling on a street corner? That's not literally true, Jared Taylor never did, but it's worth being concerned about your movement going the same way:
https://occidentaldissent.com/2022/12/02/white-nationalism-and-george-lincoln-rockwell/
you shouldn't obsess over the JQ in either direction
it needs to be an acceptable topic of discussion when relevant, and in this case the extremely jewish nature of EA is an entirely legitimate object of analysis given that Jews are famously cosmpolitan while EA tends to simply assume ingroup preference is illegitimate
I'm not a white nationalist but it does seem like a lot of the moral realism stuff boils down to a lack of theory of mind. It's guys who have fully internalised a particular progressive moral framework, taking for granted that everyone shares their intuitions.
I don't see how Effective Altruism is in conflict with the idea of ingroup preferences being legitimate, unless you have a very weird definition of "preference." Like, I prefer Star Trek to Star Wars, but that doesn't mean I only watch Star Trek and have never seen a Star Wars movie. I prefer pizza to burgers, but I often feel like burgers instead of pizza. Similarly, it seems absurd to say that someone lacks ingroup preferences if they spend any amount of time working towards universalist, impartial good, even if they also spend a lot of time and money on ingroups.
I donate a portion of my money to EA causes and spend a larger portion on myself, my family, people I know, etc. I suspect most EAs are similar. Some may just admit they are hypocrites, but I am sure many of them also have a principled belief in how much they are obligated to give. The fact that they give any money to EA at all does not mean they have no ingroup preferences, it just means that they don't have ONLY ingroup preferences.
I often hear critics of universalist moral theories say that a moral theory that allows for no partiality or obligation towards family or other ingroups is absurd. I don't disagree, but I also believe the opposite is true. A moral theory that posits no moral obligation towards a universalist, impartial good is just as absurd. A truly comprehensive moral theory should have both, people should have obligations to those who are close to them AND to universal, impartial goodness. The way EA currently handles this, with people donating a percentage of their income and spending the rest on whatever they feel like, is a model of how to implement such beliefs.
It's fun to watch two of your favorite authors duke it out. (Yes, I read the rest of the thread and yes, I have subscriptions to both of you under another account.)
So as a semi-autistic hemi-Jew originally from a big blue city on the East Coast and therefore intermediate between both of you (the other half's Spaniard if you go back far enough), I think Walt is quite right about tribalism. I admire Scott's attempt to think about everyone and produce a mental framework for that...and I believed in that kind of thing as a teenager, back in the 90s. Life, of course, got in the way.
Truth is most people care about themselves, most people like to be around people like themselves (heck, even rationalists have meetups), and nice things for me usually exist because someone else suffered somewhere in the world. And, a severe lack of suspicion of others' motives is a big reason why FTX happened. "Earn to Give!" Yeah, right, Sam, you want to get rich like everyone else. I'm a little surprised you were dumb enough to blow it all, but I guess some people don't know when to quit being greedy.
The dirty secret is that dark tetrad traits are useful in small doses, especially if few other people have them. (Or even large doses if you're smart and/or lucky enough...look at Donald Trump's narcissism.) Confidence is good, Machiavellianism is common sense, small doses of psychopathy are necessary in a competitive world, and sadism...well, you'd be surprised how many people are masochists in bed. (I'm straight, but given how many women make money as dominatrixes this is clearly not limited to women!)
And if he wants to get white guys to job-stack, more power to him. (Though maybe stop talking about it on Substack? If I can find it, so can Elle Reeve or Will Stancil.) They're going to discriminate against them, they should fight back. That's what it means to be a (censored) white male... Everyone else is forming identity teams, you have to also, or you'll just lose. Heck, if it weren't for my tainted blood, I'd join his movement.
Admittedly, I have a hard time hating anyone who turns 'Under the Sea' into 'On the Alt-Right'. I used to write music parodies as a kid, but Walt did a much better job.
I think the reason Scott comes off way better than Walt in this exchange is that Scott is a nerd with a Substack who knows he's a nerd with a Substack, whereas Walt is a nerd with a Substack who thinks he's the Ubermensch. Sorry to have to tell you this but anybody who really came from a master race would be busy actually taking over the world, not spending all day pretending to be a tough guy on the Internet. Respectfully.
not sure if I’d call it taking over the world, but I am absolutely taking concrete steps to build a fast track to wealth and institutional power for the men who follow me
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/bismarcks-buccaneers
>Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I have only read this guy a couple times, and disagree with him generally on a lot of things including analytic vs continental philosophy. But I do think he sort has the stronger argument here versus Bentham's Bulldog regarding the weaknesses and dangers of utilitarianism and its big pitfalls as some single overarching morality.
But I have been big for 20+ years on saying that the commitment to devaluing proximity is just beyond absurd and badly misunderstands what morality is even about or how to construct one people would care about or follow.
Hiya Walt. I'm not an autistic California Jew, but a WASP snot admirer of them. I don't know how California autistic Jewish thinking approaches the problem of people whose style of argument is to state but not defend their own beliefs about an issue, and then spray a layer of insults and jeers on top, sort of like, you know, Reddi Wip. My own WASP take is that it's a strong predictor of a case of undergraduate arrogance, even when it manifests in people far too old to be undergrads. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Judaism identified the phenomenon a couple of millennia ago.
Heh. You dont know the half of it, sweetbottom.
I would say it's probably more accurate to call them metaphysical. I am a metafaggot: My cock is also a faggot. And I myself am nested in the middle of the great chain of buggery: I am the penis of God. John, by any chance do you have one of those cute bubble butts?
eh I am fine with Jews and get along well with them, but virtue signaling WASPS should absolutely be deported to Madagascar
I'm not virtue signalling, hon, I'm attacking you.
Hey. Playing with latest GPT. Since AI might be in a future 'out-group' and be subject to Slave-Master discussions. Perhaps also taking jobs like the Brahmans that Bismarck blames. Here is GPT response.
Comments on Astral Codex Ten: Nietzschean Superman
The comments on the Astral Codex Ten article "Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman" by the user 'walt bismarck' do not appear to show a deep understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy. The comments reflect a general engagement with the topic but lack specific insights or detailed analysis of Nietzsche's concepts.
General Engagement:
The user 'walt bismarck' participates in the discussion about the Nietzschean Superman but does not provide a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche's ideas. The comments are more focused on the broader implications of the philosophy rather than on specific details
Lack of Specific Insights:
The comments do not delve into the nuances of Nietzsche's philosophy, such as the master-slave morality or the concept of the Übermensch. Instead, they reflect a more superficial understanding of the themes being discussed
Contextual Understanding:
While the user shows an awareness of the general context of Nietzsche's thought, there is no evidence of a deep or critical engagement with the primary texts or a thorough understanding of the philosophical arguments
In summary, the comments by 'walt bismarck' on the Astral Codex Ten article do not demonstrate a significant understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy. The engagement is more general and lacks the depth of analysis that would indicate a strong grasp of Nietzsche's ideas.
----BUT---
Maybe need to give Walt Bismarck some slack. When summarizing all of his comments. GPT seems to think he is more traditional after all .
Specific Comments:
In one comment, 'Walt Bismarck' mentions that they do not see themselves as part of any in-group, including white people. They express a desire to be judged based on their individual actions and character rather than their racial or ethnic background
Contextual Understanding:
The comments reflect a broader libertarian or individualist ideology, emphasizing personal freedom and responsibility over group identity. This perspective is consistent with a critical stance on traditional morality and societal norms
lol. lmao. lol. yeah sure supporting the incompetent members of ur ingroup against competitors who'd eat their lunch on a fair playing field is the thing that promotes good genes...
> Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I didn't find the linked post especially convincing and have a lot of disagreements with both the content and the belligerence of the writer, but I don't think "I like being bad and cruel" is at all a fair description of it.
It was very clearly a sneering and uncharitable characterization aimed at denying rightist interlocutors any space to challenge moral universalism. This impulse (and by extension the thesis of BB's original piece) is grotesquely anti-philosophical and obviously contradicts rationalists' purported desire for an honest discourse free of underhanded status games.
Although otoh going by this note referring to "fatty yglesias", I can see why you would not want to give Walt the benefit of the doubt. Content aside he does seem to just enjoy being mean.
https://substack.com/@waltbismarck/note/c-63747861?r=f8id0
good grief, where did you guys grow up that you're so sensitive about playful invective?
this is simply how men (or at least a large proportion of men) prefer to talk to each other in explicitly masculine spaces
listen to any of my podcasts and you'll see I'm not a remotely mean person
What does it mean to be “mean” if “invective” doesn’t count?
This is how children and manchildren talk. Men reserve their playful invectives to friends and family.
There probably are some groups like that but they're very unusual (it's not a general male thing), and even if it's just normal ingroup ribbing for you it's still not something you'd do with a stranger (I'm assuming you're not actually casually familiar with yglesias). Weird ribbing dynamics that come off hostile are common - e.g. my brother calls my aunt fat at random times and it's clearly friendly - but not with strangers!
Please note that what you just did is considered a poor form from both the master and slave moralities' perspectives.
You either shouldn't offend people -- or you should be a man enough to own it!
But what you do instead is strong words, followed by "I was just joking" when you receive a little pushback. Some people consider such behavior edgy. Other people just consider it pathetic.
And this is basically a small example of a more general problem: You don't actually prefer master morality. What you prefer (judging by your behavior) is talking about "master morality", but expecting people around you to be civilized. In a world actually acting on master morality, you wouldn't bother trying to discuss here, and Scott would simply ban you if you tried. Your actions seem to contradict your words.
The closest thing to master morality the internet has are scammers and people who call SWAT teams on those who disagree with them online. That is what someone like Achilles -- magically transported to our era, learning computer skills, but keeping his moral system untouched -- would do; that is, if he spent his time online at all, because it is more fun to do things in real life.
Nah dude, "playful invective" towards strangers used to get you pistols at dawn.
To me, you pattern match to an inside kid who didn't really fit in and now you're overcompensating with how you think men interact with each other.
I disagree with practically everything Walt Bismarck says, and I object to how he says it, but "I like being bad and cruel" is an unfair characterization. Specifically, it's an accusation of sadism. He's promoting callousness and selfishness, but not sadism. He may be sadistic as a rhetorical technique or a personal failing, but his moral system (which he outlines in detail, with bullet points, in the linked post) specifically recommends ignoring other people's suffering; not taking pleasure in it.
I didn't bother reading Walt's linked posts, but you effectively tackled what I was trying to say about cruelty vs indifference.
I disagree semantically. If someone hates expending effort, it's accurate to say they 'like being lazy', even if laziness is not itself a factor in their utility function at all and is just the natural consequence of their actual preferences.
If someone likes to do things that create bad outcomes and inflict cruelty on others, then even if they are doing those things for non-sadistic reasons, it's still accurate to say that they like being bad and cruel. Maybe not for the badness and cruelty itself, but they like what that lifestyle gives them.
It feels wrong to say that slavemasters in the south were not cruel if their motives were purely profit-focused.
Doing things is different from liking to do them. People often do things they don't like to do.
Liking the outcome of a thing is different from liking the means by which it's achieved. People often use means they dislike to achieve outcomes they like.
This is splitting hairs anyway. Arguing with Walt over how to interpret his own position is not a winning strategy. Best to engage on the merits.
This quote from Walt's comments here:
> I contend that frequent and negative sum high stakes conflict is necessary to maintain social vitality, reset hedonic treadmills, and legitimize status hierarchies.
actually looks to me like it is straightforwardly endorsing being bad and cruel -- or, in his words, "having negative sum high stakes conflicts in order to legitimize a status hierarchy that has me at the top".
The linked post has a weaker version of the same statement -- "As a rightist I support relentless conflict and competition with others as a vitalizing force to regularly kick you in the ass."
What a tour-de-force this essay is. Wow. 👏
OK. If you're a Nietzsche expert, I'm DEFINITELY a Nietzsche expert: maybe not a world-leading expert, but perhaps a local celebrity Nietzsche expert. Not only have I read most of his books (without fully understanding them, but I think getting some way), but I've actually lectured to classes of hundreds in Great Books courses that have Nietzsche as part of the reading ... So that said ...
I find it very misleading to have an entire post on Nietzsche's idea of morality that doesn't mention the Will to Power. The point, for Nietzsche (at least on my local celebrity expert reading), is that ALL morality is an illusion. Master morality is an illusion, slave morality is an illusion. The only thing that is real is the will to power. Strong people actualize the will to power through master morality, weak people actualize it through slave morality. On that basis, there is no moral reason to prefer one to the other at all - there CAN be no moral reason to prefer one to the other, because (as I said) all morality, slave or master alike, is an illusion, a mask thrown up by the will to power which we all possess. So there's no point in preferring one form of morality over another, from a Nietzschean perspective, or worrying about whether Andrew Tate is a cruel predator for raping people and so on. Andrew Tate is seeking to maximize his will to power; and so are the people attacking him and trying to jail him.
Now, Nietzsche obviously - and perhaps inconsistently - has a generic preference for master morality, perhaps because it seems to him more honest. Slave morality is based on "ressentiment" - people projecting their own weaknesses outward onto others, whereas master morality is based on people celebrating their own strength. But that seems more an aesthetic preference than a moral one.
But, separately from that, Nietzsche also has an idea of human self-actualization - that it is desirable for humans to fulfil their maximum potential as humans (that's the superman thing). Again, it isn't clear how he can consistently reconcile it with the idea that all forms of value are effectively an illusion, but there is a consistent sense through his work that master morality, even if it isn't exactly fulfilling the natural human potential, comes closer to it, in as much as it doesn't depend on sublimated self-hatred in the way that slave morality does.
But the bottom line is that I don't really feel that any attempt to reconcile Nietzsche with any normative moral system is going to work, since the essence of Nietzsche's case is to deny the validity of any moral system.
Thus spake the local celebrity Nietzsche expert ...
Wasn't the Will To Power basically written ("edited") by Nietszche's sister and her German nationalist husband? To the extent that attributing its contents to Nietzsche himself is in doubt?
Aside from that, I agree that rejection of all morality, and in particular of both MM and SM, seems like the essence of Nietszche's thought.
Yes, but I didn't mean the book "The Will to Power", I meant the concept, which comes up in Nietzsche's other works also - for example, he talks about it extensively in the third essay of Genealogy of Morality.
Argh, sorry, that was a stupid confusion. I think I just unconsciously assumed that the concept was, like the ubermensch, only present in one particular book.
The superman isn't just in one book either.
But it is trivial to derive morality from pure self-interest! I do not want to be seen as the dangerous individual who gets exiled from the group. I want to be seen as a valuable member of the group, with a lot of allies, trade partners and people owing favours, and possible elected chieftain. Grantly it might just mean I want to LOOK good, but every time one does something bad one risks that reputation and thus one does this really rarely.
Saving that proverbial drowning child goes a long way on the chieftain election.
Thus our really really big problem is those people who are really good at looking good while secretly doing bad. But those people are very different from the Walt types.
"But it is trivial to derive morality from pure self-interest! I do not want to be seen as the dangerous individual who gets exiled from the group. I want to be seen as a valuable member of the group, with a lot of allies, trade partners and people owing favours, and possible elected chieftain. Grantly it might just mean I want to LOOK good, but every time one does something bad one risks that reputation and thus one does this really rarely."
Of course! And Nietzsche would never deny that - on the contrary, he argues that this is one of the ways that value systems become dominant. But what he would say is that the people who have internalized that sort of behavior are deluding themselves: they believe that they are attaching themselves to some kind of absolute value system, whereas all they are doing is actualizing their will to power in the most effective possible way.
Ah. That makes sense. Have you heard of István Bibó? Anyway, he figured this will to power is just will to safety. We are the only animals who know we will die. This makes us kinda anxious. So we want to kill, exile or repress anything that might kill us. Bibó's idea was that if we could get rid of this fear, we would also get rid of this will to power.
> Bibó's idea was that if we could get rid of this fear, we would also get rid of this will to power.
That sounds exactly right. And that's also what the guy who wholly effaces himself before God or the universal flow or shunyāta, achieves.
Then again, at least for a moment so does anyone in the flow of physical exercise or creativity or so many other things.
I don't know how accurate this is as a description of Nietzsche's beliefs (I'll assume it is), but it doesn't quite sound right to me.
If a genie gave me a remote with two buttons and told me "the left button will send Andrew Tate to jail forever, the right button will make him go free, and nobody will ever know what choice you made", I'd still press the left button (after some double-checking). In that scenario I'm clearly not trying to actualize my will to power (I have nothing to gain either way) and I don't think I'm deluding myself either (I *know* I have nothing to gain and I don't care).
For what it's worth, Scott's post doesn't sound right to me either; I don't think it reflects the reasons people actually make decisions or moral judgments for.
Just to be clear, I'm not Nietzsche - I'm describing his views, not endorsing them!!! I totally agree with your objection.
That said, Nietzsche has a straightforward answer to you (or to me): he thinks that in particular circumstances (such as the one you describe) people can have internalized the system of morality to the point that they follow it even in circumstances where their will to power would be better actualized in other ways.
That is why (on Nietzsche's view) even strong people who would benefit more (and would actualize their will to power more effectively) from following master morality nevertheless in our world, where slave morality is dominant, often have absorbed and follow that value system, to their own detriment. That is the sense in which he thinks you are deluded - not because you don't know you have nothing to gain, but because you believe that you should press that button even though you have nothing to gain.
> In that scenario I'm clearly not trying to actualize my will to power
...but you are. Pressing either button means you are.
Only in ways that having any agency whatsoever is having power. Under that definition doing *anything* except staying in bed is power-seeking, that's not an interesting or insightful observation.
"I press a button and someone else's life is forever altered" is not on the same scale as getting out of bed. It's a power fantasy.
Nietzsche was not attempting to build a moral system, he says this explicitly many times, and it is a common trap to read him as trying to do that. Therefore, he would have no answer for you because he was not trying to answer that question.
Where did he say this, specifically?
Thanks, that was clarifying. I haven't read much Nietsche either but felt that something was missing from Scott's characterization of his system.
So basically you're saying that Nietzsche chose the 2nd option in the Edward Teach section. I think Scott is trying to tackle how morality can be utilized in the real world, and so can't really do much with the meta claim that everything is invalid anyway.
The whole point is that even if Nietzsche ultimately says "Silly, it's Moloch all the way down!" our collective response should be "Yes we know, we're trying to construct anything that can keep Moloch at bay anyway!"
And so, given that Nietzsche defined 2 sorta-opposing concepts that can be talked about, even if he then did the hipster thing of saying that ultimately it's all void, you can still talk about those concepts.
Nietzsche wasn't trying to create a moral system. He says this many times in his writing. Additionally, at the time he was writing, "the meta claim that everything is invalid anyway" was a novel concept with a lot of surface area still to be explored. Nietzsche's exploration of this topic is largely way it seems so dull today: he explored a lot of it already!
He was looking at a world that was rapidly changing, socially, technologically, politically, etc. and was trying to figure out what it all meant for philosophy. His famous quote "God is dead" is not a claim he was making, it was more a conclusion of looking at the world of the time. And it was not an endorsement of Atheism. In many passages Nietzsche seems almost sad that he has to conclude that God is dead - he feels forced to conclude it based on the modern world.
Anyway, he definitely didn't chose the #2 option. Nietzsche rejects nihilism in very strong terms (it's ironic that he has become so closely associated with it). He looked at a world where "god is dead" and instead of choosing the nihilistic option and pushes the thread forward and asks where that leaves humans and philosophy.
He also does reject all morality. This is something missing from Scotts piece. At first Nietzsche throws out all existing morality but does not throw out the idea of virtue (just most of the predominant virtues - those of the slave morality mostly). Scott would get an answer to his Andrew Tate question if he knew this. Politeness is one of the virtues Nietzsche keeps! (There is also no passage I can remember where Nietzsche endorses rape, but his views on women were quite negative even for the time. This could have been skewed by his failed love life and problems with this sister.)
Hmm, what I tried to say, unsuccessfully, is that here we have two people speaking orthogonally past one another.
I don't think Scott tried to do the academic thing and suggest that there is a true reading of Nietzsche which can be presented and that here he is expounding upon it and showing how erudite he is in his knowledge of the tradition of explicating Nietzsche. If that was what he was doing, then indeed some noted scholar can show up and say "well acsshhhually" and give his one true Straussian reading of Nietzsche, QED.
Rather, I think Scott was, very practically, using the fact that there is a known source for the two phrases "slave morality" and "master morality" that are used by some group on the internet for their own ends, and decided to use that source as a launch-off point for his own thinking.
I'd make two comments here. My first point starts here, with this throwaway remark of yours, "But that seems more an aesthetic preference than a moral one."
For Nietzsche, these are not two different things -- he *does* have a moral preference for master morality, precisely because he has an aesthetic preference for it. An aesthetic preference IS a moral preference -- though I think what is really happening is the the inversion, that morality is suboordinate to aesthetics, not the other way around. I think it's instructive to think of Nietzsche's notions of morality as a type of aesthetic claim about beauty. We all are, in some sense, aware that there is no universalist conception of beauty that is objective in the same way that the laws of physics are. Nevertheless, most of us have no qualms in asserting that one work of art is superior to another along some dimension or another.
You see this theme emerge very early in Nietzsche's work -- it's essentially the thesis of the Birth of Tragedy. Here again we get a similar move as the thing that troubles you about his preference for master over slave morality: Nietzsche very clearly endorses the Dionysian aesthetic consciousness over the Apollonian, but there's no real objective grounding for why one is better than the other. He's basically just hoping to persuade you to adopt his preference by helping you see things as he does. You can't rationally test it. You can only bring your own conscious reason to bear on the problem and you are either affected by his arguments or not.
My second point is about the question of whether or not morality 'matters' to Nietzsche. I think you are reading the frame of a moral realist back into Nietzsche's work where it doesn't belong when you connect the idea that value systems are 'illusions' to the secondary idea that they therefore don't 'matter' or aren't 'real'. That secondary idea is I think pretty unsupported in his work -- he is obsessed in Zarathustra and in other places with demonstrating the weaknesses and perversions of various value systems. You are making him out to be essentially a nihilist, which is perhaps the type of person he most detests (and I think it's no accident that this hate is accompanied by deep similarities between his thought and that of committed moral nihilists). Recall the transformations of the spirit -- the final stage here, and the one most closely associated with the overman, is the self-generation of a coherent value system that is grounded in aesthetic consciousness rather than in social coercion.
In short, I think it is simultaneously true that morality can't possibly be objectively real and is illusory, but also that it is of critical and central importance to Nietzsche's thought. You cannot 'self-actualize' without first having a conception of value. Power does not passively exist, it is an active force that must be used to *do things*, and only value systems can provide a higher framework than base, animalistic urges. The real distinction here is that these value systems be grounded in the question of what is beautiful rather than what is 'good' (since for Nietzsche the latter question is vacuous and obscuring).
“Power does not passively exist, it is an active force that must be used to *do things*, and only value systems can provide a higher framework than base, animalistic urges. The real distinction here is that these value systems be grounded in the question of what is beautiful rather than what is 'good'.” Agreed. Nietzsche was obsessed with artistic culture (especially music), not sports - whatever the Prussian version of kickboxing was - or business - whatever the Prussian equivalent of real estate deal-making was. The issue is not just "what Nietzsche Really Thought" but that defining and applying "master morality" without reference to artistic culture makes the concept uninteresting and subject to easy dismissal. I do not know who a modern Wagner might be – and of course Nietzsche famously broke with Wagner and wrote all about it – but merely having power (being an “alpha male”) without using that power to create culture in accordance with "revalued values" is not the Nitzschean ideal.
A more modern Wagner might have been Pablo Picasso, who had a (justifiably) high opinion of himself and was infamous for being terrible in his personal life. I've also heard that people have told horror stories about working for film director James Cameron, although I've never looked up the details.
What Nietzsche Really Thought is a semi-interesting detour from the main thrust of the piece.
"So there's no point in preferring one form of morality over another, from a Nietzschean perspective ... Andrew Tate is seeking to maximize his will to power; and so are the people attacking him and trying to jail him."
My reading is that Nietzsche oscillates between "slave morality is awful and gross" and "slave morality is one form of WTP being exercised." But reading the books (not an expert) I disagree that Nietzsche doesn't preferring one to the other--he absolutely does prefer master morality to slave morality, despite common commentary on how it's WTP all the way down. I think he would criticize Andrew Tate on other grounds (obsession with sex, pandering to losers on social media, dispensing shitty advice for money) that are distinct from the rape allegations.
I think I said that in my original post, didn't I? Even though both forms of morality are illusory (which is why I said that he wouldn't rate Andrew Tate higher than his accusers on ethical grounds), Nietzsche clearly and very obviously prefers master morality, on the basis that it is closer to actualizing human potential, and because (as you rightly put it!) he thinks "slave morality is awful and gross".
But you say he’d have nothing to say about the merits of Andrew Tate (stylized as rich, great fighter, rapist) vs his detractors (stylized as people who want him in prison because rape is harmful and evil). I think this is wrong and Andrew Tate is much closer to a Nietzschean ideal than the stylized liberal detractor.
Would have been my basic point as well. Also might have mentioned that Nietzsche was schizophrenic.
Your comment made me look it up, and I found that Nietzsche's psychotic break was near the end of his life, shortly before it happened he seemed sane, and it was probably caused by the strokes he suffered. So, I doubt Nietzsche's philosophy has anything to do with schizophrenia.
The problem I have with Nietzsche is that he was smart enough and lived late enough that he should have figured out that technological and organizational changes were making war ever more horrible. But he didn't.
Five years after Nietzsche cracked up, the elderly Engels wrote an essay in 1895 advising his fellow revolutionaries that their Fight-on-the-Barricades theory of how they were going to win was outmoded. Modern armies would absolutely slaughter workers in a fight.
The year after that, the Olympics got started, reviving a key institution of Greek master morality ... but one that didn't get people killed.
He definitely did see that. For one he was in the Franco Prussian war, so he knew how deadly it had become. For another, he writes somewhere that glorifying war is stupid because while war may have been heroic once, now it just kills an inordinate amount of young people who might have otherwise become poets and scientists - or something to that effect.
Orthogonal to most of the discussion, can you explain why Nietzsche found "Untergang" (doom?) so attractive?? I find that perplexing. _Regardless_ of whether one is valuing slave morality, master morality, or esthetics, I would expect that e.g. 2 year of serving the herd, exhibiting excellence, or creating great art would be better than 1 year of the same.
I've always found it interesting how Christianity is tied into "slave-morality" when Christianity has always held that envy was a black sin, bad enough to get on the same list as "pride". Christianity has tried to ride the golden mean between pride and envy.
It brings to mind Chesterton's criticism of Nietzsche, combined with his criticism of "slave morality" types (here represented by Tolstoy):
"The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is--well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
...
"Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We KNOW that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost. And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.
...
"As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist. In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough. The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.."
It always brings me joy to see Chesterton quoted
Thanks. I *think* what he's saying, and what is my own view, is that nihilism (can we please stop calling Nietzsche a master moralist; he's a nihilist!) is self-defeating. Metaphysically, if all truths are relative then the fact that all truths are relative is relative, and thus just as false as it is true. Aesthetically, if nothing has meaning then the observance that nothing has meaning is, far from an insight, an observation or claim of no meaining at all, and can be immediately forgotten and ignored.
Nietzsche was not a nihilist in the sense you're describing. He held the view that a nihilistic universe is a fact, and one has to accept it and adapt. It's not a contradiction, it's an observation that there's simply no metaphysics at the base of our judgements.
Chesterton criticism might hold as to his character, though Nietzsche did fight in the Franco-Prussian War.
I don't think I understand your disagreement with ascend on Nietzschean nihilism; he seems to be saying that Nietzche is a nihilist, and you seem to be saying that his metaphysic is that nihilism is a fact. Could you unpack the difference there?
I would also point out that the idea that there is no metaphysics at the base of our judgements is a metaphysic about our judgements itself. Why should I accept his nihilistic metaphysics over my own non-nihilist metaphysic?
Nietzsche explicitly considered metaphysics irrelevant rather than having other, additional strong opinions on it. I don't recall which book it's from but at one point he says that the knowledge of metaphysics is as useful to us as the knowledge of the composition of water is to a sailor navigating a storm. Or something along those lines.
Sure thing. The difference is between nihilism as an attitude and as a theory of reality. Nietzsche wasn't expressiving a nihilism of hopelessness or that there is no meaning in our lives per se, his whole philosophy terminates in an exortation to create meaning in the true metaphysical context as he saw it, that there are no metaphysics. That it cannot be based on ground truth is the tragic context of our meaning, not it's termination.
There being no metaphysics is to say there is no reasonable expectation of logic or reason operating in moral systems, they are mad mixes of historical phenomena of many types, given a veneer of totality and coherency by priests (as a broad generic type). There is nothing but ultimately arbitrary human judgements, notwithstanding that in practice some moral systems are more advantageous towards given ends that are arbitrarily held as valuable.
For instance we tend to construct moral systems as having opposites in the way elementary particles are opposites (though mind you I believe even that is actually a simplification). It's like a kind of platonic ideal is supposed to be operating in the firmament, an ideal good, an ideal virtue, and their opposites, but we don't explicate as much because it immediately looks ridiculous. Instead we try to construct air tight practical arguments that divide the ideal good from the ideal bad, as in this article, and the conclusion is always that we haven't quite gotten there yet. In fact we will never get there, because there's nothing at the base of these ideals that give it a fundamental metaphysics.
As to whether you should buy this vision or another, I think the question has to be how you anchor the idea of objective meaning. If you're religious, that is reasonable, but this is ACX. And the consequence of accepting this nihilism, again, isn't the destruction of meaning, or cutting ties with what you have loved and valued. It's recognising what's really going on, that it is an exercise of Will upon the world.
Chesterton so much did not understand Buddhism, it is atrocious. Basically words in Buddhism do not matter for much. It is about meditation, and words explain that and maybe give an advice or two about how to live. "Not grasping anything" does not mean what it means in common language. You cannot just decide to "not grasp". But you can have a non-graspy feeling in meditation and you can try to keep that feeling around.
> Christianity has always held that envy was a black sin
No that's a main feature of slave morality. It takes the herd's natural envy and sublimates it into the herd's own self-discipline. Envy itself is not purely a herd feature; the warrior feels envious of someone, so he kills him and takes his stuff. The herd is told, "actually your envy itself, not the object of your envy, is what you need to defeat" And so they repent and pray and purge themselves. This is an essential part of slave morality and it's why Christianity is the prime example
>Christianity has always held that envy was a black sin
...and that the meek and weak would get their just rewards in the "real" superior spiritual world. Christianity doesn't try to ride between pride and envy; Christianity banishes envy to the realm of the inferior physical world and tells its adherents to focus on Heaven. Secularized Christianity (social justice) is worse because the physical world in which envy and resentment exist is the only remaining one.
Yeah, this is why the whole thing puzzles me. The post clarifies why one could be opposed to this thing being called "slave morality", at the expense of leaving me more confused why it would be associated with Christianity. Either the people saying this (I have no idea about Nietzsche's exact views; I have read only a few passages quite some time ago before deciding that he was either too odious or too muddled to worth reading further) cannot keep straight what they mean by "slave morality", or their idea of Christianity is a confused caricature, or both. (Given some of the other comments here, even in this subthread, I'm leaning towards "both".)
On another note: A quibble, maybe, but I always flinch at appeals to the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean as an account of virtue. It's not always wrong, I suppose, but rather than drawing up a spectrum and identifying virtue as some point in the middle between excess and deficiency, I think it's better to think of the Good as its own, positive thing, and vices as various ways of going astray from it. They don't always, or even usually, form pairs of opposite errors between which virtue is found. Indeed I don't think that Pride and Envy are opposites, or represent a deficiency and excess of some quality; they can easily (and generally do) coexist in the same person.
Lectures on YouTube helped me a lot. I like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kuk35VNSEc
I think my disagreement here is that you seem to be treating master morality and slave morality as symmetrical. I.e. you're treating both of them as approaches evaluating people, which vary primarily in how they do the evaluation. For example, you say:
> Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. [List of them.] I think master morality has to approve of all these things.
and
> a commoner can’t do much with this kind of master morality besides conclude “yeah, I suck”.
But if we instead think of master morality as being about pursuing excellence, then neither of these is necessary. You don't need to figure out how much you approve of other people, or even yourself. You can just keep your eyes on the path towards excellence, and figure out what you need to change in order to get closer to it. (This is related to a post of mine about one-place versus two-place judgments: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qXZLFGqpD7aeEgXGL/p/sbJgv5De6d34eiHWA). You preempt this approach by saying "if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes?" But I don't see why picking heroes needs to be objective; it seems fine to just pick whoever you personally look up to. Indeed, picking one set of unified heroes that everyone is meant to look up to feels very slave morality.
I don't know whether any of this is anywhere near what Nietzsche means by either master morality or the superman, but to me it feels like the right approach, and one which steers you away from a bunch of traps. For example, you write:
> Suppose Tate wasn’t a rapist, he was just some kickboxing champion who was a jerk to people online and constantly posted about he was better than them because of his Bugatti. I still want to feel contempt for him!
Should you feel contempt for Tate, or pity, or admiration? The answer: you should have very few feelings about Tate, because he simply isn't your problem. The contempt is a trap! It's not going to help you or the world. Reorienting your morality towards what allows you to feel contempt for Tate is precisely how slave morality gets its hooks into you.
Tate is infinitely more Nietzschean than Yglesias. It's not even close.
That feels like a Lutheran version of Nietzscheanism, the quote about Shoemakers would be perfect but apparently is fake. But the idea you can be strong and perfect by being the best version of yourself seems a consistent and useful compromise of slave and strong morality.
> Should you feel contempt for Tate, or pity, or admiration? The answer: you should have very few feelings about Tate, because he simply isn't your problem. The contempt is a trap!
Yes! I think about this whenever I hear people talking about Musk. The lovers and the haters would do well to focus their attention elsewhere
Well said!
I understood "unified assessment" to mean summing up a person's good and bad qualities to get one overall judgement of how good you think they are. I don't think it means different people need to come to the same assessment.
I think Scott Alexander alludes to this here:
"Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity."
Found myself aggressively restacking this, so good it is!
This is the best ACX I've read in years
I have not read a lot of Nietzsche, but I have read Zarathustra, and what confuses me a lot about when people speak of Nietsche's Superman / Übermensch: In Zarathustra, he is very clear (to me, at least) that the Übermensch is an unrealistic ideal (not even a clearly formed ideal) to strive towards on your way to your downfall (Untergang). He is very clear that the right thing to do in life is not being a superman (that is impossible), it is striving towards that goal, being the bridge that may someday lead to the superman. But not because achieving the superman makes it worth it, instead because you will die anyway, dying later rather than sooner isn't better, so it's better to die for a cause. Any cause. Doesn't matter which, choose your virtue.
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal"
"One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one’s destiny to cling to." (Terrible translation on gutenberg.org, the original is "weil sie mehr Knoten ist, an den sich das Verhängnis hängt. = "because it is more of a knot that your doom can cling to". Verhängnis /= destiny)
Zarathustra speaks A LOT about about your Untergang, which again is horribly tranlasted to down-going, it means ruin, downfall, demise, doom. He contrasts it with the last men, who are too cool and blase to care about virtues, and reach the highest age, but fail to live at all, too concerned for their health.
So I have a very hard time understanding how one moves from this seemingly very clear concept: (there is no god, when you die, your soul dies before your body -> living longer isn't better then living shorter, but living for your virtue is better than not -> choose your virtue and follow it until it kills you, that's better than being killed anyways) to saying "I am a superman, because I have a Bugatti" or whatever.
I wonder what Nietzsche would make of transhumanism. It seems like "there's a decent chance that we'll get a materialist, non-wooey form of immortality, like, within our lifetimes; and we can choose to spend our lives taking actions that make that more likely" short-circuits the argument.
Superman concept is tied to eugenics. Nietzsche was a proponent of it.
That may be, but I don't think it went as far as "we might defeat mortality" in his mind.
> being the bridge that may someday lead to the superman
"Communism can't be achieved at present year, but we can aspire for socialism, which will be the bridge that opens the door to true communism."
My man's sounding a lot like Lenin right there.
_______
Similar to the promise of communism, the reason no one wants to be the bridge, is being being the bridge is a miserable existence. All the effort & suffering, with none of the reward.
I mean you can make a case for Communism being some kind of *societal* Übermensch in this analogy, but Nietzsche was mostly offering inspiration to individuals, and prophesying the emergence of some individual overman rather than the transformation of society.
The people you hold up as examples of Nietzschean morality make a great argument against that whole school of thought, just by existing as they do. You don't need to construct a theory of morality to look down on Andrew Tate, you just need to look at him.
I've always wondered how a sincere bully-worshipper would react to being physically brutalized. If you gouged out one of Richard Hanania's eyes and told him that you'd tear out the other unless he adopted all your political opinions, would he do it? And if he did, would he really believe it in his heart? It sounds ridiculous, but his writing does imply that he should.
I suppose on some level, a battered wife is the most sincere master moralist. They're showing real commitment to the hierarchy, not just taking advantage of it when it's convenient.
Bully worship is a thing. Some people would rather align with the bully, and take a chance of being brutalised, than against,and take a chance of being killed.
Ironically I think in Nietzsche's view having contempt for a person because they are ugly is more true to master morality.
> I suppose on some level, a battered wife is the most sincere master moralist. They're showing real commitment to the hierarchy, not just taking advantage of it when it's convenient.
It's for sentences like these that I read the comments!
> I suppose on some level, a battered wife is the most sincere master moralist. They're showing real commitment to the hierarchy, not just taking advantage of it when it's convenient.
This is a completely different psychological mechanism. Generally, women who are attracted to abusive men have borderline personality disorder. They need intense emotional interaction, and getting abused is the direct path to achieving that. Especially if the abuser feels bad about it after and tries to make up for it, before inevitably abusing them again later. It isn't a power dynamic or hierarchy in the way you are thinking of. Probably something like a dom/sub relationship would be more on point.
I mean he literally changes his opinions all the time just to get subscriptions, let alone having his eye gouged out.
Typo notes:
"behold the newest inventions making our leaves richer, safer, and easier." leaves => lives
"and trying to retvrn to some kind of crunchy organic notion of life" retvrn => return (although this is an odd typo to make, and maybe some kind of reference to the Roman practice of writing U as V?)
I wondered what “leaves” was supposed to be.
The “retvrn” bit is a reference to a meme, referring to posters who want to return to tradition. Don’t know where the v came from originally.
It is a reference to the Roman practice - the original sources were pictures of Roman statues/architecture with just "RETVRN" written underneath
Roman inscriptions sometimes replaced U with V because carving a V is easier (two straight lines instead of a curve), so writing in all caps with V's makes your writing look "ancient Roman."
It was the same letter in Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V#Descendants_and_related_letters_in_the_Latin_alphabet
Great post, Scott! I just wanted to add that I think Nietzsche does manage to explain the psychological appeal of what you call "cycles". In fact he was arguably the first philosopher to see, contra Aristotle, that the meaning of life may not consist in achieving some terminal value, but in encountering and overcoming resistance. (cf. Antichrist 1: "What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome.") In extremely brief summary, Nietzsche thinks that the will to power (which each of us has) is the will to seek out and overcome resistance to more determinate ends (being helpful, glorifying civilization, creating art), and that this explains the appeal of cycles: there is no terminal point at which the meaning of life has been achieved, because continuing to satisfy your will to power means continuing to seek out and overcome resistance. For the book-length version see Bernard Reginster's "The Affirmation of Life".
Man, the Sid Meier part did a good job actually explaining and writing down the "thing I've been thinking for years but never clearly wrote down anywhere". Including specifically using civilizations as the example.
Now I'm wondering how many other people have this exact idea.
I have thought something very like this, but my reference is Sid Meier's Pirates! The original one that I played back when I was a little kid.
There is a terminal value there, however: ending your pirate career as a SUGAR PLANTER and not a ROGUE
"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."
Finally *someone* makes a cromulent point...
Very, very interesting. Feels like a return to Slate Star Codex quality.
Having said that, I have a lot of issues, but expressing them will be difficult, so I'll start off with two.
First, there's this assumption that Nietzsche is in favour of Master Morality. I don't claim to have any expertise on Nietzsche, but that seems completely wrong to me. My understanding is that he thinks it's as incoherent as Slave Morality, just as much an attempt to paper over the reality of nihilism. And that the only reason he didn't criticise it specifically (like he did SM) is that he either assumed it was unnecessary since nobody thinks like that anymore and it's not coming back, or he didn't get around to it before he went insane.
So regarding "Sometimes it sounds like the Superman is the guy who brings master morality back in style. Other times it sounds like he reconciles both systems, keeping the best parts of each. Still other times, it sounds like he transcends them entirely." I'm pretty sure it's the last one.
Second, you kind of hint at, but don't really address directly, what I think are the two main objections to SM. First, that it's just another way of persecuting people but doing it under cover of humility (see the Catholic Church, the French Revolution, modern Cancel Culture, and every other extreme manifestation of SM). And second, that people are naturally cruel and if denied the ability to be cruel to others (even in the aforementioned hypocritical way) they will turn that instinct on themselves. This isn't just "SM causes people to be miserable" it's "SM causes people to *actively inflict misery on themselves* as a form of masochism".
These are my interpretations of Nietszche, not my own opinions. I could be wrong about them. I'll have more to say when I figure out how to express it.
I said this in more detail in my own comment, but I think Nietzsche is favouring master morality because it's more advanced towards it's own transcendence.
I don’t think Tate lives up to master morality at all — he’s desperate for attention and admiration and validation, working hard and driving a cool car so other people will think of him. Not as a triumph of greatness in and of itself. Meanwhile, something like philanthropy could probably be a master morality thing if it’s done for the greatness rather than as some signalling of humility and self-lessening to the herd.
The thing about ancient barbarian warrior-kings wasn’t their muscles or their violence. It’s _being_ warrior-king.
Compare this to the eagles and the lambs analogy. Tate seems to care a lot about what “the lambs” think of him — much more than the freedom feeling of air under the wings, or whatever.
The Greek heroes (Neitzschean models for the supermen) of the Iliad (especially Agemmenon) seem very similar to me. The pretty armor, the prettiest girls to rape, the most slaves, the best tent positions on the beach, the sulking and petty vindictiveness, while compelling reading, always leaves me (a Girardian at heart) wondering how on earth they were models for anything other than memetic desire run amok.
Tate is pathetic because he exhibits all the above vices with none of the virtues of the Classical heroes — a willingness, no eagerness, to sacrifice one’s life for a purpose greater than oneself, the aesthetics of male beauty in action and not mere preening (the body builder vs the boxer), the brief moments of gentleness.
Tate is closer to Agemmemnon. He thinks and acts like having the best booty makes you the brightest hero. Even in the bronze age, that was pathetic.
> while compelling reading, always leaves me (a Girardian at heart) wondering how on earth they were models for anything other than memetic desire run amok.
Yes, one of the important axis that this essay entirely leaves out (as far as I understood) is the day-and-night difference between the true creative impulse and mere seeking of fame or approval.
> a willingness, no eagerness, to sacrifice one’s life for a purpose greater than oneself
His family, he attests repeatedly
> the aesthetics of male beauty in action and not mere preening (the body builder vs the boxer)
But he is literally the boxer
> the brief moments of gentleness.
Playing with his daughter, etc. The moments are out there, they just don't go viral
The classical heroes did not seem to me particularly about sacrificing their own lives to a purpose greater than oneself. They were prepared to *risk* their own lives in service of their personal glory, or in order to keep a promise, or exact vengeance, or to attain great riches, or for vengeance, but martyrs for the cause they were not. And the scenes in the underworld from the Odyssey seem to indicate they regard even the above reasons as foolish reasons to risk ones life, which in the hazy clarity of the underworld they realize was really the most important thing of all.
Agreed. Also, isn't he a kind of a snake oil salesman? I don't know much about the guy, but my sense is he's selling a vision of masculinity where if you just adopt the right alpha male mentality of assertiveness, confidence, etc., success is sure to follow. That advice seems reductive at best, and at worst, a quasi-scam. I don't think that's particularly ubermensch-like...selling fake or at least highly questionable self-help platitudes to low-status men.
I think there's some truth to it for a certain class of people -- those who severely lack assertiveness and confidence will find themselves much more successful if they can acquire a normal amount.
If you already have a normal amount of assertiveness and confidence, then further gains may be a bad idea. Extraordinarily high levels of assertiveness and confidence are only a good idea if they're backed up by actual extraordinariness, otherwise you're just an annoying person that nobody will like.
I don't disagree, but I tend to think of that advice as not super helpful even for the people who need it. E.G., for a guy who is losing a race, you could shout at him "run faster!" and that would not be an erroneous course of action for him to follow, but...well, you see my point.
That was my response too. Selling self-help to children in order to afford luxuries isn't "strength". Elsewhere he mentions that master morality isn't interested in spreading itself:
Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too
Andrew Tate's entire day is spent trying to convert people! That's what all his hustle and energy is going towards.
"So sometime around the Iron Age, the slaves started working on a morality of their own, one where they’re the good guys and the masters are the losers."
Maybe this is much older. There is the hypothesis that humans evolved from (the least common ancestor with) apes by self-domestication. Part of that process (Christopher Boehm says) consisted in commoners banding together and killing the alpha males.
No one ever said Nietzsche was an expert on paleoanthropology. He was a philologist of classical Greek so he read his ideas into that society, not anything earlier.
Right. "Hierarchy in the Forest" by Boehm makes a strong case that hunter-gatherers spend a lot of time putting down their potential alpha male to keep him from monopolizing the women.
That seems like it feeds in to the "Against the Grain" argument of, roughly: agriculture -> non-portable capital -> bandits -> government, and a transformation in the male ideal of "providing the best food" from "actually hunting/gathering/farming the food", to "taking food from other people", and thus to an aggressive warrior ideal.
Banned for a month for this comment (last sentence).
hmmmm? Cant those who live by the sword die by the sword? let the "4chan" insults target the "4chan" people freely
In this walled garden, those who live by the sword die by Scott's sword. We prefer it that way.
I'm not questioning if God-Emperor Scott is correct, I was just endowed (presumably by him)with reason to ponder his mysteries.
I think this leads towards "Well, [group] is obviously made of bad people who would insult me if I gave them the chance, so it's fair to insult them", with gradually expanding values of [group].
Members of [uncontacted tribe] engage in combat, combat is wrestling until one member takes a chunk of flesh, usually biting off an ear(other times less friendly), you are free to feel its barbaric, should the tribe be contracted by attempted to gauge who is the aggressor by sniper?
Given two socail-darwinists(i.e. people who believe generics can factor into how people are treated) and what you could classify as a slur (bugman) how do you know they airnt engaging in ritual combat by *their own* rules ethically?
I am assuming the insult here was directed at Yglesias - is he a 4chan person? I am confused by this comment.
>Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I don't think you are being fair here, so I will throw out a steelman: he is saying "I want people stronger, not happier." which is sort of the essence of vitalism, and yes it has been associated with fascism, and Walt apparently does not mind that association one bit, but still, I don't know whether this is enough to completely throw out vitalism.
"I want people stronger, not happier" can be interpreted as "First survive. Then make fucking sure you survive. Then maybe you can relax and focus on happiness."
This is not true in many specific places of the world though, as far as I know, which is what a lot of effective altruism is dedicated to correcting...
In the five or so countries with lowest life expectancy, there is about 10% child mortality, and then on average, people who survive childhood live to age 65. In those countries, on average, 65 year olds live to age 77.
Not enough people live to those ages in those countries, but it’s still pretty common.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
Right - but I am happy to focus my altruistic endeavors on that. I don't disagree with the facts, I disagree with saying (in these locations) "survival is super-easy," though I can see how you can be "poor" and still "probably" live to 75 almost everywhere in the world.
I think you think that the fact that he has some goal means I can't accuse him of being bad and cruel. I am happy to admit he has that goal, I just think the way he's going about it is bad and cruel. I think Bulldog accused him of not caring about human suffering, and he answered "yes, I don't care about human suffering (and here's why)".
Utilitarians typically also want people alive to be happy.
Yeah, but they'll murder you for a sufficient reduction in headaches, nationwide.
For the greater good.
But that’s only because they mostly care about survival and well-being and think it actually matters.
Bully for them, then.
But not unduly happy. Time to review the repugnant conclusion again.
>"I want people stronger, not happier" can be interpreted as "First survive. Then make fucking sure you survive. Then maybe you can relax and focus on happiness."
The problem is, if everybody maximizes for selfish survival at the cost of everybody else's, then step 3 can never come, because just as you finish up step 2, everyone else catches up and you have to go back, ad infinitum. Getting everyone to agree to make relaxation into step 1 is the better long-term strategy.
Part of why I like being a mathematician is that proving *some* theorems sometimes really feels like a terminal goal (there is some spiral-ish stuff in it, of course). I guess works of art may feel the same to some creators, not just "to make other people happy" (e.g. Tolkien and the Silmarillion).
Proving a theorem is getting at a real fact. But I would say that the reason getting at real facts matters is because that is the sort of thing that is nearly universally helpful for getting at whatever it is that someone actually desires.
I don't think this is true of most facts that mathematicians find interesting. I think it is better to count "getting at real facts" among their their "actual desires."
(If you want to say that mathematicians' desires are a mental spandrel produced by evolution optimizing for other goals, I completely agree — but that's not what you seem to be saying.)
There are no such things as real facts. And mathematics certainly isn't discovering them.
> At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach.
The way I think about this (which I came around to after reading something in Ryan Muldoon's Social Contract Theory in a Diverse World, which I recommend) is that the whole dynamic is very similar to mechanisms at work in financial markets.
Investors are generally modeled as having some kind of Relative Risk Aversion where the richer they get, the more they have to lose, and the less risk they are willing to take. I think the same thing works for societies and somewhere in the 20th century we reached this point.
That bit about relative risk aversion surprises me. I'd expect richer people to be more risk-tolerant, as the diminishing marginal value of money means your wellbeing isn't as impacted by losses.
I think that as you get wealthier, your risk tolerance for a thousand dollar loss gets larger. But your risk tolerance for a year of sickness or a year earlier death gets less, because that year of healthy life is so much more valuable.
I've heard it described as "Focus moves from getting rich to staying rich."
This was almost great, except it concentrated too much, at the end, on internet figures not really that well known outside their own bedroom.
I dislike Nietzsche for many reasons. Scott hinted at one - what exactly is the superman? Argue that it’s a right wing idea online and many will agree while others suggest that the superman is extremely nice to kittens, as a primary characteristic.
The real problem is that Nietzsche wasn’t at all aware of the actual world he was in. Apparently.
One where the “slave morality” of Christianity dominated the world. All of Africa, most of China, much of Asia, America and South America of course. And this had been largely the case for generations. Islamic countries were largely occupied or quiescent and nobody gave much thought to it. Yet, Islam is clearly more militaristic and less slave morality.
So why did “slave morality” dominate the world? Because it wasn’t really. Scott hints at this in his aside about puritans. What Christianity has is enough space for master morality hidden by kindness, enough in it to promote wars against its enemies and all non Christians (not just for personal glory but to spread the Word, the absence of which condemns the natives to eternal damnation, so it’s a good thing to invade).
Then there’s that phrase about dying for your friends - There is no greater love than this: that a person would lay down his life for the sake of his friends - well that’s as good an entry into heaven as dying in battle is to pre Christian religions, which were trashed in battle over the centuries anyway.
In fact right across from where I write - a matter of a few dozen feet
- is the site of a battle between the Christian Normans and the last remaining Vikings who were their antecedents. The Vikings were exterminated.
Anyway the “slave morality” of Christianity might have helped rather than hindered world domination, after all — outside Islam — most of the world invaded by Christians converted.
Why? Here come these nasty people but look they say nice things, promise an eternity of happiness and, to be fair, do engage in some acts of charity that perhaps more outwardly supremacist invaders might not. So let’s accept this religion and therefore the culture of the invaders.
and perhaps enough there to
Nietzsche was at a point in history to observe that Christendom had conquered the world and was also in the process of undoing itself.
He dies 14 years before WWI, there’s no obvious decline in western power in his lifetime.
Not obvious ones. He and Spengler were both concerned with the subtle.
There is no decline in western power in terms of its actual supremacy, only in terms of its vitality when reflected onto itself.
"The Christian love of God was destroyed by the Christian love of Truth."
"Most of China"? Even if you include communism as a Christian-derived slave morality, that hadn't taken over China in Nietzche's time.
Nietzsche was dead before China becomes communist. I’m talking about European imperialism in China.
Europeans didn't take over "most of China".
China was doing badly at that time. Late in that century there was the Sino-Japanese War, which inspired Sun Yat-Sen's Revive China Society to launch their Guangzhou Uprising. But surely Japanese imperialism wouldn't be considered an example of Christian "slave morality".
You are off in the weeds now, aren’t you.
> But surely Japanese imperialism wouldn't be considered an example of Christian "slave morality".
Yes, surely not although I fail to see the point here. What’s that refuting exactly?
You should consider reading Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution. He addresses the problem with Ayn Rand by (in my words) viewing evolution as an entropic force. So for instance, part of our elan vital is eyes, which connect us to sight. He argues that this cannot reasonably be said to be caused by natural selection, because while natural selection can explain that if there's a steady stream of mutations that give ever greater eye, sight, and thus fitness, it cannot explain the correlation in where this stream of mutations come from. Instead, the root cause of eyes lies primarily in light, as light makes sight possible; natural selection merely removes the obstacles to sight e.g. that the original life happened to lack photosensitivity.
Slightly longer review here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6i3zToomS86oj9bS6/mysterious-answers-to-mysterious-questions?commentId=SMxdKAXi2WdfAwLj6
Sorry, this still makes no sense to me.
The cosmos is completely filled with light and yet I will bet any sum that we will fail to find lone eyeballs rolling around in Alpha Centauri. Selection is the more particular and thus more causative principle.
Alpha Centauri lacks the original impetus.
By my understanding, this should imply that by the same token, natural selection would remove the obstacles to wheels, where the original life lacked equipment for rolling.
However, if an evolutionary pathway to such an outcome exists, it doesn't seem to have been explored so far. Some things are physically possible within the laws of the universe, but not readily accessible via random mutation and selective pressure over generations.
This strikes me as an interpretive framework laid over the process of natural selection which generates predictions which are simply wrong, and forces us to rationalize why it doesn't mean the things it appears to mean in order to bring its predictions in accordance with reality.
Wheels and eyes are low-entropy, so they don't spontaneously arise.
When it comes to the evolution of eyes, it is *sight* that mediates free energy (from e.g. noticing plants/animals to eat), and eyes are eroded into being by pressure from this free energy.
Similarly, if you have roads, then the possibility of driving mediates free energy from more efficient ways of going places, and therefore erodes wheels into existence. But nature does not have roads.
So would you affirm that in an environment with lots of smooth, flat surfaces already available, wheels should naturally arise?
I don't know; it requires an opportunity for driving, but this opportunity is the interaction of other factors than roads, e.g. there needs to be some place to drive to, and something to drive. Also, forces can't discretely jump states from non-driving to strongly driving; instead it requires there to be a continuum of varying degrees of driving, which is a stronger condition than the mere possibility of driving.
Wheels clearly don't require opportunity for driving though, they just require opportunities where rolling is at least temporarily an efficient way to get around. Animals like flying squirrels can glide temporarily, but they don't need to get everywhere by flying. It's enough that being able to glide to some degree offers them an advantage in their environment. An animal which gets a fitness benefit from wheels doesn't need to rely on them constantly or exclusively.
I don't think I said anything about exclusivity or constancy? The continuum was more in the sense of the space of macrostates.
Let me know if I'm understanding this right: the objection to the evolutionary view is that it doesn't predict _having a bunch of mutations specifically to eyes_ and should instead predict random mutations that don't all point on the same direction?
I think an evolutionary biologist would counter that there's a constant baseline of random mutations, and ones which _happen_ to line up usefully get preserved (because they're adaptive) whereas ones that are neutral or negative tend (all else equal) to not spread or persist.
Does Bergson just think that the numbers don't add up (and there aren't enough random mutations, or isn't enough selection pressure, to account for chains of beneficial mutations) – or does he have another argument against the standard view?
An example he gives of the failure in prediction is that different lines of evolution converged on similar structures for eyes. My impression of his argument is that he's saying this makes sense if we imagine that light and biochemistry has properties that make certain kinds of eyes work (e.g. tiling structural cells around photosensitive cells to form a pinhole camera), but not if we imagine all the effects of mutations (on the body and the elan vital) to be uncorrelated. In a scenario driven solely by random mutations and natural selection rather than by the properties of biochemistry and light, you wouldn't expect sight to consistently develop in such particular forms as eyes.
His book was written prior to the modern understanding of DNA, so he didn't really discuss whether this was the correct interpretation.
This just sounds like the normal modern theory of evolution. I'm failing to see the difference. In regular evolutionary theory, eyes won't evolve without light, or if sight is biochemically impossible. Convergent evolution is also expected in many cases.
I'm confused about the point. The physics/biochemistry/etc. matters for how eyes tend to form, and if you want a full model of how natural selection works in our reality you'd have to consider those details. And?
> natural selection merely removes the obstacles to light
It selected for genes that tended to work better because the environment had light? Is the argument that there's some already-existing processing-capability that evolution is directly building off of and that it is just letting light in and then growing from that?
> ... This description of his view actually makes me wonder if the rationalist community has been unfair to Beff Jezos' assertion that increasing entropy is the meaning of life.
I still don't see the difference between that and "reproduction is the meaning of life", they both still seem reductive and not useful as explanations?
(And then I'm confused about how it resolves the problem with Ayn Rand)
I think you are trying to do the same thing I was thinking a lot about: rescuing vitalism from fascism. Vitalism is the idea that people should be stronger, not happier (or not only, both). This is not unusual for a doctor, doctors define illness as pain or dysfunction. Dysfunction matters, weakness matters, and in this sense happiness-only utilitarianism is too narrow. We want to heal people's knees not only so that it does not hurt but also so that they can run a half marathon.
Eric S. Raymond tends to justify this vitalistic aspect on survival. If we become lotus eaters, the first society-wide major shock will make us extinct. Yes, true, but it is a classic multipolar trap, coordination problem?
Another way is aesthethics. A strong, bold, vital optimism like those Commie propaganda posters is just simply cool and needs no other justification other than coolness. We just like strong horses.
So it looks like it is a job for the artists, not the thinkers.
But you are right that they have a weirdly right-wing vibe, because now we associated left-wing with victimhood.
One way to deal with that is make it explicitly queer and non-white, that won't get criticised a lot.
What about being the fastest runner? In that case, you being stronger hurts others on the margin (the other people running the race, who would like to win and would be sad to lose). The same goes for job opportunities, and romance, and any other positional good and zero-sum (or even positive-sum but not entirely fungible!) game - your being stronger/better will bring rewards to you that would have gone to others otherwise.
I like Amadeus as a meditation on this for the specific case of creating art.
But what's the point in the other runners competing if they don't have others to compete with them and push them to run faster? They can just run by themselves if they hate coming behind anyone.
What's the point of pushing them to run faster? That's a vitalist value.
You could make the case that if everyone stopped running competitively, the competitive sport would die and the runners would be sad. But I think the parent comment was just about the fastest runner, who on the margin makes the second fastest runner worse off.
Whether or not it's vitalist, it's simply a fact that runners enjoy competing with each other. If you own a dog, you might notice that they enjoy running, and while they could simply do laps around your home, they enjoy it more if they have another entity to run with or something to fetch.
I just realized a counter-example to my thought about pets: hamsters seem to enjoy running in their hamster wheel, even with nobody else to run with.
Yeah. This doesn't address the point me or the parent commenter were pointing out though.
If your moral system is be vitalist only in situations where it benefits others, how would you apply this to the fastest runner? By training hard and being the fastest, they are hurting the other runners. The second place runner would be better off if they won, right?
The runners would still be able to enjoy their competition. You'd just have other winners.
It's pointing out that most people place some value on greatness even when it doesn't benefit others.
Vitalism predates fascism, which was a phenomenon of interwar Europe. It doesn't seem that hard to avoid/ignore.
It's not that easy to rescue vitalism from fascism, because the moment you start talking about vitalism someone comes along and calls you a crypto-fascist.
(And then you reply "no, I'm not a fascist, I'm not any kind of socialist" and then your interlocutor denies that fascism is a form of socialism, and then you wind up arguing about that instead)
There is a kind of divide between the old left & new left, where the old left was more into the working class seizing power and labor unions are a remnant of that. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/victims-and-sympathy/ Of course, the environment was different when the old left began. There was more of a proletarian/peasant majority, while now the people the left is attentive to are smaller minorities who can't claim to be the actual producers of the wealth of society. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-good-old-days/
>because now we associated left-wing with victimhood.
Yup. The oppression olympics seems to be a new thing, beyond the slave morality of Nietzsche's time. I don't like seeing it getting to the point of disempowering the competent. From a purely practical point of view, I don't want the electric grid to fail.
> Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2
This may turn out to be small comfort if you happen to live in a place
Also, masters often spread ideas like "It is God's will that I am in charge" in order to make sure people properly appreciated their conquering.
>>She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in.
Rand is not so different from USSR's morality. When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I felt a strong sense of deja vu that I couldn't quite place. Only after reading the whole thing I realized I was reading a very typical Soviet book of Rand's time. Yeah, really so. There was a whole sub-genre in Soviet science fiction that was quite like that. Basically, if you take any of these old Soviet books, and change the heroes' speeches from "Communism brings progress" to "I want to be selfish and bring progress", but leave the entire rest the same - you'd get Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, people tend to underestimate how deeply-influenced Rand was by Soviet/socialist ideology, I think. The whole of plot Atlas Shrugged is that a bunch of workers go on strike, bring capitalism to a stop, and build a workers' commune in the mountains, for Galt's sake!
I think these both really miss the point. Striking and and such are the trappings of socialism, Ayn Rands problem is with the psychology of socialism.
In the Soviet book, the entire collective of workers would strike and bring the owners of capital to their knees and then collectively take ownership of the capital and operate it by committee.
In Rands book, a few exceptional owners of capital who haven't forgotten how to be outstanding workers take their ball of capital and go home somewhere where no workers commune or committee or bureaucrat can ever touch it. They care about it being theirs so much that they are willing to work towards it with only the sweat of their own brow and those who deign to trade with them.
The thesis of galts gulch is "you say the capitalists need the workers, that society allows us to have the infrastructure in which to prosper. We say you're wrong. We will prosper entirely of our own accord and expose "society" as at best a stowaway and at worst a parasite"
Soviet fiction would allow no such premise. The rest of the book is a hero story, and sure everywhere has hero stories, even Soviets. But Soviet heros are men-of-the-people devoutly concerned with the collective, and the good of all - Rands objection and novelty is that the heros in her story have no special concern and oft special scorn for the collective.
"build a workers' commune in the mountains"
Galt's Gulch wasn't a commune. No one there lived for the sake of anyone else.
I just have a question about master morality - it seems like Nietzsche still seemed to think it could be a thing, but I wonder what its content could ultimately consist in, other than forcing other people to bow to you?
Like, we can stride around the world erecting skyscrapers, but why should anyone care about those skyscrapers? You could become a master sculptor, but what if no-one wanted to look at your rocks? Don't you have to force them to like your work, which means ultimately you either are the local warlord, or you're working for the local warlord, and your successes are a by-product of his violence.
I dunno, I'm definitely not a Nietzsche expert. I just haven't worked out how any of this works.
And... once again I have failed by not reading to the end. This idea is pretty similar to the point that Scott got to at the end of the post. Ho hum, sorry.
> You could become a master sculptor, but what if no-one wanted to look at your rocks?
It'd make it harder to make a living from it, but the idea that it would become *pointless* is alien to me. People can and do take joy and pride in their achievements even if no one else ever knows about them. Sometimes someone somewhere dies of old age and their distant next of kin or their landlord finds out they've filled the place with art they've produced over multiple decades. People leave easter eggs (like the signatures inside the Apple Macintosh case), where the entire point is that very few people will find them. People bury letters in time capsules, where any appreciation for the contents will come long after they're dead and may never happen at all, or be entirely negative.
That's not to say having others value your work isn't psychologically satisfying as well: it almost always is, which is why truly hidden achievements are rare and why people often try to focus their efforts where they'll be appreciated. But there's some value in the achievement itself distinct from that. Honestly building a bunch of secret skyscrapers no one will find sounds pretty cool, not good enough to replace my current life plan (and I can't afford to do it), but if you gave me a choice between spending the rest of my life doing that or doing equivalently-hard work leading to no actual outcome, I find that I am far from indifferent.
So... this is where the vagueness of Scott's thesis becomes a problem. (I don't mind that he wrote this piece in a very vague and hand-wavy way, it's just useful to acknowledge that this piece much more impressionistic than his deep data dives or some of the philosophical dissections he's done in the past.)
Because I agree with you about the satisfaction of work. But I don't think that "feeling satisfied with some work you've done" constitutes a "master morality". Master morality is surely bigger than a guy feeling good about his work. It's about the "masters" informing the rest of humanity that the things they do constitute the good and the right; that they are to be admired and emulated. Remember those Greek heroes who embody the classical master morality - what they wanted was *glory*: the adoration of the masses and recognition from their peers.
Perhaps in the ancient world it was clear to everyone how that might happen, and it was clear to the masses whom they were to appreciate. But in the modern world, where we have had heroes as various as Einstein and Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan and Donald Trump, I can't see how you get everyone to fall in line and adore correctly without cracking a few skulls.
Why do you need to get *everyone* in line? Past a certain point you run into diminishing returns.
If you look at the pro-achievement people (at least the subset who aren't also endorsers of totalitarian ideologies), they don't express the need to get everyone to admire the same things. Musk wants to build a city on Mars, and he has plenty of fans who will shower him in adoration and praise for it, who will try to buy rides there. And as oversensitive to criticism as he is, he doesn't actually care if most people want to stay on Earth and don't really value what he's doing.
The group trying to get everyone in line are the harm-minimization people, who put the destruction of 9 bird nests in a Starship launch as the very top story of the New York Times: https://x.com/pescami/status/1810402441134829798 in a push against them getting more launch licenses. Harm is harm, and your vision of people eking out a living on the red planet gives you no more right to destroy bird nests than to anyone else.
Master morality says "if you destroy bird nests on the way to achieving your glorious goal, so much the worse for the bird nests". It's not nice, but it doesn't foreclose someone else going and making another habitat for those birds with no rocket launches somewhere else, so long as they don't get in the way. Slave morality says "this is an endangered species, and until it is no longer endangered, everyone everywhere must adjust their behavior to minimize harm done to it". Arguably kinder and more caring, but also a much more totalizing perspective.
The classic exemplar of a failure mode of master morality, glorifying war, can only happen in a world with other people who oppose you. "And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer." is a fake quote, but captures the sentiment well. Going to the moon was that much more of an achievement because we beat the soviets to it. "Vae victis" is fundamentally a recognition that you're harming the vanquished from their perspective, but that's just too bad for them.
Sorry, I think we're still at cross purposes. You're talking about who's doing what; I'm not talking about that at all.
I was trying to talk about what it would mean to create a morality based on these so-called master virtues. There are an infinite range of possible different master virtues: they might include beauty, exploration, rigour, physical strength, IQ, scientific insight, compassion, etc., etc., etc. As such, simply claiming master morality is empty until its actual content has been specified. And because there is no other morality to guide that process of specification, it has to be physical force that makes the decision in the end, doesn't it? I'm not sure of this conclusion, because I haven't read Nietzsche and don't understand his philosophy properly. But that's how it seemed to me.
I'm not doing internet politics in this thread, just internet philosophy. The question of Starship and birds nests isn't relevant to the question I'm asking: How does the content of a master morality get decided?
> And because there is no other morality to guide that process of specification, it has to be physical force that makes the decision in the end, doesn't it?
Why? Only if you care deeply about getting everyone to share the same full set of virtues. Which you keep insisting on but never justify in any way.
> I'm not sure of this conclusion, because I haven't read Nietzsche and don't understand his philosophy properly. But that's how it seemed to me.
I'm also a non-expert, but AFAICT his big overarching idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was that people should come up with their own values, even though, or rather because, they'd differ from everyone else's. Which is utterly at odds with your concept of a universal moral code that everyone will end up following. Here's a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on him that decently covers it:
"the demand of one morality for all is detrimental to the higher men"
So the question of "how would we all agree on morality if we were operated like Nietzsche thinks we should" is ill-formed. We wouldn't.
Huh, interesting. Alright, I will go and read more about it. Thank you.
Your assuming the point is to be judged positively by the herd; if you rape 100 women the "gods"(/*evolution*) may bless you with 100 children
If you win the war, have the children, lift the big rock you *are* vital
I mean, you're kind of making my argument for me. I said, isn't master morality just violence? And you said, rape 100 women, win the war. That's what I thought!
Im sure those thoughts will be very comforting while you die to the rampaging war-rapist
Id suggest maybe, you should try to *not* die while thats a possible moral position; instead of mental masturbation; you could maybe suggest different actions the war-rapist could take, how you could defend yourself, what you could bargain with.
You should argue with people *where they are* and not by your standards. If someones a race realist, how do you suggest different courses of actions besides yelling racial slurs on the street (to reduce harm), *that they would believe*.
Maybe you don't get what slave morality is in contrast?
Why should you care about what others think of your sculpture?
Well, you should to the extent that you care. Part of the whole slave morality shtick, as far as I get it, is that you would feel required to like it because of others. Perhaps it is 'in' with your social group, maybe even honestly popular, but you just don't get it. Yet you feel forced to enjoy it anyway.
The 'master morality' would be that you care to the extent that you should care. You may be the kind of person who needs validation, but often that sort of validation seems associated with slave morality, though I don't think the theory fully disallows legitimately wanting such.
This may result in your forcing of others to look upon your works and despair, or it may be that you merely sigh, and continue on with the next sculpture that interest you.
You seem to be trying to get some objective moral fact out of the system, or a socially prescribed moral fact, but that's kinda what master morality is against... I think.
Interesting, thanks. Perhaps that's it - I was getting hung up on the word "morality" in master morality, and yes, you're exactly right that I'm trying to get an objective moral fact out of the system. But perhaps you're right to say that master morality doesn't do that. I will try to read some more about it.
Slave/master morality are misnomers. They should be called feminine and masculine morality because they reflect how groups of men and groups of women function internally.
In this sense a master is a leader who puts together a hierarchical group of men (warband/movement/company) and leads them to success. If he is a jerk to the outgroup is irrelevant as long he is generous and fair with the ingroup. Universalism is a characteristic of slave morality anyway. That's why the same man can be violent and even cruel in a conflict with the outgroup while being a kind and generous pillar of his family, community and friends.
“you had better ensmallen yourself if you know what’s good for you” is how groups of women function. Women are ruthless egalitarians who will gang up on the tall poppy and exclude her which is the worst punishment possible for most women. That's why women are far more obsessed of keeping up with their peer group both in fashion and ideology.
Some aspects of early christian morality like valuing virginity, chastity and fidelity are also obvious feminine values. Largely the same with caring for the children, the sick and the old.
Even the way charity was done changed with the rise of Christianity. For example roman emperors provided food and games for roman citizens (their ingroup) while christians provided food for the poor regardless of legal status.
I would not use the Roman Empire as a good example of in group preference, as the definition of Roman citizen was continually expanded for political reasons. Not unlike how it is today
Expanding the ingroup was the secret of roman success at least during the Republic. The writer of the ACOUP blog makes a good case that this how roman armies were able to vastly outnumber everybody else.
Rome is important because it's a well documented society that went from master/masculine morality to slave/feminine morality.
The process of using other tribes for the Roman armies only really worked well for the socii. Acoup says that the Romans failed by not giving more privileges to the Germanic tribes pillaging the empire gives you an answer for why the Romans weren’t interested in the idea. And also makes you wonder why raising infinite legions from Africa and Greece and Egypt didn’t pan out.
While some of acoup s writing is interesting, he comes across as extremely ideologically driven in his conclusion, similar to Jared dimond.
Romans gave socii rights to their fellow italic tribes with whom they were closely related and compatible. Even when expanding the ingroup they still needed an outgroup that could be looted and taxed.
Unfortunately being extremely ideologically driven has become the norm in modern american academia.
You *do* know citizen rights were granted way beyond that, eventually to everyone within the empire, right?
Yeah, by emperor Commodus of Gladiator fame. But that was long past the times when the Roman Republic was expending with her armies of levied roman citizens and italian socii.
I haven't read the ACOUP blog, but the claim that Romans succeeded by expanding the ingroup goes back to antiquity. But the point wasn't primarily about giving citizenship to allies - it's that the Romans, highly unusually among ancient societies, gave citizenship to their freed slaves (and a LOT of slaves got freed). There is a famous letter of Philip V of Macedon dating from 217 BC (so just before he himself got entangled with Rome) in which he argues that this was the secret of Roman success.
Weren’t said slaves primarily sourced from Italians at the time?
In 217 BC? No, though it might depend how you define "Italians". Over the previous 75 years Rome had engaged in massive military conquests in Magna Graecia (southern Italy, but Greek speaking, and not at that point considered ethnically Italian), Cisalpine Gaul (the region north of the Po, similarly not considered Italian at that time though later became incorporated into Italy), Sicily and Sardinia (Italian now, but never considered as such in antiquity). The likelihood is that those were the source of a large proportion of the slaves being sold in Rome at that period.
Adding to the above.
I think that Christianity was partly responsible for the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as a feminine morality was poorly suited for a militaristic empire.
The rebirth of the West after the year 1000 was the result of the synthesis of masculine and feminine morality in the form of Chivalry which became the morality of the feudal ruling class and who's rules like don't butcher and enslave the peasants when you're raiding and don't rape captured ladies form the basis of our own moral rules.
I see greco-roman morality as being masculine, followed by feminine early Christianity than by a synthesis in the form of Chivalric morality and then a gradually transition to a fully feminine morality which has been undergoing since the victorian era.
+1, I wanted to mention Chivalry.
How do you explain the Byzantine empire?
+1. "Christianity destroyed the Roman Empire... except, you know, the other half of it that lasted another 1000 years."
I find this take, like so many other takes, greatly trivialises the extent to which fundamental ways of thinking are built into the fabric of a civilisation over time and aren't going to be undone quickly (or ever) and also aren't just going to coexist with opposite modes of thought in the same society. Suggesting that men follow MM while women follow SM, *in the same society*, has a nice neat aesthetic but just utterly lacks coherent plausibility to me.
Masculine and feminine morality are based on innate characteristics resulting from human psychological dimorphism so they cannot be changed. When one becomes dominant they shape the fully fledged moral systems at civilisational level but can not eradicate the other which continues to exist at the lowest level, the peer group.
I don't see how fundamental ways (plural) of thinking are built in...would imply that there is only one per society.
Except that power fantasy is not how modern men work. I am a 46 years old man and the hierarchical kind of social life stopped right after high school and went egalitarian. It never resembled a warband. Outgroup violence was not tolerated because there was no outgroup.
Companies are hierarchial, but that is just what we do to pay our bills, that is not real social life.
What do you mean by power fantasy?
Well, a point of nuance needs to be added here: as Arnold Kling likes to say, there are two main types of hierarchies, dominance hierarchies and prestige hierarchies. Dominance hierarchies are hard to maintain when there is free movement of people and stuff (ie, not high school) but prestige hierarchies still persist.
Maybe it's because I'm in STEM, but when I'm around other women, I (for example) absolutely 'brag' about my latest achievements and encourage them to do the same. I've never observed anything else. These people are some of my best friends and I've had the (somewhat awkward) pleasure of them talking about me to their (incidentally also female) friends behind their backs as "Neike's really cool!", which I found out upon meeting said friends.
To be clear, this is just data for you, it's not meant to be an argument that you're wrong. Subcultures are a thing and I am definitely up to my eyebrows deep in nerddom and STEM, and that might be the most of an explanation why things are so palpably different for me. I know exactly one woman in my circle of friends who is even into fashion; she adores me for some reason, even though we have approximately nothing in common, but maybe that's the appeal. (It's certainly mutual, I think she's fantastic for being totally different to the people I usually hang out with, without being judgemental.)
Ish, very ish. Egalitarian/altruistic morality is popular with women , as one can tell from voting patterns, but also with poorer men and minorities. There's no reason for "male" values to be uniform, since alphas and betas have different interests.
I won't be popular here, but female sexual choice appears to be very favorable for exceptional men, isn't it? Male "slave morality" is not great for this chemistry (without cultural "patriarchal" pressure), Andrew Tate might argue. Was Nietzsche imitating the seeming female optimal choice out of frustration?
Labor unions are extremely male and function according to slave morality.
Why do you say it's obvious that virginity and chastity are feminine values? Women benefit from getting to choose their mates but not from chastity for its own sake. I would say it's clearly men who care about women's chastity for evolutionary reasons, with women (in most cultures) acting as enforcers of that preference for practical reasons.
Embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=embiggen%2Ccromulent&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
If it's good enough for Lisa Simpson, then it's good enough for Scott Alexander.
So, another issue: I'm very suspicious of the idea that *anyone* in the modern west is an actual example of master morality. SM has been the orthodoxy of western civilisation for a couple thousand years; the idea that anyone now can *really* be a practitioner of MM seems almost incomprehensible. I don't even know if the Nazis qualify: they had a huge persecution complex and a great amount of envy towards the Jews and their material success. They were obsessed with claims that Germany had been stabbed in the back and mistreated at Versailles--basically the exact same "not faaaair" childish whine that the likes of Nietzsche would attribute to all slave moraity. And the resulting cruelty was as much self-righteous revenge as it was domination and glory.
Basically, the left and the right and every other ideology (insofar as its a meaningful "ideology" that people can rally around) is a form, ultimately, of slave morality. Even if it claims to hate SM, it will eventually just largely fall back into it. The alternative is to suggest that a way of thinking that has dominated civilisation for many centuries and has been unquestioned and unquestionable is suddenly, in our very special unique present, entirely up for debate in its fundamental form. And I don't find that plausible.
You can either agree with Nietzsche that SM is an illusion, like all morality, to be abandoned and ultimately transcended, or you can disagree and say morality exists and is good (and by morality you *will* mean what N calls slave morality). Actually following master morality is something you either accuse your enemies of doing, or you pretend to do to seem brave and edgy, but that nobody really does.
Definitions of true master morality usually include some kind of virtue or warrior spirit.
Should the first sentence say "example of master morality" rather than "example of slave morality", or am I confused what you're saying?
Yes it should. I just can't type.
Data point: The description of master morality in the essay resonated a lot with me and I would identify with it quite strongly, to the point where I am sincerely tempted to use the term and start normalising it in my circle of friends. I'm generally not an asshole (what would that achieve?), but I definitely aim for vitality and success in my life, and consider it fundamentally wrong if I fail at these things for preventable reasons.
The "This just says 'I can do what I want'" meme unironically basically describes my attitude. It turns out you can in fact have that attitude without also being a jerk, or edgy about it. I think the idiom "If you want something done, you need to do it yourself," when positively rephrased, is exactly that. If I want something done, I *can* do it myself. There's a component of anarchy here - rules are useful guidelines, they're not constraints. That doesn't mean you go around breaking them all the time (again, what would that achieve?).
Not Nietzschean (as far as I know) is that I go a step in a different direction, too: If someone is more awesome than me, *I want to help them succeed harder*. I will be the sidekick! Let me be the sidekick! (I guess this is potentially Randian as Scott understands it?)
Lots of footnotes and asterisks apply (e.g. if I personally perceive someone to be an asshole, I am not going to be their sidekick, regardless how successful they are; I *also* identify as a deontologist and so believe certain categories of things are morally wrong; breaking some societal rules has big consequences and that factors strongly into the decision whether to break them; and so on), this is a comment on a blog post, not a blog post, but my core point is that I am neither trying to be 'brave and edgy', nor would I accuse my enemies of following master morality, since from my perspective, it's not an accusation. (That said, neither is "slave morality" and I wouldn't say I "hate" it?)
I guess one could say this is just a form of "transcend all morality", not actually "master morality", since it's got a bunch of footnotes and asterisks on it. But I would say the same is true for "slave morality", surely? Usually people have asterisks and footnotes on those; e.g. success in sports might still be championed, the hierarchies Scott mentioned Western society tends to at least grudgingly accept, et cetera. I think if we claim "slave morality" is followed by some people, we can also claim "master morality" is followed by some people, surely?
If you're gonna use it in conversation I recommend reverting to the German Herrenmoral. Fewer syllables, overtly a term of art, and very cool sounding.
Hah! It sounds approximately just as awkward to my German ears as 'master morality', but fair point nonetheless. :)
Dumb question: In English "master" is ambiguous. It can mean master of a skill or a field, or it can mean master of other people. Does German have the same ambiguity? Which sense does Nietzsche seem to imply?
Nah, not a stupid question at all, I don't know my way around languages I didn't grow up with, either, and sometimes googling these things leads to dubious results.
"Herr" can be three things that I can think of off the top of my head - "mister" ("Herr Schulz" is "Mr. Schulz"), as well as the two meanings of "master" you mentioned (e.g. "Lord of the Rings" is "Herr der Ringe" in German).
"Sklavenmoral" and "Herrenmoral" in context of each other definitely tap into the master/slave dichotomy, which makes it awkward terminology, for sure. But just taken by its own, "Herrenmoral" sounds rather dated, or like it might potentially reference a morality of men (meaning 'men' as opposed to 'women', not 'men' as a shorthand for 'humanity').
Many Thanks!
Which makes the far Right with it's incessant, "They were so mean to me because I am white and a man," a most excellent example of Slave Morality.
Isn't that more of a centrist anti-woke thing? The author of this blog has written a lot about how terrible feminists are to certain men for example.
There's a difference between "it's wrong for you to oppress us" and "we should stop letting ourselves be oppressed", isn't there? One is begging for mercy, the other a call to action.
Far right might be more like the latter:
https://t.me/nickjfuentes/11752?embed=1&mode=tme
Nietzsche just didn't like Christians and came up with a clever line.
Sometimes I wonder that the people we call intellectuals are mostly boys who were showed into lockers at school by bullies a lot. I mean, I am one. Physically weak, clumsy, but smart. Funny how these things correlate.
(Walt was either the type who did the showing or was also showed a lot and keeps compensating for it ever since. )
I mean, when intellectual analysis is also self-help therapy, is it still good intellectual analysis?
So I wanted to be positively judged on passing exams and writing essays. I did not want to be positively judged on throwing balls and doing push-ups, I had no chance.
Because I knew I will not be positively judged on winning fights, my best bet was negatively judged as being someone who never starts fights, never harms other people, trying to turn weakness into a virtue. I am not weak, I am not cowardly, I am a Nice Guy! Is this what the Nietzscheans are calling out? Because yes, in that case, yes, it was indeed a lie.
Except that I think they are massively overcorrecting in the other direction. Weakness masquarading as goodness is a lie, but there is also true goodness, the goodness of the strong.
My point, we really do need to stop looking at weakness as a virtue, we really need to stop that lie that we pretend to be good, when in reality we are just too weak to risk doing harm.
Which is why women are shaming But I Am A Nice Guys - they can smell that fraud from a mile. They can smell that type stops being nice every time he thinks he can get away with it.
This is easier said than done. I can admit I am weak, but I think I would still not go about beating people up even if I was strong. But how to precisely separate the two?
Anyhow all I can say is this. It is easy to not start fights when weak, it is actually harder when one is strong. So I guess the way out is do not shame those people too much, who do things we do not dare, risk doing. It is hard to know how much goodness a counterfactual strong-me would show. Yes, this is a bit of an argument for "boys will be boys" and "mean girls will be mean girls".
If .morality is only about consequences , it.doesn't matter. If morality is about praising what you want more of, and punishing what you want less of , they are entirely different.
To quote Nietzsche: “Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”
Jordan Peterson has also often espoused this line of thinking: "A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control."
Yeah, so your attitude is precisely what I think many people (including me to some degree) find extraordinarily repulsive.
I think the answer many would give to this from a *practical* perspective is that the potential for anything meaningful is morally neutral. Someone without the capability for great harm is, in some sense, also lacking some pre-requisite for great steps forward. i don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, we're allowed to just exist and in practical terms it *might be* the same outside of situations where broad capability is required - but what that means is being locked into what might be called mediocrity.
In a more theoretical sense, I think there's something to the idea that meaningfully being a good person requires forbearance of something that they're *actually capable of*. There's a saying in Tamil that translates to "guy with a stomachache on a religious fast" and this sort of reminds me of that - you don't really get credit for not doing what you can't do. This seems less concerned with the practical side, where someone who can't do harm and doesn't want to do harm (but can) is identical outwardly, even if the former might actually want to a lot of harm - but it does seem like a difference to a philosopher.
> Someone without the capability for great harm is, in some sense, also lacking some pre-requisite for great steps forward.
That sounds very symmetric and plausible at first blush, but is it really true? I don't really see why.
If you ended up with a defense mechanism of appearing harmless, it doesn't mean you don't have any inner strength, it just means you're too afraid to put it to use in most circumstances. It only takes one circumstance where that fear doesn't trigger, and all of a sudden you see great steps forward.
The meek person who suddenly does something forceful or heroic or unexpected is not that rare, in fact it's common enough to be a literary trope.
It may make more sense if you extend the way of thinking from simple physical dangerousness to something more general: agency, applied intellect, commitment & will, status, physical fitness, competence, and efficacy in general are forms of power – of being able to effect change in the world. Power is potentially dangerous.
Then there's also the whole integration of shadow aspect - for example, recognizing, accepting and using your inbuilt aggression constructively, rather than repressing it.
I would *much* rather spend time with a self-controlled werewolf then a toddler. He probably has a lot of interesting stories! I mean toddlers are nice, but this is an honest-to-goodness good werewolf over here.
I don't think it's about being practical, it's more that you can't call yourself "good" unless you had the opportunity to do evil and rejected it. Otherwise you just took the only course available to you, which isn't moral because it's not a decision.
Much like how you can only be brave when you're afraid, etc.
I'm right there with you. People who just can't help being nice and who simply can't bring themsleves to do horrible things, even when the situation might arguably call for it, are just immeasurably nicer to be around than people who're constantly capable of horrible things but also constantly reigning themselves in. You'd have to be absolutely flipping loopy to want to work with or, heaven forbid, to *actually marry* the latter sort of person, over the former!
I always knew nana and my kid sister were no good pieces of shit. And screw babies too—especially the cancery ones.
"Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many." -The Eleventh Doctor
"Which is why women are shaming But I Am A Nice Guys - they can smell that fraud from a mile. They can smell that type stops being nice every time he thinks he can get away with it."
Of course, those same progressives are making excuses for how Islamic societies aren't actually invading countries like the West is, which is exactly the same effect you describe (but just a billion times more obvious)...
>Sometimes I wonder that the people we call intellectuals are mostly boys who were showed into lockers at school by bullies a lot. I mean, I am one. Physically weak, clumsy, but smart. Funny how these things correlate.
There does appear to be a correlation, but I'm pretty sure this isn't causative. I'm about as far towards the nerdy intellectual side of the continuum as anyone, and if we're going to infer childhood experiences from adult social behaviors, I'd probably have a long history of being shoved into lockers. In fact, my mother told me that a psychologist I saw in my childhood once told her "it's a good thing your son knows how to handle himself, or he'd probably be bullied like crazy." I was very much a social outsider as a kid, but I was also strong, physically skilled, and good at fighting. I quickly learned that I was too strong for anyone to pick on, and developed enough confidence that people generally didn't try. For a while, I became a bit of a bully, throwing my weight around and belittling people I didn't like, because they knew I could kick their asses, but it didn't take me long to grow out of that and feel guilty about it.
I don't think many nerdy intellectual adults had this experience growing up, but I don't think the fact that I did makes itself particularly apparent in my personality. I think that there are a lot of weak but meanspirited people who would never have learned to withdraw from the pleasure of lording their own strength over other people if they'd had the opportunity. But I don't think learning that lesson takes a particularly rarefied level of moral character. I strongly suspect that people who seem about as nice as I am as adults, but were weak growing up, would probably also have been about as nice as I am if they'd grown up strong.
> Hanania is terrible at being right-wing. He’s pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, and supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump.
Most of that just sounds like American conservatives are bad at being right wing rather than Richard Hanania.
> Andrew Tate
I'm not convinced that Andrew Tate exists. Sure, his physical form probably exists out there in the world somewhere but I'm not convinced that "Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer" really exists as a manosphere influencer rather than as a boogeyman for the other side. I have never once heard his name from someone supposedly on his side, but I hear it all the time in the form of pearl-clutching articles about how terrible it is that boys are listening to manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate... written by people who couldn't possibly name another manosphere influencer. Andrew Tate is a character, a troll, a class clown, who exists in a symbiotic relationship with those who hate everything he stands for. Of course you hate Andrew Tate, he's a classic heel whose every move is designed to irritate you and who exists only to be written about negatively. Using him as an example of anything, let alone master morality, is cheating.
He has 10 million Twitter followers, surely they can't all be ironic.
That just shows that you're not in his demographic. You don't know anyone who listens to him, so nobody does.
Do you talk to teenagers often? r/teachers and other teacher forums discussed him a lot last year since it was a barrier to classroom management. They're interesting discussions because unlike most pearl-clutching, the teachers are actually interested in accomplishing some goal (such as getting a 16 year old to practice stoichiometry rather than bark about bugattis). He's discussed in the same way that fidget spinners were discussed a decade ago.
When I was a teenager, it was towards the tail end of the gangster rap era, when pimps were considered the epitome of cool. So I'm not exactly shocked to hear that teenagers think Andrew Tate is cool.
My brother was doing substitute teaching a while back. Some of the boys asked what he thought of Andrew Tate, he said he disliked him because he was a pimp. They then argued about whether he was part of The Matrix or not, with the "nots" mustering that he was not a woman.
Andrew Tate has a stupid level of following among teenage boys. He appeals to the juvenile male id.
I understand that it's pretty common practice among scammers and grifters for their pitches to include moderately-obvious flaws, for the specific purpose of weeding out anyone who's smart or careful enough to be a difficult mark. That way they can focus their time and attention on the marks more likely to pay out.
Tate's target demographic is young men who are anxious about their masculinity and some combination of unintelligent, inexperienced, and gullible: this is not the sort of person who's writing think pieces, appearing on podcasts or, well, writing blog comments on a site like this. If you lurk on the right corners of Facebook (which I don't recommend doing) you can absolutely find people talking him up or defending him.
"Andrew Tate is a character, a troll, a class clown, who exists in a symbiotic relationship with those who hate everything he stands for. Of course you hate Andrew Tate, he's a classic heel whose every move is designed to irritate you and who exists only to be written about negatively."
I could replace "Andrew Tate" in this passage with "Donald Trump" and it wouldn't be one whit less true. Their sheer hateability seems to be a large fraction of their popularity: people who are angry and resentful place a high premium on doing things that piss "those people" off, whether "those people" are their parents or their political opposition. But also there are just lots of people who like things that seem bizarrely and incomprehensibly bad to me: this was quite apparent to me long before either of them became household names. Humans are strange sometimes.
The end ties it all up nicely. Ultimately all debates about morality lead nowhere, and we have to get on with living our lives. In the words of Wittgenstein, who solved philosophy a century ago - "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
When thinking about Rand and egoism and altruism, it's good to keep in mind that by "altruism" she means something different than most people. She's talking about altruism in the same sense as the originator of the word, Auguste Comte: as otherism, living for the sake of others, self-sacrifice.
So, for a Randian egoist: Helping others because you value them, out of a sense of generosity and great-heartedness? Fantastic! Helping others out of a sense of duty, stunting your own life and happiness? Nope!
As far as efficient altruism goes, most people espousing it seem to think in utilitarian, rather than purely altruistic terms. Under utilitarianism, helping others in a way that also helps you is *obviously* better than helping others in a way that makes you miserable, other things being equal.
Her hatred of self-sacrifice is why I suggested she'd be a better person to parody Heinlein's Starship Troopers than Verhoeven (who didn't read it).
I thought Verhoeven started reading it, then got disgusted and tossed it aside while screaming to the heavens "Fascist tripe!" After, he vowed to sabotage the film in an orgy of vengeance.
And the "fascist" label is wrong, because the book is radically globalist (or would the correct term be "interplanetary"?), even bringing up the idea that morality will one day extend across multiple species. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/starship-troopers/
Yeah, Yglesias would be just about perfect except his macroeconomics is wrong, thinking there is a place for fiscal policy in managing aggregate demand. I keep hoping the will read my corrective comments and eventually come around.
I'm sort of surprised that Scott did not do a take on Tyler Cowen and his Prometheism cum common sense morality.
It's perfectly reasonable to think that monetary policy should be the regular method for this, and break out fiscal policy for emergency situations (like the 2008 crash or the threat of a Covid crash).
The central bank always acts last and can apply monetary offset. The exception is if the rest of the government overrides that, like with FDR devaluing the dollar.
How would the Central bank have handled the threat of a Covid economic crash, do you picture? Its tools are neither that fast-working nor that robust.
COVID was a "real"/supply-side phenomena. If the central bank anchors expectations of nominal GDP growth, then we can still have that even if it means inflation. And falling short in one year (if you worry it's not fast-working enough) is offset the next.
I associate Bryan Caplan more with talking about "common sense" in the philosophy of ethics.
Nothing says “Superman” like cowen being a covid faggot for a couple years and saying how woke he was until it stopped being cool.
I thought the reconciliation (and indeed the foundation of civilization) was that individual masters are weaker than multiple unified liberals. That the fremen myth was a myth because by allowing a society to form, specialise and create surplus, it will out compete those barbarian warlords who focus solely on negative sum games. This requires the introduction of some slave morality to enable cooperation, without letting it grow like a cancer and ultimately leaving your society weak to those same warlords (though see most of Roman history for how master morality can be equally cancerous). I taught my son early on that it is better to make friends than to be good at fighting, because the guy with a bunch of friends to back him likely will never have to fight at all, and if he does it's better to have 20 fists than 2. Of course, I still teach him how to fight because throwing a good punch or kick or grappling well is its own reward outside of its ability to overpower others.
Anyway, it's all information replication evolution in the end. We're just a bunch of genes and memes trying to find the most effective strategy to replicate, to have our informational payload expressed across time and space. If part of that payload is a pleasing melody of the pursuit of cycling goals, it seems worthy enough.
Lovely article.
I don't think you can understand Rand without understanding her habit of making up completely straw man definitions of words. "Altruism is bad" means "There is this specific thing I will can altruism now and it is bad", and then it turns out it means giving in to precisely those envy-driven people that do not like achievement at all. And "selfishness" defined as "not doing that".
But that thing she called altruism is exactly what Auguste Comte, who at least popularized the word and perhaps coined it, advocated. A while back I copy edited a scholarly bio of Comte, which quoted a passage where he said that Jesus was not a sound moral teacher, because his line "Love your neighbor as yourself," implied that it was all right to love yourself (indeed, that your love for yourself was the standard for love), whereas, in Comte's view, to feel any love at all for yourself was immoral. That's exactly like the sort of thing you imagine Rand making up as a parody of altruism.
Of course, already, in Comte's lifetime, his friend J.S. Mill was trying to water altruism down to "concern for others," taking out the harsh "lack of concern for self" part. And it's been steadily watered down since then. But I think that Rand was spot on about the original meaning; and I can't think she was wrong about people who liked the sound of the original but wanted to make it less virulent.
"Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact."
Huh, so Rand's twenty-pages-long proofs are weak, but we're supposed to accept this paragraph as an axiom instead? I guess it does have a virtue of brevity, if nothing else.
"If they’re forced to draw attention to their advantages, they should talk about how they benefited from privilege, and how millions of people with the same skills are unfairly languishing in poverty."
It's amusing that an obvious clown like Tate is presented as an exemplar of master morality, while there was no mention of the likes of Musk and Altman. I'm pretty sure that they don't go around abasing themselves before peasants, and to the extent that they are flawed characters that isn't one of their flaws.
I think Rand claimed to have objectively proven stuff by first principles, and liberalism just says here are our values. I understand there are some attempts to prove liberalism (eg Rawls), but they're not great and they tend to be more than a paragraph.
I don't think Musk particularly claims explicitly that he's better than other people. I agree Musk is an interesting example of master morality done somewhat well, or at least better than Tate, but that's not what I was going for!
"It’s our headline result" seems to imply that this was somehow derived from underlying principles, though. And I do agree that there are some considerations that support this conclusion, e.g. from game theory, but even so there's no good reason to believe that it's particularly stable, or truly represents terminal values of a large number of people.
It's not reasoned from underlying principles, it's justified entirely on consequentialist grounds. I guess some people have tried to justify it from first principles like Rawls but ymmv
You can justify it from first principles if one of those principles is a Literal God on His Literal Throne, but when you swap him for the metaphorical version you just have to take it on faith.
This is not being short - it's my genuine answer, but I'm sure that venezuelans would convert if given the chance. If ideologies are religions, then Liberalism seems to me to be the most intuitive and correct. Its converts dominate various measures of success.
If liberalism starts losing, how fast will you convert?
Since nobody can actually perform the calculations, you can't justify anything non-trivial by invoking consequentialism, the most you can do is appeal to your intuitions for what the outcomes would be and hope that others share this intuition.
I basically agree, and note that the intuition stems from basic interactions and self-interest. You would buy marginally fewer substack subscriptions if the price increased. You would buy a marginally newer car if the prices went down. As far as I know, the efficiency of markets is experimentally proven to incorporate information about the real world into prices.
This means that markets are generally optimal. From there you can try to justify through various means such as science that certain political systems are better than others.
None if it is really first-principles based, nor do I see why that's important. The first principles of the most influential challengers are pretty arbitrary ie communism (rich people bad) and fascism (our dear leader is good). The evidence of the misery created by those systems compared to alternatives is evident.
The strength of liberalism is that it doesn't require a precise set of values, so it can form.large alliances. And if everyone has the same values, there would be bonkers for democracy.
Musk believes basically the opposite of hanania and Yglesias. He’s on twitter talking about The Great Replacement, not One Billion Americans and open borders. He leads the anti-war faction while hanania and Yglesias have gone all in on liberal global imperialism. He has come out for Donald Trump while the other two oppose him. Etc etc.
I think it’s telling that the actual “Superman” (or should we say Ironman) is a complete inversion of beliefs from people that blog for a living and lie all the time (Yglesias won’t even mention IQ and huge sections of his work are nonsense because of it, hanania has his own lies). It’s the difference between a doer and people who are just trying to make a living as bloggers.
It's worth noting that Yglesias' values, as Scott lays them out, are rather Rawlsian, especially the maximin reasoning.
Great post! I felt like Scott was groping around trying to reinvent chivalry without quite realising that's what he was doing.
The idea of chivalry of course was that knights would seek to distinguish themselves by their virtue. The virtues they were to aspire to were laid down in the codes of the orders they would seek to be accepted into. So there was that desire and drive for greatness - the quintessential chivalrous man was a literal knight in shining armor. He was brave, and fierce, and deadly on the field of battle. But he also protected the weak, was courteous to women, kept his oaths, fought with honour and showed mercy to a vanquished enemy.
The reality of chivalry probably never lived up to those noble ideals. But what real world has ever lived up to any ideal?
A modern day chivalry might exalt rich successful capitalists - while also insisting that they don't do the bad things that rich successful capitalists are known for. To be inducted into the Order of the Sparrow you need to have a half a billion in net worth - but also you need to be honest and fair in your dealings, and be faithful to your wife, and treat women with respect, and donate a hundred million to charity, and treat your employees with decency and dignity, etc. And if you do those things your membership in the Order of the Sparrow makes you a highly admired man that everyone wants to do associate with. And if you fail to uphold them you get tossed out of the Order and that's a terrible scandal and people worry how it might look to associate with you.
Would it work? I dunno. But I wouldn't mind giving it a try.
Rand wanted to create a code of honor for chivalrous capitalists. Her flaw was not giving enough credence to how the original capitalist men who inspired her were created by a synthesis of religious and civilizational values that can not be replicated just through words alone
We have equality before the law -- a tycoon so does bad things can be jailed.
The dichotomy Scott Alexander is talking about is off the mark. The true dichotomy is between people who uphold the classical liberal values that built Western society (positive-sum thinkers) and those who oppose these values (zero or negative-sum thinkers). In this dichotomy, the former are unequivocally good and the latter are unequivocally bad. The key question now is how should the former react to the latter forcing their values on them.
Master and slave morality muddles things because there are positive and negative aspects in each of them.
The positive sum / zero sum distinction requires everyone agreeing on numbers in the payoff matrix, ie value consensus. I think most of modern political squabbles consist of each group accusing the other of defecting. And according to their own internal value system, this is true.
"The positive sum / zero sum distinction requires everyone agreeing on numbers in the payoff matrix, ie value consensus."
Does it, though?
I think in general it's the case that the points in a payoff matrix are by each player's own lights, not based on consensus between all players.
Me buying a coffee from Starbucks is positive sum. And yet, I value having money and having nice coffee, and Starbucks (to the extent that it is a unified entity with values) values having my money while giving me as little coffee as possible for as much money as possible. We don't agree on what is valuable, often our values are in direct conflict, yet I can give Starbucks something it values, in exchange for something I value, and it works out better for both us than if we had not traded.
Another nation may have a very different culture and very different values and interests than your nation, and yet negotiations can happen where both get things they want from the other.
In fact, value differences (I value the amount of money I would have to pay for a cup of coffee less than I value the coffee I receive when I buy one. Starbucks values the money more highly than the coffee it gives me. When nations negotiate, they often give things they value very little in exchange for things they value more) are key to trade.
So being positive-sum doesn't require value consensus. And when we say "zero sum thinking" it's typically in contrast to positive sum thinking - I. E., someone who treats it as fact that they can only get what they want at another's expense. I can think in a zero-sum way even when someone is attempting to propose a positive-sum deal to me - I'd just see it as a "I won, so my opponent must have lost" situation. And two zero-sum-thinking agents can believe they are winning and the other is losing by whatever values they have, without those values being the same - and so a deal gets done, both zero-sum agents think they've won and are happy, no problem. I think the concept of "saving face" is related - it's the ability to let someone else feel like or claim they've won at your expense, even though from your perspective/by your value-set they've lost and you've won.
"I think most of modern political squabbles consist of each group accusing the other of defecting. And according to their own internal value system, this is true."
Sure. And if I was trying to cooperate, I would offer the group I was trying to cooperate with something it valued, regardless of what I value, and understand that if I did something it disvalued, that would be considered a defection, regardless of what my values might say about the matter. I think most political leaders (unable to say the same for online mobs) are sophisticated enough to take the other side's perspective and likely reaction into account when doing things, and rarely make a "oopsie, I thought you would like this because I would like it, I forgot you aren't me, didn't mean to defect" sort of mistake.
You seem to be talking a little about how an individual ought to behave, but mostly, what kinds of behavior, in aggregate lead to a healthy prosperous society.
Why would these two match up? You’ve also left out families, neighborhoods, and communities, cities, etc. There are incentive games at every level of interaction, and at some level we are all playing prisoner’s dilemma with ourselves.
So if you ask the question, “is there a diagonal strategy that’s cooperative with all levels, from the individual to the family to the community on up”, there’s no reason to believe the answer is yes. And that seems to be what you’re looking for here.
Unless you believe that there’s some intrinsic fitness between morality (at all these social levels) and prosperity, you end up saying things like “we all know X is true but we try not to think about it too much.” This isn’t sustainable in an era of digital communication, and so your model of morality ends up being an argument for a bunch of nonsense we all pretend to, but don’t really, believe.
The alternative to all this is considering that morality is _real_ and describes a strategy which maximizes both individual and group prosperity, but that humans keep on getting it wrong because we get attached to culturally constructed maps, and start ignoring the territory. When this happened historically, it was interpreted as, “people turned from God and he punished us.”
But, if we believe that morality just describes the optimal long term strategy that maximizes cooperation at all scales, we can then talk about reality and drift between map and territory. If you don’t have this idea that morality is real, you can’t describe this “drifting” phenomenon and don’t have the ability to talk about off-diagonal strategies, (say a family defects against their community) because you end up stuck in a place where you can’t say your OWN group is wrong. As you said, master morality isn’t trying to convert anyone, and salve morality rejects your attempt at prophecy because how dare you think for yourself.
I agree that morality is about individual and group survival.and prosperity , and disagree that it is "a strategy"...there are a whole bunch of different virtues and values, and a lot of tension between them.
In the limit, I think there’s a single strategy, which is the integration of all those virtues and vices in such a way that, in each moment, the ideal long term move is made.
That might be an unattainable ideal...buy it does give you a way of getting quasi-,realism, the ability to judge ethical systems as better or worse.
Yeah, I agree that’s it’s unattainable, like a limit point you’d want to converge towards.
As a nominal right-winger, for me the argument has always been economic. I don't have time to show my numbers right now but if most of what the right claims empirically is correct about history and innate inequality, I estimate we're looking at 1-5 quadrillion dollars of economic mismanagement easily. The full case is almost too depressing to consider.
I’m an expert on Scott (I’ve read some of his posts), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them).
Disappointed this wasn’t the Blackbeard Edward Teach
Or an actual bulldog of Bentham's.
This reminds me of the End of the Rambam's laws of the Messiah:
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/101744/jewish/Laws-Concerning-Kings-and-the-Messiah.htm
4. The sages and the prophets did not long for the Messianic era so that they may rule over the whole world or dominate the heathens, nor to be exalted by the nations, nor in order that they may eat, drink and be merry; but only to be free [for involvement] with the Torah and its wisdom, without anyone to oppress and disturb them, so that they may merit the life of the World-to-Come, as we explained in Hilchot Teshuvah.55
---- i.e. we can act life we want the stuff in master morality but have to secretly pretend we don't and have some kind of aultirior non-master morality motive
5. In that era there will be neither famine nor war, neither envy nor strife, because good will emanate in abundance and all delightful things will be accessible as dust.
--- us being masters will make everyone else better also (Like Rand Says)
The one preoccupation of the entire world will be solely to know G‑d. The Israelites, therefore, will be great sages and know the hidden matters and they will attain knowledge of their Creator to the extent of human capacity, as it is said: “The earth shall be full with the knowledge of G‑d as the waters cover the sea!”
---- altruism bottoming out in something else i.e. "knowing God"
This post gives a little too much credit to Andrew Tate as a flawed man with many admirable qualities. He got started as a kickboxer (although I’m not sure how challenging his kickboxing league is as far as materials arts go), but all his money and internet notoriety stems from his webcam pornography business, with his online classes originally telling men how to start their own cam business. I’m not sure that’s enough to make him a Superman figure.
OK this is officially confusing. I know something about Scott's post (I read most of it), but I'm not an expert either, so consider this a free riff on the theme. How do we undo the confusion? Here we have two completely separate concepts, uncomfortably joined at the hip by the word "morality". So let's lose the word and look at them separately. What do we have?
On the west side, we have mastery. Everyone knows mastery. Everyone wants and admires mastery. You want your potatoes to grow big, your house to keep you dry, your arrows to hit the bullseye, your drumming to be steady, your singing to be in tune, your poetry to scan, your stews to be tasty, your lovemaking to be otherworldly, your excel sheets to be accurate, your LLMs to mimic intelligence, and so on and so forth.
Note that mastery is logically independent of your choice of goals. Contra Scott, if your goal is to efface yourself before God, you want to be a master of divine receptivity. If it's to meditate yourself into non-existence, or even better, into a state beyond both existence and nonexistence, you want to be a master of formless meditation. These things require as much dedication and discipline as becoming a world-leading harpsichordist, and their practitioners are rightly called masters.
Note also that, contra Scott, mastery does not necessarily imply taking your cues of success from mainstream culture. You can be as much of a contrarian as you want as long as you actually hone your skills.
On the north side we have empathy. That's looking at another human being in the eyes, and seeing "another you" there. It's avoiding the lure of feeling like a single center of interest here ("looking out for number one") and a basically inert rest-of-the-world outside of your skin. It's basically taking the other people's existence into account as people, and probably extend some of this empathy to animals too, and why not to the environment as a whole. That's Kant and Jesus and Buddha and Buber right there, and most everyone else who has considered the basic "I-you" relationship.
These two are basic human capabilities. They have evolutionary roots, and various cultures have polished them into various shapes. They both need to be learned and trained — young kids lack both, and the elderly lose them. They also are not in any kind of intrinsic contradiction with each other. Maybe I'm naive here, but in terms of basic psychology it seems like they should help each other; mastering stuff should give you self-confidence so you don't need to see others first and foremost as a threat, and being empathetic should help you find a place in your community where you can hone some useful skills.
So if these two end up as a dichotomy or a trade-off, it's only in some secondary, non-essential way. Such as the simple fact that they both take effort to develop beyond what comes naturally, and there's only so much effort you are able or willing to put. Or that society starts rewarding you for one that you focus on that and forget all about the other.
So far this is all at the individual level. What does the world need? It seems obvious that it needs both. As a civilization we want our things to be well-functioning and beautiful and accurate, *and* we want people to treat each other as people and not as unfeeling tools.
Having cleared the space around and taken some good picture of the area, can we join the whole thing back together? Can we put the "morality" back in and avoid being off-topic?
I guess in the end I'll be boringly pluralistic as usual, and just say that there is no one true principle to rule things. Not even utilitarianism. Morality is complicated, it has evolutionary roots, it has cultural variety, it has individual variety, and it's always a question of balancing different principles with each other. When you take one of these too far, and ignore the other, you get into a failure mode, like wanting to conquer the Earth for no good reason, or submitting to others for no good reason. Then you end up with confused double hierarchies, like the woke (or Christian) thing where the downtrodden are simultaneously at the bottom (by definition) and at the top (by overcompensation).
Same goes with the individual-collective axis. If you go too far in individualism you end up in "neo-liberal terminal late capitalism" ruled by Musk and Zuck and people are starting to hate that. If you go too far the other way you end up in a failed communist state or something.
So balance people. A is not the enemy of B, unless you go to extremes. Don't go to extremes.
I found the essay confusing too, although parts were thought provoking. I’m not sure that the master/slave morality dichotomy is useful for explaining whatever Scott is trying to explain.
There's a new thing called the American Communist Party whose propaganda more closely resembles the old, more muscular version of communism:
https://x.com/HMBrough_/status/1815545743152984278
Still unclear whether this org actually exists outside of the Internet and the publicity efforts of the main perpetrators.
The biggest problem that any society has to deal with is ultimately the problem of the individual with competence, ambition, and no moral code; the individual that wants the best for themselves with no thought given to how this affects everyone else. I think this is similar in some ways to psychopathy, but to avoid running into specific definitional issues I'm just going to call these people assholes.
You can't build society around assuming that there are no assholes. There will always be people that both have extreme self-interest, high competence, and the ability to ignore morality (or define morality to their own benefit). Any utopian vision that assumes that people will not be assholes is doomed to failure.
Master Morality doesn't generally care if people are assholes. Strength, virility, ambition are good. The difference between an asshole noble and a non-asshole noble is the asshole either lacks the sense of noblesse oblige or fakes it. The problem is that this makes it easy to claim that Master Morality is Asshole Morality, when asshole morality is actually whatever they can use to get to the top.
It then becomes very easy for an asshole whose strengths lie in manipulating people to use slave morality to push themselves up. To go with section IV:
1. Assholes profess the idea that the system is rigged. Because they're not yet at the top of the current system, and they deserve to be.
2. They believe that all virtues are subjective, meaningless, and kind of a grift, because they themselves have no virtues.
3. Any attempt by anyone else to talk about good things, pursue good things, or achieve good things comes across as a bid for status, because that's the what the asshole would do. Their goal is to unite all the envious people into a Tall Poppy Police who agree that successful people suck, because leading the Tall Poppy Police is a great way to have power and the ability to hide their own Tall status.
5. The asshole replaces the normal cost-benefit calculus with their own version that ignores benefits to anyone other than them and obsesses over harms. If everybody who has accomplished things is a bad person, then they win by default.
6. They become collectivist. They demand that every action be done only after getting unanimous non-hierarchical collective approval, because their particular skill is in controling the collective.
7. They believe that people should be judged not by their actions, but by the purity of their ideas. Ideas are easy, and they can always profess or believe that their ideas are the most pure of all.
I don't think there's an easy solution to the problem of how to deal with people that are assholes. But it does put the lie to "Isn’t slave morality, with its concern for charity, peace, and equality - simply correct?" If concern for charity, peace, and equality is the path to power, then assholes will fake it. Anyone who's not continually improving their morality to filter out the changing ways that assholes slip into power is doomed to end up with assholes running the show.
Realy clever, interesting, thought-provoking, and helpful post - but whatever happened to words like aggrandise and diminish?
("I shall ensmallen, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"..)
> 'Maybe at some point there’s a hidden offramp marked “TERMINAL VALUE” '
This is the most interesting/crucial part, for me. Trying to take the large view ('large' in that it encompasses, er, all of philosophy, all of history and all of civilisation..) I think it's reasonable to suppose, given what we've seen of the universe so far, there's roughly even money as to whether or not there is some very-hard-to-discover slip-road leading to some terminal value:
If it turns out there isn't but we keep expanding and learning forever whilst we search for it for it, no big deal - partly because, as Scott says, "the trip is [or could be] pleasant enough", but mostly just by definition: without any fundamental terminal value out there to find, is *anything* a big deal?
If it turns out there is a terminal value slip-road but we get locked into some sort of philosophical/civilisational trap whereby we permanently stop searching for it, that might potentially be (again by definition) kind of the worst thing ever.
From the above, it follows that:
1a) The *ultimate* goal of ALL OF CIVILISATION IN ITS ENTIRETY ought to be to search for that slip-road, and meanwhile to learn and grow and develop itself so as to be able to better search for that slip-road.
2a) Therefore, the *immediate* goal of OUR PARTICULAR CIVILISATION (which we can think of as a component/sub-civilisation of the broader civilisation that also encompasses all of history, the future of humanity, any AI/posthuman/whatever descendants that may come after us, any alien civilisations we may collaborate or merge with, etc. etc.) ought to be to balance civilisation's growth/development/learning vs. its robustness against any philosophical/civilisational/existential traps (ie. nihilistic philosophies, Orwellian dystopias, Molochian races-to-the-bottom, etc.) that might hamper a super-civilisation's future search for the terminal value slip-road. (In short: human civilisation is too small and dumb to have any hope of finding the terminal value slip-road, but if we try really hard maybe we can avoid killing everybody for long enough to eventually grow into a civilisation that may potentially manage to find it)
3a) Therefore, the goal of ME AND PEOPLE LIKE ME ought to be to contribute as best as we can to (2) - to what we might loosely call the project of civilisation. This will require some contribution across the domains of economic growth, intellectual development, kindness, empathy, and a dozen other things - a different contribution from each individual, sure, but with the hope that civilisation can on aggregate progress along every domain necessary to achieve (2)
I'm not trying to make some sort of end-justifies-the-means, "cruelty is acceptable provided it brings us closer to finding the terminal value slip-road" type argument, here. Rather:
1b) There are almost-certainly many, many different kinds of civilisation capable of finding the terminal value slip-road, and still more different ways our civilisation could potentially grow into one of those
2b) If two hypothetical civilisations start from the same point-of-divergence but arrive at the TVSR (yes, I'm fed up with typing that long-form now..) after having generated different amounts of suffering, any extra suffering in Civilisation B was by definition unnecessary, since that civilisation started from and ended at the same place as Civ A
3b) Provided I'm willing to make the *unbelieveably tiny* assumption (seriously, it's possibly the smallest, fairest, most reasonable assumption in all of philosophy..) that needless suffering is a bad thing, it follows that in addition to our civilisation's imperative, in (2a) above, our own Civ also has a moral imperative to take the Civ A route rather than the Civ B route - and in addition to my own imperative, in (3a) above, I also have a moral imperative to minimise suffering, maximise wellbeing, etc., insofar as this doesn't harm my civilisation's chances of eventually growing into a civilisation that can find the TVSR
(And of course, once a civilisation achieves (1a) and successfully takes the TVSR leading off from the M25 of endless Development>Expansion>Development, what it morally ought to do next would depend on what that terminal value actuallly turns out to be!)
Finally, if a civilisation grows and develops to the point where it can say for absolutely-definitely-certain that no terminal values actually exist within the universe - as I happen to suspect might turn-out to be the case - it's still morally compelled to minimise suffering, maximise wellbeing, etc. because the (3b) assumption still holds - except now the civlisation knows for sure that all suffering is needless suffering. What it ought to do after that would depend on what it's learned about the universe on its philosophical journey towards the Ultimate Truth in the Absence of Terminal Value - perhaps it ought to gradually and painlessly wind-down all of consciousness to leave a sterile universe because it's learned that suffering must necessarily eventually come to outweigh happiness, like a sort of ethical Second Law of Thermodynamics. Maybe it ought to tile the universe with hedonium because it's learned that avoiding suffering is trivial and once you've mastered that, maximising happiness is all that's left. Maybe it ought to pursue some more complex definition of wellbeing that transcends "avoiding suffering" and "maximising happiness", much like we do as individuals, except it's pursuing it on the scale of a (presumably colossal and coherent) civilisation and with the certainty that there's absolutely definitely nothing more important that it ought to be doing...
> whatever happened to words like aggrandize and diminish?
("I shall ensmallen, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"..)
Many people whose rhetorical style is well-regarded, such as Churchill and Orwell, have commended the use of Anglo-Saxon-derived words over Latin ones.
That's really interesting, I've never heard of this before! On what grounds do they favour Anglo Saxon? Aesthetics?
(I suppose I do have a personal preference for A) using, where possible, dictionary words rather than recently made-up ones, and B) words with some aesthetic quality to them; to my ears "diminish" has an elegance to it that "ensmallen" very much does not - but even if this particular example is just me being weird ..oops, I mean strange.. I'd still argue that Romance languages are generally somewhat famous for sounding beautiful whereas Teutonic languages are famous for, well, not.
Of course I do have to admit that in a question of language where Orwell, Churchill, and Scott Alexander are all united against me.. probably I'm not occupying a particularly defensible position....)
Mostly, yeah. I think the idea is that they're different REGISTERS, and the shorter Saxon ones are more … visceral.
Churchill: The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek.
I'd recommend Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." It's a pretty short essay, which makes this and a few other good points I like.
This is super-fascinating, thanks so much for sharing!
Churchill's argument does seem to be as much about rhetorical power than beauty, though (then again there's probably plenty of overlap..)
(Also: I absolutely feel your pain with "REGISTERS" - why does it have to be so hard to get italics into Substack.. without them we all sound like we're trying to discuss rhetoric during a hurricane..)
Thanks for the reccomendation, too; I shall definitely read it.
True, but at the same time, I'd bet quarters to pennies that Churchill and Orwell would prefer extant words to neologisms.
I fail to see what "enbig" offers that isn't already supplied by "enlarge" - other than an aesthetic blemish on an otherwise fascinating essay. (Ditto for "ensmall" vs. "reduce".)
Yeah, as part of his advice in "Politics and the English Language," Orwell does say to break the rules he suggests to avoid saying anything "outright barbarous," which he might consider these. But I like them, so there.
Given the Galadriel example, I actually imagine Tolkien, who also had a similar preference for what he called "Old English", liking these words, given his pretty famous lack of aversion to neologism.
(Also, "embiggens" with an "m", due to phonological assimilation.)
Ah, yes, "m" for "n" for the sake of euphony. ;)
If you aren't familiar with Poul Anderson's essay "Uncleftish Beholding" - an "Anglo-Saxonized" description of Atomic Theory, but purged of all words derived from Greek (such as "atomic" and "theory") and Latin, it's worth looking up. You might get a kick out of it.
Thanks. Yeah, I've seen that. Fun, as is the broader "Anglish" movement.
I want to clarify that this is not my personally favored aesthetic: I enjoy Greek- and Latin-derived neologisms more than the next guy. But used sparingly, the Old English words add some nice variety.
"Embiggen" is a Simpsons reference, just in case anyone taking part in this conversation is unaware.
I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know.
The Civilization IV reference is fun, but I think the last chapter could have been called Tyler Cowen.
More than any other writer I know, he exemplifies the whole vibe of having fun being excellent while remaining modest and working to make the world better for everyone.
I think Nietzsche's distinction in relative value between master and slave morality is that master morality is pro life, seeks to fully unravel the potential in things, while slave morality is a product of being damaged, a curse at life. Nietzsche puts emphasis on the physiological weakness of the slave minded type (seperated from literal historical slavery), and calls it the mark of the declining type. He sees the spread of slave morality then as the end of history and dissolution of man, whereas master morality keeps building a bridge towards some future.
He's not exactly setting up a universal dichotomy, where morality is master or slave, either/or and you have to swallow one pill or the other. Rather they are historical phenomena, the two principle modes that come down to us by the particular path we've taken. Master morality then is superior inasmuch as it's forward and life loving, but it's not a terminus in the possibility space of morality.
The great task that he sets up in his Superman is the revaluation of values, the transcence of historical accidents in the development of morality. Master morality happens to have more to offer in his view, but I suspect he'd grant that is open to contention when in a less polemical mood. I think he'd argue that, given there are no moral facts, altruism may well be "good" but this cannot be straightly derived out of slave morality, it must be sanitised of underlying metaphysics, which really are masks for underlying psychology. On the other hand the virtues of master morality are more readily translated by the Superman. The master perspective that spurs elaborate arguments in favour of emenent greatness is more akin to where Nietzsche sees the transcendence of morality leading.
Lincoln had similar thoughts:
"...new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?--Never! Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.--It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs."
Next, an individualism for selfishness of the expanded (empathic) self –
https://www.quora.com/What-was-Ayn-Rand-wrong-about/answer/Mark-Frazier?ch=15&oid=124828&share=7f7edf25&srid=mU&target_type=answer
(More at https://is.gd/WhereTo )
I don't think I "skimmed" through "Atlas Shrugged", but I still hated the book, because Ayn Rand is simple a bad writer. Other people wrote about similar ideas way better (of more recent writers, Michael F. Flynn's "Firestar" series comes to mind). Her characters are cartoonish, her dialogues are childish and her sexual scenes are frankly off-putting (I guess maybe there is nothing wrong with rape fetish, but she's trying to sell it as The Only Right Way To Make Love - like she's trying to sell everything else). It's not bad for a religious text - which I firmly believe it is - but it's a bad book in every other sense. Also, I didn't get any feelings about positive-sum society from it. My reading of it is more like "Atlases of our world should be given free reign, and if it so happens that your puny little non-Atlas life is made worse by their actions, well, you're out of luck and deserve what's coming to you because you suck".
Now, I also have to object to "toxic slave morality of USSR". I know it's still popular to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end, but it seems like most people get their knowledge of Soviet culture from Cold War sources tinted with a heavy dose of propaganda. Or Ayn Rand herself. Soviet society always celebrated unique individuals - actors, scientists, sportsmen, no less than its Western counterpart. It just denied hyper-rewards for such individuals: top Soviet actors, for example, still lived in apartments (if a bit nicer than your ordinary worker), not in mansions behind high walls and security. Frankly, I can't say their acting was worse off for all that.
I guess you can say that while there was no "official" slave morality in USSR, the rules were set up in such way to actually encourage it, e.g. by writing a letter to NKVD/KGB about your more talented peer to cut them down. While I agree that this is true to some degree, I think all societies in all times had something like that - from reporting someone to Inquisition, to reporting to him to Un-American Activities, to reporting to HR for harassment, an individual talented at "office games" can always make life of someone more talented at actual work miserable. I guess it was easier in USSR for most of its existence, compared to contemporary Western countries, and it was detrimental to nation, but to call all of USSR "slave culture" because of that is an overreach.
While I agree that the love / fetish scenes are off putting, I don’t think there’s anything cartoonish about Rands character writing. The real world is filled with living weathervanes. When Orwell shows a crowd enthusiastically agreeing that we were always at war with Eastasia, was this cartoonish?
The Atlases of Rands world live by a code of specifically not making the world worse for random people just through their actions. If you don’t like the idea of working in Reardens steel mill, you aren’t forced to. Reality of course does not live up to such lofty expectations, but it never does for any utopia.
> I don’t think there’s anything cartoonish about Rands character writing
Well, at the very least, all her characters are "color-coded for your convenience" in the worst comic-book manner possible. All her positive heroes are beautiful and strong, while her villains are slovenly and dull. I expect such approach from children morning cartoon, or at best from pulp fiction novels. I mean, nothing wrong with having your main hero be lantern-jawed steel-eyed superman, but when EVERY character falls into one of two clearly defined visual categories, that's when you know the author either doesn't take her readers for intelligent people, or just can't do better herself. In Rand's case, it's the later, since her writing is generally bad. I mean, I've read Doc Savage novels as a child - they had better writing than Rand, despite literally being low-brow pulp fiction.
And her villains? They're comically evil. They don't twirl their mustaches only because mustaches already went out of fashion at the time of writing (or maybe Rand didn't know the word "twirl"). Look, a bunch of incompetents who managed to run a nation into the ground is not unusual, but there ARE ways to write them better. David-fucking-Weber managed it with rulers of Republic of Haven - and he's not what you call a heavyweight writer, and also has an agenda to sell.
And her heroes? Well, she sure does a lot of "tell, don't show". For all that they are supposed to be geniuses, we don't get a single good glimpse in what makes them so great at being inventors, or captains of industry, or whatever. Paul Anderson's Van Rijn, now that's a capitalist I can get behind. But Rand can't invent a good plan of action for a fictional situation in her own book. That's OK, neither can Becky Chambers - but Becky has other redeeming qualities, for example she can actually write interesting, nuanced and funny characters and dialogues. Not so Rand.
One can say what one likes about Rand's ideas, but as a writer, she's on the level of bad teenage fan-fiction. Then again, I don't think she ever attempted to write a good book, or make herself a better writer - it was never her primary occupation. She just wanted to write a parable - in religious sense - to explain her views to wider audience. Bible's pretty bad, too, as a book - rambling, inconsistent and self-repeating. It still doesn't appear to need a defense from critique as a work of art, so maybe neither does "Atlas Shrugged". I still hate that book, though.
I don’t believe that something written with simple morality or in the style of a parable is disqualified from being good literature. Sometimes heroes are plainly virtuous, and sometimes villains don’t have a complicated and sympathetic backstory. Again, I could point to Orwells writing for being parable like. Or going back further, there are stories like the Canterbury tales or epic poems like the epic of Gilgamesh, where heroes are frequently larger than life instead of “realistic.”
The Bible has many sections that are legalistic or genealogical in nature rather than being meant for pure reading, but dismissing the entire thing as bad literature smells of grade school contrarianism.
Well, I can't defend my view any further - I'm not a professional literature critic, and indeed I was, and remain very much "grade school contrarian", much preferring science fiction to classic works of literature. All I can say is that I, personally, found Rand's writing horrible even when compared to other authors I don't like, and so far nobody managed to change my mind on that.
And frankly, I don't get everybody's love of Orwell, too. He's not as bad as Rand, certainly - a professional writer, compared to amateur, but what's so great about his works? OK, "Animal Farm" is at least kind of funny, being a thinly-veiled satire. But I think "1984" is overhyped. Then again, I must admit I have a strong bias against all anti-Utopias. Unless author makes a very big effort to show me how it all works, and how it is sustainable for any long-ish period of time, I refuse to believe in anti-utopias, and since neither Neal Stephenson, nor Brandon Sanderson are in business of writing them, I'm yet to meet an anti-utopia which meets my criteria for beliveability. Utopias I can tolerate, because they're pleasant to read about (but they're very few and far between these days, so I admit I don't have a lot of experience with the genre - maybe only Ada Palmer's "Too Like Lightning" comes close).
Highbrow readings of 1984 place it as a work about the present rather than a future anti-utopia. Atlas shrugged is best enjoyed in a similar manner.
On Orwell and literary criticism, you might be interested in his critique of Tolstoy's critique of Shakespeare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lear,_Tolstoy_and_the_Fool
I hated Atlas Shrugged and have a low opinion of Rand's writing ability, but I had to read it in school so maybe there is some emotional baggage attached to that. Orwell had a much better representation of ideas in his writing with respect to propaganda and psychology, but I agree 1984 isn't that good as a story. It's much better as an illustration of methods for totalitarianism. Also, was Terra Incognota a utopia? The idea of Hives instead of nation states was utopian, but it only worked because a prostitute secretly groomed all of the leaders. As soon as this became public knowledge, they all started killing each other.
Terra Ignota was as close to Utopia as I could find in modern fiction, and that it was flawed only made it better (though not entirely realistic - Ada has some problems with hard sciences, and her flying cars are waaaay too hand-wavy and magical). It's a society I'd like to live in more than the current one, and that's a very rare case in sci-fi: most sci-fi societies are, at best, same-as-now-but-with-better-technology, but hers was uniquely different in its structure.
More importantly, while people in this book did start a war, it was unique (again, in sci-fi) in that there was no "bad" side to the story: all participants wanted a better future for humanity. Only their visions were so incompatible (mostly because of resources required to make them come true) that they still had to fight it out, even though "all sides had very fine people".
Not all of Rand's characters are black and white like that. Robert Stadler is one of the worst of them, but he has major sympathetic moments early on, and we see him betraying himself. Fred Kinnan is a labor racketeer, but he enjoying pointing out uncomfortable truths to the other schemers; he vetoes a proposal to have the death penalty in industry, and makes it stick; and he actually enjoys talking with John Galt, while acknowledging that Galt has no use for him. The Wet Nurse starts out being entirely on the wrong side, and over the course of the novel he changes his mind, largely out of admiration for Hank Rearden.
It's certainly true that Rand thinks that some things are objectively good, and some are objectively evil. But she does have characters who are in between, or who change. In fact, the essential struggle in the novel is between Dagny Taggart and John Galt—and she fights against changing sides to the bitter end.
I cannot share your view. I lately read Atlas Shrugged aloud to my wife (cover to cover, except that she asked me to skip over most of The Speech), and while we spotted flaws in the writing, we found it a pleasure to read as well. I think most basically I'd say that it's the single greatest pulp novel ever written—complete with the crucial scene where the master villain explains his great plan to the hero (structurally Dagny Taggart is the hero and John Galt is the villain).
Among other things, I would note the multiple characters who are NOT Atlases, but are treated with sympathy and made attractive—Jeff Allen, Cherryl Brooks (later Taggart), Gwen Ives, Eddie Willers, and Tony (nicknamed "the Wet Nurse"), whose death is a moment of real pathos.
A major part of the point of the book is that inversion, IMO.
Dagny and Hank start out seeing things fall apart and think this is a terrible thing that needs to be stopped. And they do their best! Originally, they think the thing destroying the world is the crazy and destructive set of ideas that are taking over everywhere. They're still trying to right the world by working harder and producing more, and expecting everyone to snap out of it and realize that the dominant ideology is obviously nuts. Hank says something at some point like "it's evil, so it will self-destruct sooner or later." The critical thing is that *if it were just the crazy broken ideology, they might actually manage it*. They don't know about the strike, which is sucking things down a lot faster. But if they knew, they'd oppose the hell out of it. You see this in the way both of them both recognize Francisco as a first rate person who ought to be their peer, and also are baffled by why such a smart and capable man lives the life of a useless playboy.
Francisco spends a lot of time basically giving Hank an advanced seminar in practical philosophy, in a way that is preparing him both to recognize places where he's accepted the crazy ideology of his society, and also to eventually understand point of the strike. But he doesn't tell either one about the strike early on, because they aren't ready for it--they'd both refuse to have anything to do with a strike at that point.
A big part of the novel is Hank and Dagny both ceasing to think in terms of "we've got to push back on whatever this crazy thing is that's destroying the world," and beginning to think more in terms of "why are we helping this monstrous system stay afloat?" And from there to "okay, maybe this strike idea makes sense." And eventually, they both end up joining the strike, after realizing there's nothing left they can save of the things they value in the outside world.
Yes. It's the same kind of reversal that Alan Moore used in the final installment of Watchmen. But Rand did it first.
I also remember reading that when she was writing it, she told Nathaniel Branden that she was writing a scene where the villains were torturing the hero of the novel, and Branden asked, "Do they want him to reveal how one of his inventions works?" And Rand said (probably with a big grin) "No, they want him to become the dictator of the United States." She was intentionally writing a thriller, and she seems to have taken delight in coming up with ingenious plot twists.
Dalton Trumbo was still quite successful even after being officially blacklisted.
The official "slave morality" (to the extent this term makes sense) wasn't in the material welfare or KGB letters. It was in the fact that everything that is important and worthy came from the Collective - spearheaded by the Party - and one could only ever strive and be worthy in serving the Party and the Collective. USSR was not free of lesser personality cults - people are people after all - so a famous actor gets their share of popular worship. But officially, all those achievements happened only - and this was explicitly emphasized at every opportunity, and woe to a popular star that forgets to mention it regularly - because they were parts of the Collective and only because of how well the Party was managing the Collective, and it could not happen any other way. As the popular saying went "The winter has passed and the summer is in - we thank the Party for that!" That approach permeated everything, and it's a diametrical opposite of Randian philosophy. If you could blame Randians for disregarding "non-Atlases", in USSR model there can be no individual existence at all, whether Atlantian or puny - you only exist when inside the Collective Matrix, and outside of it there's no meaningful existence worth being discussed at all.
To be sure, this is not exactly unique to the USSR - but in the USSR it definitely has been a very strong moral foundation. Which consequently necessitated other things - like if the Party says Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania, not only you must believe it - the mere fact you remember that yesterday it was otherwise makes you a deeply immoral person (and if they just declare you insane for that, you must consider it a mercy - a sick person could be potentially healed, a moral-less person has no worth at all).
While it is true that Soviet ideology emphasized collective, "you only exist when inside the Collective Matrix" sounds like a hostile interpretation to me, as Soviet people celebrated many individuals and their achievements. A less hostile interpretation is more like "I wish to thank my family, my colleagues and Jesus" kind of Oscar speech: when you achieve great things, don't forget you didn't do it alone, because no man since times prehistorical ever achieved anything without help of others.
That sounds like common sense to me, not a Christian exercise in humility: one did not avoid standing out, shying of all achievements and ascribing ones that happened to higher forces (which is how "slave morality" defined in this post, at least), but proudly proclaimed good things you did - just without forgetting others who helped you. Well, one must also address the Party thing - which is kind of Jesus, for it permeates all, but unlike Jesus, Party, at least, could be seen actually doing something for you: providing free education and medicine, funding your research, so even in that, it was different from Christian morality. Whether it actually hindered you more than it helped is a detail to be discussed in every case, but that's a wholly different question.
And anyway, that all was the official line. While people paid lip service to it, it barely did penetrate below society's surface - if it did, maybe USSR wouldn't have collapsed. Frankly, I never even heard this discussed when talking about "slave morality" or its cousin, "slave mentality", a very popular Russian liberal meme. Usually, it's exactly about the thing I'm talking about in my original post: that Russians hate anyone who rises above general level, wish to cut them down, and always believe their good fortunes are undeserved, because they could not be achieved through honest labor.
THAT is true, at least to some extent. When I see our former Customs Minister's property that takes several acres of previously free forest near my dacha, I feel a strong urge to join a mob and hang him on the nearest tree. USSR provided Russian people with what they wanted, in that respect: wealth disparity was comparatively small, often well hidden away even where it existed, and rarely inherited. My wife's grandmother worked as an engineer at an aerospace company, and her company's director's dacha was in the same community as hers, and the plot was the same (small) size, and while the house maybe was slightly better, it wasn't an opulent palace. Is this "slave morality" not to wish that nobody ever achieved anything, but to wish that people who achieved more than you in life only received fixed, or maybe linear rewards instead of exponential? By Nietzsche, probably yes, because it's certainly not "master morality", and there are only two variants. By Rand, this is an abomination, for sure. By the court of history, it certainly did not work well for USSR, in the end. But I think that rejection of all achievement and rejection of hyper-rewards are different things, and there is more to morality than Nietzsche saw.
Nietzsche scholar here (bona fides: an academic book and several journal articles on Nietzsche). I just want to note that Nietzsche is often misunderstood as defending master morality, or wanting it reinstated, or something like that. None of that is true. In fact, he describes the ancient nobles as so crude, unreflective, and unsymbolic as to be scarcely imaginable by moderns. After 1900 years of slave morality (Christianity, natch), our psychology is fundamentally altered. He writes in The Genealogy of Morals that “the bad conscience [guilt, a consequence of slave morality] is an illness, but as pregnancy is an illness.” We can’t go back to the old masters way of thinking, but we also need to get rid of slave morality, which he thinks is decadent (=anti-life] and fosters ressentiment. We need to give birth to something new.
One of the things Nietzsche is trying to do is undermine the idea that morality is immutable and absolute; instead moral concepts have changed and altered over time. In fact, slave morality flips master morality on its head: the old virtues of strength and dominance are no longer good, but now are seen as evil. The ancient dichotomy of good (strength, power) vs. bad (weakness, impotence) has been replaced with good (humility, poverty, chastity) vs. evil (strength, power). So when Nietzsche wants to move beyond good and evil, he is not talking about good vs. bad.
Nietzsche calls for a new kind of morality. He wants us to try different perspectives on living, to forge our own categorical imperative, to develop our own virtues. I should add that the idea of the übermensch is a weird one for Nietzsche: it is of utmost importance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but barely mentioned elsewhere. But the idea is of a world-affirming individual who has completely overcome the sickness of Christianity and can live in such a way that at the end of their lives they shout da capo! Do it all over again, without change or alteration. That’s what it means to embrace the eternal recurrence.
I’ve got no Nietzsche bona fides, but I like your reading of Nietzsche quite a lot: the goal is to live a life that one would be glad to live again if you had to live that life again and again eternally. No one can tell you what that life looks like; you have to discover what it looks like by trying out different modes of being and by reflecting honestly—unhindered in your thinking and reflections by the morals and values of others—on what works for you.
Thank you for this comment (and your others throughout this post). Nietzsche requires such a careful reading. His nuances and efforts at definition and specificity are absent in this post and in most of the comments. In our modern world that is his greatest weakness - he can be so easily misunderstood but has so many short quotable passages. Very easy for people to twist his writing however they please.
Where can one find this new morality?
In Nietzsche, you mean? Well, he tends to pick up a topic, put it down, then come back to it 20 pages later, or even in another book altogether. So there’s not a concise answer. Try Beyond Good and Evil and/or The Antichrist for a taste of his thinking.
Any Rand
"And second, you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too."
Well, no - the actual masters (as in literal masters who own literal slaves, and our thought naturally turns towards 1800s American South here) were rather more concerned with spreading slave morality, amongst their slaves! "Know your place", "don't get ideas" and so on, with the tall poppies cut down quite literally if necessary. In a hierarchical society like this, the whole idea of universally applicable morality would be implicitly or explicitly ludicrous; there's one set of morality for one class, another for the other one, and if this would seemingly conflict with an idea of universal moral values, well, eventually the friction between Christianity and slavery did indeed become too hard for many to bear, leading to a set of well-known historical events.
I'm reminded of an old Soviet joke: "Radio Yerevan is asked: in the future communist society, will we have money? We answer: the left revisionists think that we won't, the right revisionists think we will, but us orthodox communists know that the true answer is that some will and some won't."
I think that an under-appreciated aspect of slave morality in Nietzsche’s thinking, in the contemporary discourse around it, and in this (otherwise great) essay is the disingenuous, spoiled-grapes, ressentiment kind of thinking from which is arises: I can’t take revenge (even though I want to), so I’ll convince myself and others that forgiveness is a virtue; I can’t have sex (even though I want to), so I’ll convince myself and others that purity is a virtue; etc.
By contrast, a “master morality” would be based in the ability to clearly see and act upon one’s desires, whatever they may be … But who says they need to be cruel?!
I LOVE doing kind things for others. When my dad was in the hospital literally dying (I took him off life-support a week and a half later), a co-worker was freaking out because her older dad was having some stomach pains and wasn’t doing so well and probably needed a few small surgeries. My dad had been in the hospital a bunch of times throughout his life (mostly related to his alcoholism); I had some competence with the hospital system and doctors, so I shared some of that competence with her. I have found that Bayesian reasoning is very helpful for mitigating stress, so I walked her through a little lite Bayesian reasoning about her dad’s problems and chances, reminding her that her dad would, in all likelihood, be fine, and that if he wasn’t, well, we all gotta die sometimes, and at least he made it to an above-average-life-expectancy age, and obviously he lived a good life because his daughter loves him so much, and what more could you want from life? and blah, blah, blah.
My co-worker is a very nervous kind of person, so she found this all very helpful both pragmatically and emotionally, and to this day, we are good buddies (and her dad is still with us and doing just fine).
At the time we had our first talks about her dad, she didn’t know that my dad was in the hospital literally, actually dying (and to be fair, I didn’t KNOW if he was going to die either; I only knew that he was in a coma and that the prognosis from the neurologist was grim), and at no point in the conversation did I tell her what was going on. It felt great to be able to be there for my co-worker and add value to her life and help her to manage her emotions, and it felt even better to do that when I was in an analogous and objectively more difficult situation. It felt great NOT to make that conversation about me by sharing what was going on with my dad and just be there for her in the ways that I could.
This wasn’t a distraction from my problems or anything; I was thinking about my dad the whole
time I was talking to her—how could I not? But at no point did I want to bring him up. I wanted to help this person because I thought it would feel good to help her—and it DID feel good—and it felt even better to do so, knowing that my situation was actually worse than hers.
Anyway, my point is this: I happen to feel good when I do good, when I act upon my desires to do good, when I add value to other people’s lives, even when it’s difficult to do so. I don’t think I’m succumbing to slave morality by being kind. I think it’s *closer* to a master morality because I’m doing what I want to do—which just so happens to be acting kindly and generously toward other people, especially those I like.
I find Andrew Tate a repugnant person, but I do so not out of some secret, suppressed envy for him and his money and his Bugatti: I do so because none of those things appeal to me at all. I don’t know Andrew Tate and have no idea about the state of his psychology, but how many people chase the money and Bugatti not because they want them in themselves, not because they enjoy chasing those things, but out of a secret, suppressed envy for something else about the lives of the kind of people that have those things? Isn’t chasing money or women or cars of whatever *despite having a bad time doing so* just as much of a slave-morality move as anything else?
Anyway, I wish I had something deeper to say than “To thine own self be true” to say, but, like, seriously: I think our truest selves and our most authentically held desires—those things that
happen to make us feel good—are, for most of us, much weirder, much harder to follow, and probably much kinder than we give them credit for.
Even more so, I think that it can be VERY hard to figure out what’s a “true” desire and what’s just some internalized or disingenuous BS. But let me give you another example from my personal life: despite building a decent CV for myself, I have recently given up the goal of staying in academia for a whole bunch of complicated reasons that basically come down to me wanting to spend a majority of my time working on intellectual and artistic projects that I want to work on (whether or not they’re profitable or lead to professional success) and not wanting to compromise that goal. So I got a job as a waiter/bartender, moved into my friend’s basement, and now split my time between working at the restaurant (part-time), spending time with my drug-addled friends, working on my dissertation/ research, and working on my artistic pursuits. I live in a low-cost-of-living city in the Midwest, so I’m not acquiring much wealth but I have more than enough money, and I’ve never been happier. I love working in the restaurant, love my dissertation/ research, love my artistic pursuits, love my dirty, smelly, drug-addled, hippy friends.
My mom can’t brag about me the way she used to when I seemed to be on a fast-track toward something that looks like “success” in the eyes of the boring, professionalized, middle-class types that she desperately wants to impress. But to hell with them: I have one life, and I’m going to live it the way I want to live it—which, for me (to my
utter surprise, honestly) happens to involve living in a basement in a small Midwestern city, making art, working on my dissertation, hanging out with my friends and customers, and doing kind, loving things for people that I like when I get the chance to do so.
And that’s ultimately my point, I think: deliberating over what is and is not master vs. slave morality is, I think, misguided slave-morality thinking. If there is such a thing as master morality, I think it involves following the desires one *happens* to have and approaching/ seeking whatever *happens* to feel good. For me, it happens to feel good to be kind and helpful to others, to be a basement-dweller, to be the stereotype of the over-educated humanities scholar who’s waiting tables. And I know from personal experience how genuinely wonderful it is to seek out whatever happens to feel good, regardless of whatever that thing happens to be.
I’d like to pick up on the passing comment, near the start of this post, that Nietzsche thought slave morality originated with the Jews. If that is so, it can only reflect the extent to which his Christian upbringing and cultural environment distorted his (and his followers’) understanding. Jewish morality is very much based on actions, not beliefs, which would put it in the “enbiggedness” camp. And the emphasis on enlittleling (humility, sacrifice etc) is very much a Christian thing, used through the ages to demonstrate their superiority to the Jews that they had replaced — it’s the core of antisemitic supercessionism.
Paul made Christianity for gentiles, but he didn't invent it.
Nietzsche repeatedly and in several places praises the Jews as a group, especially in contrast to German nationalists. He does call out some Jewish individuals for criticism, especially St. Paul, but admires others, like Spinoza and (with some qualification) Jesus.
Plainly false. He wrote next to nothing after the onset of his insanity, and the only thing from that time I can think of that refers to the Jews is "I am having all the anti-Semites shot. --Dionysus"
He's pointedly talking about historical Jews, distinct from Jews of his day.
The argument he makes, to my reading, isn't exactly that they invented slave morality, it's clearly in primitive form the psychology of the downtrodden and weak. Nietzsche says the innovation of the Jews was to invert values, to take the bad in the morality of the oppressor and make it good, and further to tie this to a belief that judgement will come in the afterlife, and one day the world will end and all will come to that judgement.
With this you have a memetic virus, in modern terms, which became Christianity, and has mutated into the pathologies described in the article, spreading and undermining the possibility of pure master morality that could contend with it, or the possibility of transcending that dichotomy.
> The argument he makes, to my reading, isn't exactly that they invented slave morality, it's clearly in primitive form the psychology of the downtrodden and weak. Nietzsche says the innovation of the Jews was to invert values, to take the bad in the morality of the oppressor and make it good, and further to tie this to a belief that judgement will come in the afterlife, and one day the world will end and all will come to that judgement.
I'm not sure how that squares with the foundational Jewish myth that they are the one true God's chosen people, and therefore have a unique responsibility to the world to literally complete the work of God. It doesn't get much more masterful than that.
Note also how Jews were often hated for their *success* in the societies they lived in. They did stuff and they were good at it, too good for their envious neighbors.
I agree it's not self evidently the correct take. I think his reply would roughly be that believing you're chosen but repeatedly getting squashed by the power of the day makes you a little demented. I recall he said something to the effect that they uniquely held out against complete dissolution, where every similar people faded away, by inventing the inversion of values.
He was very explicit in saying he wasn't talking about modern Jews mind you, he praised them for just what you're saying about their successes and denounced the petty envy going around in his day. i think you can easily tease out from the above that the condition he's talking about doesn't apply to modern Jews any more than Frenchman are traumatised by Caesar.
I think that last bit only applies to Ashkenazi Jews rather than ones earlier in history.
Jewish morality may be about action on the individual level (although often ritualistic action) but the story of the Jewish people in the Bible and in much of history is that of a people who are promised triumph but who fail, and who still believe they are God’s people. This is how the ”slave morality” develops.
Or, to quote a recent New Yorker essay
”And the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is, perhaps, unique on the planet inasmuch as it is, as the scholar Jacob L. Wright suggests in his new book, “Why the Bible Began” (Cambridge), so entirely a losers’ tale. The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts.
…
In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/why-the-bible-began-an-alternative-history-of-scripture-and-its-origins-jacob-l-wright-book-review
That is quite early in the Bible, after a certain point they are continually dominated by others.
In haste, because this was only meant to be a short visit: what you write has zero resonance. It’s a very Christian take on Judaism. The Hebrew bible had a different text (and translation) than the Christian ‘old’ testament and — most important — the way it is read and engaged with is different. The burden of being ‘chosen’ is not about being winners or losers, it’s about accepting that humans always have a choice and must responsibility for their choices.
Well, for what it’s worth both Adam Gopnik and apparently also Jacob Wright are Jewish.
I don’t know whether it’s a ”Christian” take anyway, it is a kind of historical analysis.
Christian as in culturally Christian, and influenced by the ideas/assumptions that become ‘common sense’ when it is the dominant culture. Individual Jews think all kinds of things, they are not a unified block.
Well, it’s an interpretation of history that Christians or Jews or non believers can apparently find convincing at least in parts, so it has more than ”zero resonance”.
A good rule of thumb when reading Nietzsche is that wherever he says "Jews," he is actually talking about "Christians." The whole thing makes a lot more sense if you read it that way.
I think this way of writing was supposed to be provocative, but of course it was extremely common for readers to come away from his books thinking "Yeah, these Jews really are a problem!" Nietzsche knew people would misinterpret him in this way, but he wrote like that anyway because he was more than a little bit of an edgelord. ("haha, look at those idiots who think I'm saying antisemitism is good! antisemites are so dumb, literal lol.")
That would make it make more sense! Perhaps it’s an early example of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ conflation which became more popular in the mid-20th century.
It's also important to remember that "Jews" can mean ethnic jews, judaism as a religion, or judaism as a political entity. Nietzsche switches between these various uses without making it clear which he is talking about.
The post and these discussions want to be big picture groks of the whole world. That's fine. I'm fine with that. We need that type of written work. But the lack of discussion about normal compassion and empathy and, hey, even noblesse oblige is a huge hole. Someone has to have concerns about normal people at some margin. A world which adopts Hanania-ism, or Effective Altruism, Tall Poppyism, or the liberal-Nietzsche compromise full stop is going to get destroyed by its blind spots pretty badly. So I think we need the caveat to this whole essay. We are talking about moving society 10-20% more in some direction, not going FULL GODZILLA on one these -isms.
> "Some kind of shock jock, saying “Note to unattached liberal women above 40: you are ugly hags who have lost your chance with men and all your eggs have dried up and nobody will ever value you anymore, you should either beg for some fat alcoholic guy to take you in since that’s the only man you can get, or resign yourself to being a cat lady growing old with nothing to do but dwell on your regrets and what could have been.” Outside of 4chan, there’s a sort of universal alliance against these people, which the rest of us join immediately and unconsciously. Is this the dreaded “herd” of “slave morality”? If so, long live the herd."
But what if the core of this advice to [straight cics] unattached liberal women above 40 actually is *objectively* far more useful than not?
The herd's rejection of this "bullying" does nothing to "correct" the priorities of the very, very large population of straight cis men who are disinterested in women over 40. The herd might say, "that's mean!", but it doesn't have the power to force straight cis men to be equally attracted to female 40-somethings as they are to female 20-somethings. There are indeed actual women whom *only* fat alcoholic guys are interested in because appealing men can do better with cute 20-somethings, and cute 20-somethings don't need to put up with fat alcoholics.
The herd can object to the sneering tone, perhaps (although the tone itself provides important information about how unapologetically these women will be swiped-left), but it behooves 40 year old unattached straight cis women to acknowledge the reality of the core observation. The herd can't provide any meaningful help to these women, it can only condescend with false hope to make itself feel better about the slow-moving decay of these women's lives.
Signed,
A 44 year old politically-nonbinary not-hard-bodied cis straight unattached woman whose experience dating at 44 is *extremely different and inferior* to dating at 39, and 35.
P.S. - That initial knee-jerk reaction you, Dear Reader, had to the identity of the person writing this comment is proof that the 4Chan bully is essentially correct in his assessment.
What does "politically nonbinary" mean in this context?
It's a joke I've shamelessly stolen from a comedian to identify myself as not having (and explicitly rejecting) political tribe affiliation.
Is the comedian Arielle Isaac Norman? She appears to be a terf. I'd recommend not using that joke.
I actually don't remember where it came from - I listen to a lot of comedians' podcasts - but my secondary reason for using it is to repel the people who would be offended by it, so I have it on dating profiles and whatnot. It saves time if people who require leftist orthodoxy self-select out before we waste any of one another's time.
Let me rephrase then - you shouldn't use it for the same reason you shouldn't use "Politically Mulatto" as a white person.
No thanks. It's the most literally accurate way to describe myself. Please remember that, unlike the word "mulatto," the phrase has many use cases and isn't exclusive to describing gender.
And FWIW, your hypothetical isn't great; "Politically Mulatto" doesn't work either as a joke or an accurate label (beliefs were imposed by one's parents, are a mixture of two ideologies, and are unchangeable?).
Again, repelling the people who would be offended by my use of the word is a feature, not a bug. Its use is a considered and deliberate choice, as it saves time for everyone. My friends who use the phrase to describe their gender are my friends in part because they aren't the kind of people who would be bothered by me using it both literally and as a joke to describe my politics. I don't want to socialize or become emotionally intimate with the people who would be offended by it.
I'm a cishet(tish) man and therefore also hated by TERFs.
I think I'm going to steal it.
William Shockley was a bad guy; I still use my iPhone.
TERFs are good though, and being politically non-binary makes far more sense than being sexually non-binary.
A couple of things here. Firstly, there's a huge difference between "men find 20-somethings more attractive than 40-somethings" and "no men are interested in 40-somethings, so the only people who will date them are fat alcoholics settling for what they can get". Realistically, in my experience, most people date within a few years of their own age.
Secondly, I don't want to go too far into the lived experience vs lived experience thing, but I'm a man who's about to turn 40, and the women I know who are a few years older than me have not suddenly turned unattractive to me.
Finally: phrasing. In the hypothetical quote above, the speakers abandons all pretence of offering tough-but-honest advice when he uses the phrase "ugly hags". Fuck him.
Everyone is aware there are exceptions to any absolute statement about huge populations. There are lots of anecdotes about successful age gap relationships between younger men and "older" women (although "older" in this context is almost always between 25-40, so not necessarily *old* in terms of visual cues of fertility). It's a very popular porn category (although, again, "step-mom" is usually well under 35).
Sure.
But is that helpful for 40+ women? "Hey, don't worry about this obvious phenomena, YOU could be the exception! Just keep dreaming and swiping!"
There are endless studies and statistics you can find on the topic which support the common sense observation that the older women get, the smaller the population of men want them.
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whats-the-average-age-difference-in-a-couple/). I think you're right that Scott's hypothetical shock jock's use of "ugly hags" isn't productive, but mostly because it gives people an out to dismiss him entirely.
I don't think the situation I'm describing is the exception? I'm not saying lots of men want much older women (I know that situation is fairly rare), I'm saying that most people date within striking distance of their own age. Your source, if I'm reading the graph right, seems to bear this out, with mean age gaps for mixed gender couples (in either direction, I think?), increasing from about 2 years at 20 to about 5 as you approach 50.
That looks to me like people seeing age gaps as less as a big deal as they get older, which seems to work. A 19yo dating a 24yo is noteworthy, a 50yo dating a 45yo is not.
What it doesn't seem to show is middle-aged men in large numbers ignoring middle-aged women so they can date 20-somethings (or at least hold out in the hopes of doing so), which is what you seem to be saying, unless I'm misreading you.
I'm not saying that women don't become attractive to fewer men as they age. I agree that happens. I'm saying it seems to be gradual, and not enough to doom middle-aged women. There's separate data showing a lot of men on dating sites pursuing very young women regardless of their own age, but as that doesn't meet up with observable dating patterns, I think that's about chasing one-night stands (and wishful thinking, in many cases).
If you are a woman who wants kids, biology imposes some fairly harsh limits on you. Biology imposes some limits on men, too, but not so harsh. I think most 50 year old men can have kids without too much trouble, whereas almost no 50 year old women can do so.
Similarly, if you are a woman who wants a romantic and sexual relationship, you're going to be attractive to a much wider range of men at 30 than at 40, and at 40 than at 50. Romance can and does happen later, but it's likely to be harder to find, given that most men react to attractiveness and find the average 30 year old woman a lot more attractive than the average 50 year old woman.
The first part is true, obviously, and places a hard limit on women but not men. But is the second part any less true of men than women? I'm agnostic on this. I guess you could say that facial attractiveness is higher up the priority list for men than women (or for people who are attracted to women than people who are attracted to men?), so that could mean aging is harsher on women in this respect.
You've captured the appeal of 4chan perfectly. It's a place where kernels of truth are exaggerated and distorted almost beyond recognition. I say "almost" for a reason; not everyone can get over the brutish ugliness, but it's a refreshing experience for those who can. Whereas in real life people have to deny offensive truths, on 4chan people do the complete opposite and blow them out of proportion. It's refreshing in a way.
If it helps you feel better, keep in mind that 4chan exaggerates. So while it might be true that your dating experience at 44 is far inferior than it was at 35, it's likely not as bad as 4chan says it is.
Oh, I'm not personally wounded by 4chan, nor the 4chan approach. My young adult social circle was comprised mostly of men, and our bonding ritual was making highly-personalized ostentatiously "cruel" jokes at one another's expense as a kind of perpetual mental-toughness-training-and-trust-fall exercise. I can't even conceive of a personal insult directed at me that would "hurt my feelings."
Scott didn't make it clear if he was objecting to the tone of the shock jock 4-chan types or the observation. The tone? Well, I still think the tone is useful for understanding how emphatic dudes can be when they swipe left; but I can see how it isn't productive.
If it's the observation - if Scott agrees the herd should reject Hoe Math's less sneering and more supported observations (https://www.youtube.com/@hoe_math/videos) merely because that observation is going to be hurtful to many - fuck the herd.
About Tate and wanting to have a negative opinion of him. It’s not like pre Christian ancient people couldn’t have contempt for rapists or criminals or tyrants. Consider the rape of Lucretia, which is the founding story of the Roman republic.
Andrew Tate is a phenomenon of a liberal society that has values like respect for women but is too weak to enforce them. (Well, he is maybe going to prison, but it is taking a long time.)
What a glorious post. Thank you Scott.
>But something about Trump’s style makes him wildly popular.
He has the courage to disagree even with his followers. He tells them that COVID vacciness were a great achievement of his administration and he is boosted. They boo and he just does not care.
I'm confused by how you fit architecture into the master/slave dichotomy. Isn't the contempary "starchitect" a Nietzschean master, expressing himself in his buildings, while the traditional architect follows conventions?
"But also, his impulsive temper and fragile ego are bad qualities even by the standards of master morality.
And his violence, misogyny, and boastfulness are bad qualities by any morality with even the smallest consideration for altruism and common decency."
Dear God, I've tried my best to avoid learning anything about Andrew Tate, and now you're forcing me to equate him with Achilles:
"Compare Achilles (master morality) to some of the early Christian saints (slave morality). Achilles wants personal glory. He seeks personal glory by being the best - the strongest, the most handsome, the most skilled in warfare - and by doing great deeds of renown. He had the most beautiful armor, the hottest women, and the best soldiers. When Agamemnon offended him, he was willing to let all of Greece perish to piss him off and restore his honor."
Impulsive temper and fragile ego? Check. Achilles is prepared to let the Greek war effort flounder and fail because he feels slighted.
Violence, misogyny, and boastfulness? Also check. What is the reason Achilles is squabbling with Agamemnon? Over Briseis, his slave that is taken from him by Agamemnon as compensation for Agamemnon's own loss of his property:
"In the first book of the Iliad, during the distribution of the booty, she was given to Agamemnon as a sex slave by unanimous decision, in view of his kingly office. He bragged that he preferred her as a bed-mate to his wife Clytemnestra, because of her figure, her grace, and her skill at domestic tasks. Her father, the priest of Apollo, came to the Achaeans' beachhead bearing the god's sacred symbols and offered the Mycenaean king and his army gifts of gold and silver. Although the other warriors were eager to accept the ransom, Agamemnon rejected it. He treated the old man without the proper respect due to a priest, taunting him crassly with the image of the girl forever sharing his bed in distant Achaea, and sending him away rudely with threats of violence. Chryses, afraid, went apart and prayed on the beach for revenge. Apollo heard his prayer and, by means of his silver arrows, sent a plague sweeping through the Greek armies, so that Agamemnon was forced to give Astynome back in order to save his men from the disease. He sent Odysseus to return the maiden to Chryses. Agamemnon compensated himself for this loss by taking Briseis from Achilles. The offended Achilles refused to take further part in the Trojan War."
"According to her mythology, Briseis was the daughter of Briseus and an unnamed mother. She had three full brothers who died in the sack of Lyrnessus.
In the Iliad, Achilles led the assault on Lyrnessus during the Trojan War, and slew several of the men in her family. She was subsequently given to Achilles as a war prize. In the Mycenaean Greek society described in the Iliad, captive women like Briseis were slaves and could be traded amongst the warriors."
Nobody very much cares about the women as women and wives of others; now they are war booty and can be treated as property, and their feelings or wishes are not taken into account. Were it not that Chryseis was lucky enough to be the daughter of the priest of Apollo, who could invoke the god to help him, she would have to remain as the slave of the king with few to no rights over her own life.
"When Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix visit Achilles to negotiate her return in book 9, Achilles refers to Briseis as his wife or his bride. He professes to have loved her as much as any man loves his wife, at one point using Menelaus and Helen to complain about the injustice of his "wife" being taken from him. This romanticized, domestic view of their relationship contrasts with book 19, in which Briseis herself speaks. As she laments Patroclus' death, she wonders what will happen to her without his intercession on her behalf, saying that Patroclus promised her he would get Achilles to make her his legal wife instead of his slave.
In book 19 of the Iliad, Achilles makes a rousing speech to the Achaean soldiers. He publicly declares that he will ignore his anger with Agamemnon and return to battle. During his speech, Achilles says he wishes Briseis were dead, lamenting that she ever came between Agamemnon and himself.[12] This contrasts his own statements in book 9."
Achilles' sexual reputation wasn't any too noble, either:
"Troilus is an adolescent boy or young man, the son of Hecuba, queen of Troy. As he is so beautiful, Troilus is taken to be the son of the god Apollo. However, Hecuba's husband, King Priam, treats him as his own much-loved child.
A prophecy says that Troy will not fall if Troilus lives to the age of twenty. So the goddess Athena encourages the Greek warrior Achilles to seek him out early in the Trojan War. Troilus is known to take great delight in his horses. Achilles ambushes him and his sister Polyxena when he has ridden with her for water from a well in the Thymbra – an area outside Troy where there is a temple of Apollo.
The Greek is struck by the beauty of both Trojans and is filled with lust. It is the fleeing Troilus whom swift-footed Achilles catches, dragging him by the hair from his horse. The young prince refuses to yield to Achilles' sexual attentions and somehow escapes, taking refuge in the nearby temple. But the warrior follows him in, and beheads him at the altar before help can arrive. The mourning of the Trojans at Troilus' death afterward is great.
This sacrilege leads to Achilles’ own death, when Apollo avenges himself by helping Paris strike Achilles with the arrow that pierces his heel."
Even if you discount the "killed because he wouldn't put out" part, Troilus was targeted for death even though he was very young and a non-combatant (in the temple) and it was by ambush, not a fair fight. So sneaky backstabbing and sacrilege to boot, as well as what is probably actual rape and treatment of women as things not people, *is* "master morality", and Tate is fine by those rules.
"Hanania is terrible at being right-wing. He’s pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, and supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump. As with Donald Trump, he’s living proof that right-wingers will welcome anyone sufficiently offensive without caring about their policy positions."
Well, I always thought I was right-wing, and I can't *stand* Hanania, so I mustn't be Doing Right-Wingedness Right then 😁
Ozy's value about "I want to help others"? That's still slave morality; the master doesn't care about 'helping' others, save as it is in his own interest or part of the web of social obligations of his status to his peers.
Stunned by this paragraph from the Bulldog's post:
>Where do the moral facts come from? Nowhere, just like numbers, modal facts (e.g. the fact that contradictions are impossible), logical facts, other mathematical facts, metaphysical facts, and whatever the first physically existent thing was.
He just... came out and said it.
Brett Anderson makes the point that Bulldog's worldview has no possible explanation for why his beliefs about what objective morality is, and Bulldog responds with "But I don't get why you'd want to be able to explain my moral beliefs rationally. It's obviously better to be a mindless sheep, who can no more conceive the possibility of the ingroup's fashionable values being wrong than of a square circle."
I imagine Nietzsche is looking down and saying "I told you so" right about now.
This is a fantastic piece, and I have nothing smart to say about the actual substance, but I hope it slightly eases one of the conflicts in the middle if I say that Andrew Tate was a mediocre kickboxer at best. Kickboxing "world" titles vary wildly in quality due to the number of promotions, and none of Tate's were good (for one, he beat a 43-year-old who'd won 1 of his previous 7 fights). He also just looks like he kinda sucked. Crisis averted!
(Maybe I'm proving the whole "cutting down the big arrogant men" thing of slave morality, but then I think this also supports that it can be a good thing when they're frauds)
Right, if we're going to admire Andrew Tate for his kickboxing skills then we must also admire the many other kickboxers who are better. And I couldn't possibly name another kickboxer.
Know slightly more about MMA and kinda Muay Thai, but can't go wrong with being a Giorgio Petrosyan appreciator or something
By kickboxing terms, Andrew Tate literally just some guy, which is why I assume he stopped kickboxing and decided to go into less noble pursuits
Admire Barnabas Katona. Besides winning a lot and even briefly holding a world record at that, when he retired and became a trainer he started training the elderly, fat people, blind people, Downs people because he believes that sport is for everybody.
I dunno. An an ex WAKO, we have always envied the ISKA's sheer size (and money). Doesn't that imply more competitors and thus harder to win?
My understanding is that a bunch of promotions became a lot less important after K1 got big (early 2000s), and ISKA was one of them - after that point, the belts aren't really defended regularly. Also, it's worth noting that his ISKA title was in full-contact - so the ruleset is a lot different from what we understand as kickboxing from the real elites
So yeah, it isn't literally nothing, but in the grand scheme of "guy who tries to sell manhood based on his kickboxing prowess", basically any kickboxer we've heard of had more kickboxing prowess
Correction: 1880s. In the 1890s Nietzsche was a living corpse propped up by his sister for photo ops.
Once again, Scott verbalizes something many of us have felt, but does so approximately 100 times better than I could have done. In my opinion, this essay immediately enters the SSC/ACX canon alongside e.g. Meditations on Moloch or I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup. Bravo!
Boring technical point that no one else will care about, but Andrew Tate is not a 'world champion kickboxer' or even a particularly 'very good kickboxer'. Kickboxing is famously scattered into dozens of competing tiny organizations, similar to powerlifting, and of course the 'champion' of each 20 or 30-athlete org calls themselves a 'world champion'.
The org he supposedly won a belt in, the ISKA, is definitely one of the smaller and less serious kickboxing orgs out there. They are a branch of 'full contact' karate, not actual kickboxing per se. If he had won a title in say K-1, Glory, or It's Showtime, he would have bragging rights, but instead I'd say he was briefly the biggest fish of a very small talent pool. Here's a comment from someone that follows kickboxing much more than me https://x.com/lucas_bourdon/status/1608501322298363906
On a personal note, I find him hilariously uncharismatic and surprisingly dorky
More typos:
> Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t.
They're not doing *what* to serve you? An "it" or "that" would suffice, to refer to the previous sentence.
There's also a full stop missing somewhere between sentences, but for the life of me I can't find it again.
I think buried deep in culture of Indian and European society is the idea that the Nietzschean strong ideals come from steppe raiders while slave morality is for farmers/peasants/slaves/natives who do productive work and are connected to nature particularly plant life.
I guess it can tie in with Against the Grain and various parts of Margaret Murray's theories on matriarchal neolithic farmers (though significantly debunked).
A quick read of the Babyeater chapters from Eliezer Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide clearly indicates that any humanlike species could easily end up forming a dominant morality around either
1. Human genetic diversity: the winners of the genetic lottery have something like more RAM or neuron density, and are therefore able to go out into the world and do things, and also think complex thoughts unlike the losers of the genetic lottery, who are doomed to a life of powerlessness and simple thoughts. These winners (elites) are surrounded by the losers (commoners) because genetic diversity implies that unhelpful gene combinations are far more common than extremely helpful ones. Culture forms from elites because they think complex thoughts, and after several generations of being surrounded by roundaboutly mediocre yet self-important commoners, morality ends up revolving around this contrast, and therefore morality ends up thoroughly downstream of human genetic diversity
2. Progress: civilizations with elites and culture that revolves around playing and winning social games (or class struggle) are zero-sum, whereas elites and cultures focused on progress are positive sum. Civilizations are measured by their output rather than how cool their members think their civilization is, so high-output civilizations expand the fastest and they get more stable critical masses of culture, so they're more likely to get intellectualism and logically enlightened culture instead of culture that focuses on the contrast between elite and commoner (e.g. pretty paintings, music, statues, poetry, etc). Morality forms around progress because those civilizations inherit the earth, and commoners also benefit massively from the continuousl OOMs of progress/output because it would be weird for elites to hoard 100% of the benefits instead of 99%.
3. A wide variety of other purity spirals that satisfy the human brain/instincts but in other directions, such as Wokeness.
Wonderful essay, exploring a deep tension in moral philosophy.
As FLWAB noted with a Chesterton quote, the reconciliation between the best of "Master" and "Slave" moralities (and the Terminal Value for which Scott rightfully searches) are found in the person of Christ. He willingly submitted to a horrible death, taking all the punishment deserved for human sin upon Himself -- and God exalted Him to the highest place. He is both the sacrificial lamb and the sovereign lion; the meek rabbi riding a donkey and the conquering King riding a white horse. And every life which the EAs nobly strive to save has value precisely because all men and women are made in God's image. Only those who acknowledge His sovereignty may enter His kingdom, but in that place not one cup of water given to the thirsty will fail to receive a reward.
The renowned philosopher Michael Scott seems to have summed up the utilitarian harm coefficient when he said "don't ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you've been... ever, for any reason whatsoever..." And yet, as a successful business executive, he clearly encouraged risk-taking among his subordinates, as shown by his fondness for that old Wayne Gretzky quote “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Maybe he was the ubermensch all along.
I don't think "Slave morality, except you're allowed to be a particularly good slave" is much of an improvement over anything except "Slave morality, and you aren't allowed to be a better slave".
Compared to that, yes, it's definitely an improvement. But if that's the best deal on offer, well, I'm going back to playing video games.
That, I think, is the thing. The morality can't just be "You're -allowed- to be great." It needs the idea that being great is, well, great; that you can, in fact, build cool stuff for no other reason than that you want there to be cool stuff. As soon as you yoke it to "As long as it makes other people better off" you've derailed the train and we're back to arguing over whether or not it should be allowed - does this person's greatness leave everybody better off, or should we cut them down?
This is one of your best essays ever. I am going to likely reread and meditate on this many times.
I've come to think that The Fountainhead is the key to Rand's view of Nietzsche. Not just because she originally planned to use a quotation from him as its epigraph, but because of its major conflict between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand. Wynand really is something of a Nietzschean overman: born in the slums, he educated himself, became a successful newspaper publisher, is hugely rich, and besides that, is a lethally skilled fighter and superb in bed. And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power. I see this as the debate between the Nietzschean Rand and the Aristotelian Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged. (If you read Aristotle's account of the megalopsychos or "great-souled man," it's almost a perfect fit to what Rand says about Roark.)
I'd also note the scene where Roark asks Wynand to move so that he can have the sun on his back. That seems plausibly like the famous meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes, with Wynand as Alexander, the conqueror, and Roark as Diogenes, the self-sufficient man (though fortunately Roark doesn't have some of Diogenes's less attractive habits). I suspect Rand of making a little joke . . .
>And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power
No, the point is exactly the opposite! Roark is a model overman, embodying will to power -- not power in the vulgar sense of political influence, but in the Nietzschean sense of mastery over his own will. Wynand represents a *failed* overman, who had a mind capable of transvaluing all values, but instead chose to debase himself and become a slave to public opinion.
I think that's making too fine a distinction. It doesn't seem to be the case that will to power is characteristic only of the overman; will to power is characteristic of the masters, and even of the slaves—slave morality being a means for the slaves to gain power. I'm tempted to say that in Nietzschean terms, Roark represents sublimated will to power, and Wynand represents the unsublimated form. But isn't it the case that both master morality and slave morality are forms of the self-overcoming of will to power, and thus are already sublimated?
But I don't think Rand is thinking in Nietzschean terms. I think she understands "will to power" much more straightforwardly, as the desire to control others; and she sees Roark as someone who doesn't have that desire, not as someone who has it and has sublimated it. For all that Sciabarra analyzes Rand as a dialectical thinker, I think Rand is a less subtle thinker than Nietzsche, and all his dialectics is alien to her.
That was also my interpretation of Gail Wynand when I read The Fountainhead. But, and it surprised me to learn this, Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand's heir) said in no uncertain terms that Wynand isn't supposed to represent Nietzsche's philosophy. Because, he says, Nietzsche rejected the validity of reason while Wynand doesn't. Wynand just thinks it doesn't apply to human beings at large. Which would also explain why he runs a trashy newspaper.
Source for Peikoff's statement: https://peikoff.com/2011/07/11/does-gail-wynand-represent-nietzsches-philosophy-is-he-a-nietzschean-hero/
I’m glad you had a footnote about sports being a clear exception needing likely expansion. When I was young, I loved the Olympics (16 Days of Glory about the 84 games is amazing and worth watching even now). I then fell out of love with them (and lots of other sports) and only in my burgeoning middle age do I find myself attracted to both once again. Watching Olympic highlights the last couple of days with my 3 and 6 year old kids has been incredibly joyful. Watching excellence and competition and seeing it celebrated really is an antidote to much of what we experience in the modern world.
You’ve also done a masterful job of explaining Yglesias’s appeal. He isn’t self loathing, like so much of the left. Good things are good and 1 Billion Americans are so antithetical to the degrowth mindset that Yglesias was outcast from the mainstream left and yet is more popular than ever. He intuits the basic human desire for greatness and pairs it with specific policy proposals that would allow us to grow and achieve more.
Yglesias wants to combine European scholastic welfarism with mass low iq immigration to create a giant Venezuela out of America.
He wrote gigantic essay on education reform that didn’t mention the null hypothesis or IQ and concluded that you know that status quo is good just some minor changes that wouldn’t piss the teachers union off much and definitely we can’t have school vouchers.
He barely managed to squeeze out one kid with his frumpy wife and he’s criticizing men with many kids and hot wives. Apparently his “growth mindset” doesn’t even apply to growing his family.
This is your superman?
Ozzy Brennan's "living person" goals and your "repetitive melodies" reminded me of the lyrics of Joni Mitchell's "All I Want":
I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along
I wanna belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive
Do you want, do you want, do you wanna dance with me, baby?
Do you wanna take a chance
On maybe finding some sweet romance with me, baby?
Well, come on
All I really, really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you too
All I really, really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you
I wanna talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause, life is our cause
When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws
Queuing up Blue, on vinyl of course, before I read the next comment.
"After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?), something flipped"
I think it was brewing for a while in response to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution -- the Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, after all. The double whammy of WWI and the Great Depression made "slave morality" mainstream. In the US I think there was a brief period of resurgence of "master morality" after WWII, when it seemed like limitless energy and flying cars were right around the corner. The threat of nuclear war, the growth of environmentalism, and the failure to achieve some of the more fanstastical technological feats (where are those flying cars, again?) put an end to that resurgence.
I just saw a prototype of an electric flying car. Battery life: 40 minutes.
Zarathustra here.
I thought I had been clear that when I talked about "Übermensch", I was talking about an A.I.:
"I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just the same shall man be to the Übermensch: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any ape. Even the wisest among you is only a conflict and hybrid of plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants? Behold, I teach you the Übermensch! The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a going under."
On a related note :-)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs/comment/7010254
I really like this post. I'm not sure I agree with all your interpretations of Nietzsche, but that's not really what you're writing about. It reminded me of two books that you might find interesting and directly relevant to this problematic, without so much Nietzsche baggage.
First, Alisdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue," which in a rather interesting way makes a compelling case for a similar ethical transformation in Western culture without the master/slave meta-narrative. "Good things are good" would be a decent subtitle.
Second, Max Scheler's "Ressentiment," which is the book that might have been my decisive break with "leftist" politics of my educated/academic/humanities mileu--along the same fault lines you address in the post. If the title doesn't make it clear, he's explicitly thinking about Nietzsche, though Scheler's connection with phenomenological tradition can make him a bit opaque without that background.
Scott reviewed After Virtue a long time ago and gave it a very negative review. (I personally thought the book was illuminating).
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/10/book-review-after-virtue-or-somebody-here-is-really-confused-and-i-just-hope-its-not-me/
Woah, I can't believe I missed that one. It's strange; I'm left asking if Scott really read the same book I did.
I found the discussion of dead people's life goals valuable.
It reminded me of another "dead man's goal" which I found within myself when learning to manage my anxiety and dealing with the consequences of my PTSD: "I want to be absolutely safe at all times". The desire to be perfectly safe at all costs is, at some ironic level, a force that wants to bury you, or at least lock you up in your own house and never let you out, because going out and meeting people is not safe - doing anything that a dead person can't do isn't perfectly safe, really.
Also, when I started therapy, I intuitively expected that since anxiety is what ruins my life, I would learn to, uh, shut it down I guess (hey, I know it sounds stupid, but give me a break). Instead the focus of therapy was something like "anxiety is a valuable emotion that's crucial in life, but in your case it turns on at the wrong times, so you need to befriend your anxiety, and explain to it, from a place of friendship, when is an appropriate time for it to turn off and when it isn't". I just realized that this distinction is also well-described by the "dead people's life goals" concept. "I want to stop being anxious" is a dead person's goal; "I want to learn to manage my anxiety and make it adaptive instead of maladaptive" is not.
"But if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes?"
I've often said that we should build monuments to ideas, not people. But, for better or worse, I think most people are psychologically hardwired to prefer a personification of their virtues over those virtues' Platonic Forms.
pantheons > saints When your personification is made up you don't have to worry about them getting milkshake ducked
I've been reading & linking to Hanania ever since his Tetlock & the Taliban. And I'm an emotivist/non-cognitivist/subjectivist who doesn't believe in objective morality/aesthetics/etc. I just have that view as a modernist (rather than post-modernist), who takes very seriously the Humean distinction between "is" & "ought". I don't think an appreciation for things you regard as "good" needs any more justification than liking vanilla icecream (if that's what you like). I never read Nietzche, so my German philosopher of choice if instead Max Stirner. Stirner doesn't need to believe he's any kind of Superman, the Ego/Individual is just indexically significant in that it's him, and that's justification enough.
> But “I suck” isn’t a psychologically stable proposition.
Why do you think that?
> After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?)
Usually the 70s are supposed to be when that changed.
On modernist architecture, Scott Sumner chimes in on it being the market's response to consumer preference here:
https://www.econlib.org/thats-the-style-markets-and-modernism/
> But most of life is people’s pathetic little feelings
How do you quantify that?
> I guess this is how it works in sports
Worth mentioning Frank Knight's The Ethics of Competition, which discusses why sports/games are more popular than economic competition: https://teageegeepea.tripod.com/ethicsofcompetition.html
> Also, if you defeat the Gallic armies enough times, you might find yourself ruling Gaul and making decisions about its future. Don’t you need some kind of lodestar beyond “I really like beating people”? Doesn’t that have to be something about leaving the world a better place than you found it?
The Romans actually did just that sort of thing for quite a while before converting to Christianity.
>Usually the 70s are supposed to be when that changed.
That is my impression as well.
In terms of the overall emotional tone of our culture, I suspect environmentalism had more of an impact than gets generally discussed. Changing from "Here is a landscape, imagine the possibilities!" to "Here is a landscape, take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints." was a very diminishing transition. And then, later, Woke was even worse...
I haven't finished the post but I need to pick at this (I assume it affects downstream arguments):
> So another way to think about slave vs. master morality is as coefficients on the normal utilitarian equation, good = benefits - harms. Master moralists overweight the benefits term; slave moralists focus on the harms.
This is not an accurate representation of master/slave morality. Nietzsche emphasized that these two systems are not commensurate at all (indeed, one is "good and bad" and the other is "good and evil" - they don't even agree on the most fundamental terms). A rabbit doesn't look at a hawk and think "benefits".
Really, both the positive and negative aspects of utilitarianism, as you describe them, both fall under slave morality. Saints are venerated just as much for their positive actions, as for their own personal asceticism. You can slide all across that spectrum, but as long as you're benefiting (either helping or blending in with) the herd, it's slave morality
This is exactly the sort of derangement you should expect from people who don't even know about the art of scope sensitivity, let alone progressed further along mastering the art.
I don't think it's a coincidence that ancient Greek literature, in addition to talking a lot about Golden Age heroes, also talked a lot about their downfall. And their downfall was almost invariably due to hubris.
They didn't cut down all the Tall Poppies, but the gods or the Fates cut down the ones whose aspirations were too big for mere mortals.
In other words, even Bronze Age master moralists believed in moderating virtues.
One could sub-divide the slave morality axis into
(People who write this sort of post) | (People who read this sort of post) | (People who comment on this sort of post)
Goodness, what have I become. I better go pillage a nearby township. brb, going to lay waste to Brooklyn.
> Even extremely flawed or limited human beings can still have much to contribute to society due to the miracle of the division of labor. There is thankfully no need therefore to turn towards ideas that involve incapacitating or repressing large numbers of people
It comes as a relief that the author and his followers are not contemplating self harm.
This is a very interesting piece. Years ago I read the book *The Future and Its Enemies* by Virginia Postrel, and her dichotomy between dynamism and stasis provides a useful lens for understanding a bunch of disagreements that we see in the world. I think the people who broadly fall into the dynamism/stasis camps overlap a lot with with people in the master morality/slave morality camps, respectively, but a stasis mentality doesn't really explain some of the strategies in section IV (or even the healthy, steel-manned versions of them). I'm sure I'll be thinking about this one for a while. Thanks for writing it!
Something that's always puzzled me a bit is girl-power pop-feminism. They've internalized a lot of Randian/Nietzschean/master-morality ideas (be strong/powerful, don't apologize for who you are, make time for yourself, don't make yourself smaller to make other people feel better, etc.). And yet their ideal doesn't look very much like Dagny Taggart. Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is, and possibly writing a pop anthem about the experience. So there seems to be some kind of strange disconnect (juxtaposition?) going on there.
(Maybe the vague unacknowledged Randian current in pop-feminism comes by way of Nathaniel Branden's popularization of the psychology of self-esteem? Idk.)
It's the difference between doing and branding. Corpse morality serves capital - your value comes not from your accomplishments (doing stuff is being a capitalist bootlicker), but instead from saying stuff and expressing yourself (buying stuff and using social media is clearly sticking it to the man).
I don't think the impulse to say "but it's eugenics" in response to advocacy for genetic modification springs from slave morality. Any kind of deliberate influence on genetics is going to be associated with the Nazis and their form of eugenics (at least as people perceive it), so when you say something like "I think genetic modification of human embryos would be good" people are going to expect the next few sentences to be something like "here's why it's better if everyone is white and has blonde hair and blue eyes."
Imagine two public opinions polls held in contrast, one that asks "Should we genetically modify human embryos?" and one that asks "Should parents be able to remove the genes responsible for Huntington's disease from their child's embryo?"
XII Sam Bankman Fried
"Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms."
Liberalism doesn't reject deontology because equality before the law requires law. Liberalism doesn't allow utilitarian calculus to override the law, either, as SBF discovered. The finite calculus would suggest he saved more lives than he took, which did him no good. Maybe there is a utilitarian justification for taxation, though
I mean, *clearly* there is. We have not yet come up with a way to run any kind of functional society without them.
You could at the same thing about organized crime. Obviously it’s necessary, because there isn’t a single functional society without organized crime.
Only good things happen if we take away organized crime.
This cannot be said about taxes.
>there isn’t a single functional society without organized crime.
Huh? When I think of organized crime, I think of something like the Mafia, with e.g. at least two levels of management. Was anything like this present in e.g. colonial America?
Stationary bandits are the same beast whether they call themselves Cosa Nostra or the government.
Many Thanks! _Partially_ agreed. A government stationary bandit typically has (or at least claims) a monopoly on some geographic area. The Mafia / Cosa Nostra typically operates within an area that _also_ has a government stationary bandit. AFAIK, this is a less common situation than having a single stationary bandit.
There were perfectly functional pre-agricultural societies without taxation. Arguably, everyone in those societies also had a better quality of life until the last couple centuries.
1. Would you want to live there?
2. You can’t either way, because states pushed them out for all the obvious reasons.
Neither point is relevant to the functional nature of society without taxes. I think through a large swathe of history, living in a hunter-gatherer society would be better than an agricultural one. States can be better at marshalling resources to conquer people without being better places to live.
What they didn’t have was civilisation. I’ve heard that argument - the fetishisation of pre agricultural societies - made by naive communists as well. Look they say, a functioning world without money and with near equality.
I assure you I don't harbor any communist fetishes. Hunter-gatherer societies were generally healthier than their agrarian successors. Briefly, their varied diet was more nutritionally complete, with each of the major staple crops lacking important nutrients. Well-fed mothers breastfeeding their children was also much better developmentally than the largely solid food diet of agrarian peoples. They also don't have to worry about a bad year ruining their harvest and leading to starvation.
If there is a hypothetical where I have to choose between living in a hunter-gatherer society or any agricultural society in 1800, I would choose 1800 every time. But if the choice was hunter-gatherer or 1300s farmer, I think the 1300s loses. I don't think being a hunter-gatherer would be a good life per se, but being a subsistence farmer throughout most of history sounds quite awful.
> Hunter-gatherer societies were generally healthier than their agrarian successors. Briefly, their varied diet was more nutritionally complete, with each of the major staple crops lacking important nutrients
I know this has been repeatedly suggested, but I don't believe it. Two thousand generations after the first people arrived in Australia, the whole continent supported a population of just 200,000 people. The only way I can imagine such a small population existing for such a long period of time is if they periodically died off in massive famines, classic predator-prey dynamics with all the available food sources.
Some hunter-gatherers ate well, some of the time. Some of the time there was no food and they starved.
Calories are very distinct from nutrition. Farming can be both hugely better at creating calories/acre and worse at general nutrition. It might take 50 acres to support a single hunter-gatherer, where the same acreage of farmland might support dozens of families. The hunter-gatherer would have a better diet while the famers would have populations orders of magnitude larger.
I'm not confident about the rate of famine among hunter/gatherers vs farmers. In theory, the farmers are tied to the land and any disruption like droughts or blights would ruin them. The gatherers could move on to greener pastures. Large-scale events like volcanic eruptions would be equally devastating to both groups.
There was only "not taxation" in the sense that the tribe was too small for it to be called "taxation".
But if you went out and hunted a mammoth/buffalo/sloth/kangaroo and you didn't share it with the tribal big men who were too busy being important to go out hunting, that wouldn't end well for you.
I've never heard of any hunter-gatherer society that was based on pure private-property anarcho-capitalism, there's always an enforced obligation to share things with the group.