Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[WeepingElf]

The thing to keep in mind is the paradox of tolerance, i.e. that if a tolerant society is to remain tolerant it must not tolerate intolerance, and this goes for multiculturalism -- for a multicultural society to remain tolerantly multicultural it must not tolerate parochial cultural conservatisms. Multiculturalism does not justify, say, conservative Muslim immigrants objecting to the opening of a gay bar, and indeed attempts to foist cultural conservatisms on the community should be rejected and suppressed. However, this does not mean that monocultures are necessarily any less prone to cultural conservatism by any means (take, for instance, the Republic of Ireland for much of the 20th century).

Yep! Tolerance is best mutual - tolerate those who are themselves tolerant, but don't tolerate intolerance.

[Travis B.]

The thing to keep in mind is the paradox of tolerance, i.e. that if a tolerant society is to remain tolerant it must not tolerate intolerance, and this goes for multiculturalism -- for a multicultural society to remain tolerantly multicultural it must not tolerate parochial cultural conservatisms. Multiculturalism does not justify, say, conservative Muslim immigrants objecting to the opening of a gay bar, and indeed attempts to foist cultural conservatisms on the community should be rejected and suppressed. However, this does not mean that monocultures are necessarily any less prone to cultural conservatism by any means (take, for instance, the Republic of Ireland for much of the 20th century).

Yep! Tolerance is best mutual - tolerate those who are themselves tolerant, but don't tolerate intolerance.

People often forget that in a truly tolerant multicultural society minorities must also tolerate the majority culture, and furthermore must also tolerate those amongst said minorities who are influenced by the majority culture. Tolerance is not a one-way street.

[Nortaneous]

The thing to keep in mind is the paradox of tolerance, i.e. that if a tolerant society is to remain tolerant it must not tolerate intolerance, and this goes for multiculturalism -- for a multicultural society to remain tolerantly multicultural it must not tolerate parochial cultural conservatisms. Multiculturalism does not justify, say, conservative Muslim immigrants objecting to the opening of a gay bar, and indeed attempts to foist cultural conservatisms on the community should be rejected and suppressed. However, this does not mean that monocultures are necessarily any less prone to cultural conservatism by any means (take, for instance, the Republic of Ireland for much of the 20th century).

Right, but there are degrees. There are practices which are believed to be abominations in mainstream American culture but tolerated in others: pederasty, cannibalism, polygyny, eating dog meat, etc. There are also practices which are tolerated by mainstream American culture but believed to be abominations in others.

Because mainstream American culture is heavily influenced by philosophical liberalism, it believes its precepts to be less cultural than artifacts of the most advanced historical unfolding of the faculty of reason available to every person on a path toward the universal telos of humanity: the ideal philosophical non-culture, from which everything arbitrary has been stripped and in which all laws are derived from reason alone. From the outside view, though, this is very similar to certain Islamic interpretations of fitra, in which (it is claimed) all humans are born with innate recognition of Islam as the true religion, and this is later obscured by their environment, demons, etc. - why should the inside view of a specific culture be privileged in this way?

There's a niche political movement of "postliberals", Catholic conservatives who believe that the United States is not meaningfully multicultural because it doesn't extend sufficient tolerance to Catholic conservative cultural precepts, and believe strong liberal multiculturalism in this sense - in which the state holds to no vision of the good whatsoever - to be both unrealized and impossible. Are they descriptively wrong? (What about FLDS polygamists, evangelicals who marry at 14, etc.?)

[Travis B.]

Whether precepts of other cultures should be tolerated depends on whether they oppress others or not, including within their own cultures.

Take eating dogmeat, for instance -- it really is no different than eating beef, and unless one views vegetarianism or veganism as a moral imperative there is no solid reason to consider it immoral -- even if we Americans regard it as taboo. As a result it should be tolerated.

On the other hand, take female genital mutilation -- it is highly oppressive because it effectively destroys women's ability to experience sexual pleasure and it has an intolerably high rate of complications for an unnecessary procedure, combined with that girls it is carried out on typically do not have a real choice in the matter. Consequently, it should be suppressed.

[Travis B.]

Of course, you might say "what about polygyny?", for instance. In that case, the reason to reject it is that it oppresses men and results in there being large numbers of single men (which is never a good thing for a society) through small numbers of wealthy men hoarding wives, thus denying less wealthy men wives. In cases like the FLDS young men are commonly expelled from the community so older, richer men can keep women for themselves.

[rotting bones]

I respect London for still having Soho (we do not have such things in my country: Dupont Circle is a place for shitty bookstores) but its center increasingly resembles a walkable version of a Northern Virginia suburb - and why shouldn't it? It's the same people: office workers who moved there for their jobs and migrants from countries where a man is to have at least one wife. It's all very Postel's Law, it's all very bourgeois... It's just a reality of the new multicultural experience that it's wise to be conservative in what you emit, and on some level everyone knows it except the provincials who still think it's the 1960s.

People who think immigrants are normies tend not to know the cultural peculiarities of various parts of the world. Yes, most immigrants will be normies, but mostly because: 1. Western immigration agencies explicitly select for normies, and 2. a lot of professional people in general are. Developing specialized skills tends to take a toll on the development of personality.

On the other hand, my hometown Kolkata (somewhat hilariously) thinks of itself as an intellectual epicenter in the region. Bengal is locally infamous for producing nerds, many of whom can't afford to buy books themselves. The biggest event of our lives, much bigger than religious holidays, was the annual book fair. There's also a place in Kolkata called College Street, which was like the Platonic space of all possible book stores brought down into the material plane. Block after block was crammed with book stores and galleries piled on top of one another. There's a place where, if you duck into an alley and take the stairs to the second floor, there's a big gallery where they let you read science fiction books for free.

In the circles I come from, knowledge about various math books exported by the ex-Soviet press Mir (cheap) is much more common than the fine points of Islamic theology. I might be more bourgeois than the average Kolkatan in these circles, but I find American attempts to focus on my traditional culture stifling and a little disturbing. My "traditional" headspace is the Russian folktales in their Soviet rendition.

As against the post-colonialists and other assorted idpol academics, I wish this effect had been more extreme than it actually was. Being more Muslim/Indian/Bengali would be a diminution of my experiences. There is a reason why we chose to transition away from these identities, and I don't appreciate efforts to box us in all over again.

BTW, I have zero wives. This is not abnormal in my family. No one in my family has more than one. The fact is, Americans are much friendlier to immigrants who are with their wives. When they see a bunch of male students together, some people assume it's a gang.

[rotting bones]

Here is something I had to think of while skimming over this debate:

Voting doesn't make sense everywhere. Scientists don't vote about theories; rather, they discuss them and then test them to see which theory explains the observations best. That may result in the victory of a theory that is initially supported only by a minority. Likewise, voting about prices doesn't make sense. It results in prices that are too low, because in most markets, the customers (who want lower prices) vastly outnumber the producers (who want higher prices), and prices that don't cover the production costs drive producers out of the market and thereby cause shortages.

No one is suggesting that prices should be voted on. Most of this debate was about whether mainstream economics is an illness or a cult.

In fact, one part of it was about how no one is saying prices should be voted on. I'm saying that if you produce more, the price will fall, and how this differs from the reaction of capitalists to deflation. It's because no one appreciates the importance of this point that I don't believe things can get better in my lifetime.

[rotting bones]

I have answered all this before.

My main issue with such democratic central planning by vote is that what people vote for may not accurately reflect their actual needs (you would need something else to act as a proxy for a vote, for instance how many times someone goes to a store and buys a certain product multiplied by the amount of labor that went into making that product)

I don't think so. Note that capitalists routinely fail to allocate funds exactly. I think the people know what they need more of for essential goods much better than planners, whether in the government or in business.

Also, since my proposal doesn't ban business, any slack in this pipeline will be picked up by the private sector. I'm only proposing an additional option in a multiplicity of ways to obtain products.

, and is only applicable for production of things directly consumed by consumers (whereas much of the economy involves things bought by other companies).

The companies will channel their popular support into intermediate products.

Crucially: The voters will hate any system that fails to address deflation. Because of Terror Management Theory, this will predictably lead to fascism.

Acquired paranoid delusions to me almost sounds like heavy metal toxicity or certain sorts of neurotoxic pesticide toxicity, not bacterial toxicity.

Some bacterial toxins can cause dementia. OTOH, he also worked closely with chemicals like mercury hydrochloride.

Things like this happened to him his whole life. When he was experimenting on cholera samples, he got infected too. He survived by mixing his own ORS with sugar and salt. It was only a matter of time before he ran into something truly dangerous.

[zompist]

Because mainstream American culture is heavily influenced by philosophical liberalism, it believes its precepts to be less cultural than artifacts of the most advanced historical unfolding of the faculty of reason available to every person on a path toward the universal telos of humanity: the ideal philosophical non-culture, from which everything arbitrary has been stripped and in which all laws are derived from reason alone.

If Graeber and Wengrow are correct, "mainstream American culture" was deeplly influenced by Native American models and criticism. See their book for their documentation. They point out that a French academy held a debate in 1754 on the question "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?”— and how odd it was that such a question should be raised in the era of absolute monarchy in France.

Certainly the idea of democracy arises from European political experience. But it works fine in Botswana, in Taiwan, in Japan, in India, etc. (As well as in the US, at least.) Nor is the idea of a republic exclusive to Europe. The idea of dictatorship is also compatible with European political experience, and is quite popular among dictators, but the whole idea there is to suppress the interests of everyone else. I don't think "Putin would really really like to stomp on Russia" is a philosophical argument for dictatorship.

There's a niche political movement of "postliberals", Catholic conservatives who believe that the United States is not meaningfully multicultural because it doesn't extend sufficient tolerance to Catholic conservative cultural precepts, and believe strong liberal multiculturalism in this sense - in which the state holds to no vision of the good whatsoever - to be both unrealized and impossible. Are they descriptively wrong?

I think you've answered this yourself: Catholic conservatives would like a state which, against its people's wishes, enforces Catholic conservative ideas. Why is this craving supposed to appeal to anyone else?

States do always appeal to some "vision of the good"; the conservative idea that non-conservatives are "immoral" is self-blinded nonsense. (Romani think that non-Romani are dirty. Is that a reason to enforce Romani notions of cleanliness on the nation?) The problem is that those visions contradict in one way or another. The democratic solution is that of an exasperated parent: none of you get to impose your made-up rules on the other kids in the car.

[rotting bones]

Again, and I can't emphasize this enough, it is normal under capitalism to stop producing in a deflation. This is a phenomenon my proposal is intended to address.

More cynically, in a democracy, what people think is more important than the facts. Even if the people are wrong about what they need more of, they will suffer from anxiety if they are not incorrectly given more of that thing. We need society to supply this incorrectness if we are to avoid fascism.

[Travis B.]

Your voting proposal will only work if something more accurately reflecting actual demand is used in the place of deliberate votes. Otherwise the amounts of products produced simply will not reflect people's actual needs, and the system will fail miserably.

This is why I proposed each purchase's value (i.e. the amount of labor that went into each unit of product) being used to determine voting for products of non-negligible marginal cost, and units consumed being used to determine voting for products of negligible marginal cost. By this production will naturally follow from people's actual needs rather from what they may misguidedly think they need.

[rotting bones]

Your voting proposal will only work if something more accurately reflecting actual demand is used in the place of deliberate votes. Otherwise the amounts of products produced simply will not reflect people's actual needs, and the system will fail miserably.

Again, this doesn't matter because:

1. My system is not a fully centralized method of production. The private sector still exists to pick up any slack.

2. Capitalists fail to accurately account for demand all the time. So much so that it drives people towards fascism. They have been doing this for centuries by this point. It's just that for most of history, voting had a property requirement. This created an upper class dictatorship that kept popular passions in check.

3. My system is intended to PICK UP the shortfall in production that occurs during periods of deflation. Let's say the real demand for good g is x. During deflation, capitalists produce epsilon quantity of good g. My system is intended to produce at least x-epsilon quantity of good g during deflation.

I don't know why this is so hard to understand. People work with much harder concepts than "making up the shortfall during known periods of scarcity" all the time. And it is KNOWN that deflation causes a period of scarcity in a capitalist economy.

4. My system is intended to assuage anxiety by creating a popular safety net.

5. Capitalists are so predictably bad at accounting for demand, I'm positive voting will be an improvement over what economists are sure reflects the "actual" demand. In fact, the whole argument against central planning is that planners can't possibly account for the real demand. Okay, if planners can't account for the real demand, what makes us think capitalists can plan for the real demand, as they currently do? If Communists can't plan for the real demand, neither can capitalists, markets or economists. Ask people what their demands actually are!

...

[Nortaneous]

Whether precepts of other cultures should be tolerated depends on whether they oppress others or not, including within their own cultures.

Take eating dogmeat, for instance -- it really is no different than eating beef, and unless one views vegetarianism or veganism as a moral imperative there is no solid reason to consider it immoral -- even if we Americans regard it as taboo. As a result it should be tolerated.

On the other hand, take female genital mutilation -- it is highly oppressive because it effectively destroys women's ability to experience sexual pleasure and it has an intolerably high rate of complications for an unnecessary procedure, combined with that girls it is carried out on typically do not have a real choice in the matter. Consequently, it should be suppressed.

Every culture has things that it believes should self-evidently be suppressed and practices that it believes should self-evidently not be questioned. Reasons for this can often be produced, but are typically post-hoc, and the accounts of the practices may not have anything to do with the history of how they developed. Considering mainstream American culture as it exists: are we to believe that the philosophical truth, accessible to unaided reason (or at least reason aided by a suitably objective account of human experience), is that the line between oppressive practices and unquestionable facts about what one does is to be drawn to place female genital mutilation on one side and male circumcision on the other? There are differences in degree, of course, but it's certainly not obvious to me that this is the only place the line can justifiably be drawn. (Incidentally, the infamous David Reimer experiment began with a badly botched circumcision. Surgical complication rates of neonatal circumcision are generally given at 2-4 per 1000, although some estimates are as high as 4%.)

Male circumcision in Anglo-Saxon culture is an interesting case because it emerged relatively recently, well within the period of philosophical liberalism, generally for "scientific" reasons and concurrently with medical advocacy of clitoridectomy. It was seen as an unenlightened and oppressive foreign practice until the late 19th century, and mostly abolished in the UK as a cost-cutting measure.

If Graeber and Wengrow are correct, "mainstream American culture" was deeplly influenced by Native American models and criticism. See their book for their documentation. They point out that a French academy held a debate in 1754 on the question "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?”— and how odd it was that such a question should be raised in the era of absolute monarchy in France.

Als Adam grub und Eva spann,
Kyrieleis!
Wo war denn da der Edelmann?
Kyrieleis!
Spieß voran, drauf und dran,
Setzt aufs Klosterdach den roten Hahn!

Hardly odd. The song is from the 20th century, but the events are from the early 16th. Were the Twelve Articles of the Swabian League (1525) influenced by Native American models? What about the Hussites, etc.? Would the ascendant bourgeoisie have meekly accepted their class's position relative to the titled nobility if not for Native American models?

In the United States, the top of the political class is drawn overwhelmingly from graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This does not stop us from holding debates on the question of whether college is a good idea. It doesn't even stop people from adopting the slogan "send the tanks to Harvard Yard".

Maybe there's something to this idea, but I'm not convinced that the counterfactual is so different, and I've been unimpressed with Graeber in the past. (The book I'd try to write if I had the time would situate liberalism, parliamentarianism, governance by assembly, etc. instead in pre-Roman-Empire European history and its restoration as a process of purification from external cultural influences, which is basically what Thomas Jefferson thought he was doing - he once said that, for students to really understand what the American project of liberty was about, they'd need to study Old English.)

There's a niche political movement of "postliberals", Catholic conservatives who believe that the United States is not meaningfully multicultural because it doesn't extend sufficient tolerance to Catholic conservative cultural precepts, and believe strong liberal multiculturalism in this sense - in which the state holds to no vision of the good whatsoever - to be both unrealized and impossible. Are they descriptively wrong?

I think you've answered this yourself: Catholic conservatives would like a state which, against its people's wishes, enforces Catholic conservative ideas. Why is this craving supposed to appeal to anyone else?

States do always appeal to some "vision of the good"; the conservative idea that non-conservatives are "immoral" is self-blinded nonsense. (Romani think that non-Romani are dirty. Is that a reason to enforce Romani notions of cleanliness on the nation?) The problem is that those visions contradict in one way or another. The democratic solution is that of an exasperated parent: none of you get to impose your made-up rules on the other kids in the car.

The liberal state's enforcement of liberal ideas isn't entirely conformant with the wishes of its people (hence phrases like "legislating from the bench"), but these liberal ideas are generally agreed upon by the minority that exercises power. The postliberal program, of course, isn't supposed to appeal to anyone other than that minority, and perhaps useful allies in other power centers.

The democratic solution, of course, would be to put the made-up rules to a vote. This is not on the table, for reasons which are entirely correct: the masses can't be trusted with such matters, and indeed generally wouldn't trust themselves with such matters, and the direction of the culture must be determined by a wise, competent elite which leads the masses into enlightenment, or perhaps a much more polite and liberal-sounding sentence to the same effect. But if the masses find their situation intolerable, they'll support the replacement of the current elite with a new one, and the next generation of aspiring elites might throw in their lot with the challengers instead.

The appeal of Catholic conservatism in this sense is intended to be that replacing the elite with a new one would solve certain problems caused by the current elite and their state religion: the failure of liberal multiculturalism, the bizarre mix of permissiveness and severe restriction that people live under, the lack of rhetorical or material concern for majorities, etc. Obviously this is silly and wrong (even when it comes to multiculturalism: the leading postliberal talking head is on record as supporting open borders for Catholics, for an idiosyncratic definition of "Catholics" that explicitly excludes almost all Europeans), but that's the sales pitch they're making - and it's hard to have much respect for the current elites, whose current plot arc seems to be trying to protect a highly unpopular immigration agenda at all costs. (In the US, this looks like throwing trans people under the bus under the incorrect belief that the median voter is a devoted Daily Mail subscriber who is also a religious crank.)

[rotting bones]

I think the elites are concerned that if immigration is stopped, the resulting economic crises will be even more unpopular.

As for the culture debate, I personally have doubts that humans are smart enough to have any in any lasting sense. Consider the largest and most corrupt Islamic civil liberties organization in America, CAIR, supports trans rights.

[Nortaneous]

I think the elites are concerned that if immigration is stopped, the resulting economic crises will be even more unpopular.

Guest worker programs aren't very compatible with birthright citizenship. This is a problem for the United States and Canada. In Europe, the West German guest worker program was handled poorly and resulted in an unexpected migrant population, but this is a solvable policy issue.

[Travis B.]

I think the elites are concerned that if immigration is stopped, the resulting economic crises will be even more unpopular.

Guest worker programs aren't very compatible with birthright citizenship. This is a problem for the United States and Canada. In Europe, the West German guest worker program was handled poorly and resulted in an unexpected migrant population, but this is a solvable policy issue.

The problem is that doing away with ius soli means that you end up with populations of hereditary non-citizens (who may very well be stateless) and deportations of people to countries whose language(s) the people being deported do not even speak and which the people being deported have no real personal ties to. This is decidedly worse than occasional children being born with citizenship to non-citizen parents.

[Nortaneous]

I think the elites are concerned that if immigration is stopped, the resulting economic crises will be even more unpopular.

Guest worker programs aren't very compatible with birthright citizenship. This is a problem for the United States and Canada. In Europe, the West German guest worker program was handled poorly and resulted in an unexpected migrant population, but this is a solvable policy issue.

The problem is that doing away with ius soli means that you end up with populations of hereditary non-citizens (who may very well be stateless) and deportations of people to countries whose language(s) the people being deported do not even speak and which the people being deported have no real personal ties to. This is decidedly worse than occasional children being born with citizenship to non-citizen parents.

Does it? I have an N-year work visa in $COUNTRY, then either I get it extended (and consider trying to go through the residency process and so on) or I go back. Seems simple enough. Because they don't have jus soli, though, I don't get the employment perk of dual citizenship for any children I have in those years - and it would be an employment perk, not an "occasion". (If they did have jus soli, after my N-year term ends and I go back, could I arrange a six-month vacation there with my four-months-pregnant wife?)

[rotting bones]

People who work abroad sometimes settle there permanently. This solves an economic allocation problem. For example, if you need an expert in bacterial toxins to poison your Communist enemies, you may not have any of those at home.

If the children of these workers don't get citizenship, then this creates an underclass. Deporting these people is a problem because they don't have any connection to the country of origin of their ancestors.

To the extent they know anything about those countries, they probably hold stereotyped foreign idpol notions about them. I bet no one involved in American idpol has heard of the Kolkata Book Fair, which was a huge part of our lives. It was the one time of the year we looked forward to.

This is not about giving perks to employees. This is about poisoning your enemies while making sure that the children of the people helping you do it have a pleasant upbringing so that they can grow up to continue helping you poison your enemies. Instead of a one time poisoning job, creating a permanent ecosystem to keep the poison flowing is much cheaper in the long run.

Two things have always been a mystery to me: 1. Why Catholics always think their elites are respectable. Everyone else thinks they sin as easily as they get forgiven. 2. Why humans regard the destruction of culture as a bad thing. Isn't it the will of Zeus that a meteorite shall strike the planet one day, wiping out all culture? Why fight heavenly decree?

[Nortaneous]

People who work abroad sometimes settle there permanently. This solves an economic allocation problem. For example, if you need an expert in bacterial toxins to poison your Communist enemies, you may not have any of those at home.

Then they're experts in bacterial toxins, and their children will be the children of experts in bacterial toxins, and all you need to do is ensure that they go through the process for settling there permanently as experts in bacterial toxins (presumably there's a step in this process that grants their spouse and children citizenship) and make sure the kids don't learn that idpol is the best way to get ahead. Entirely different issue from lowering the price of labor, which is much of the point of immigration policy in the US, or from manipulating the composition of the electorate for political ends, which is much of the rest, although it hasn't worked as well as the responsible parties thought it would.

[rotting bones]

Entirely different issue from lowering the price of labor, which is much of the point of immigration policy in the US

Is there really a difference between Communists and weeds?

Illegal farmhands: Are more affordable. Leave if raped.
Legal farmhands: Are more expensive. Can be raped at will.

Policy has recently shifted from the affordable side to the rape side of the decision space. Which is more respectable in Catholic doctrine?