Modelling coordination in our activist-network states

Signalling and selection, not direction.

The great mass murdering tyrannies of the C20th were Party-States: the Nazi Party-State of Third Reich, the various Communist Party-states from Lenin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China.

The ideologies of Nazi Germany and Communism were both based around eliminationist theories of parasitism—that the Jews/bourgeoisie were exploitive parasites whose elimination would liberate the Aryans/proletariat. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are parasites—for example, via the Theory of Surplus Value—and you and yours would be better off without them, then they are primed for mass murder.¹ Class “science” or race “science”, either sufficed.

Because such Party-States concentrated enormous power in the leadership—often The Leader—the degree of commitment to the eliminationist project by said Leader or leadership was crucially important in how tyrannically murderous any particular Party-State was. Hence, in terms of rates of mass murder, Pol Pot was worst, presiding over the starvation and slaughter of a much higher share of the population he controlled than any of his counterparts. Mao was the greatest mass murderer in terms of sheer death toll, as he was committed to his Communist project of social transformation and he ruled more people than any other such Leader.

What these Party-States were, were activist-ruled states. The ruling Parties were, centrally-directed, hierarchically-organised, structures of activists.

Activism attracts manipulative personalities: activism with the power does even more so. The more important activists are in a state, the more pathocratic it is likely to be.

If the doctrine fits, ...

In the case of the Communist (i.e., Marxist-Leninist) states, the Party took over the state, pulverised the society and remade the class structure in the territory they ruled in terms of the ruling Party’s coordinating ideology and the needs of its rule. Ironically, Communist Party-States provide the clearest refutation of Marx’s notions of historical causation, the role of the state, and class structure.

Also ironically, the thought of a Muslim historical sociologist who died in 1406—the first, and arguably the greatest, historical sociologist—provides a far better framework for analysing the historical dynamics, the life-cycle, of the Soviet Union than anything Marx wrote. But ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a genuine social scientist. He assembled a vast array of data—leavened by deep personal experience—to develop his framework of analysis.

The paradox of polities

Marx was, by contrast, an activist. He took his already-reached conclusions about the nature of man, man’s proper role in society, and the fulfilment of the same, and parasited off classical economics to create a framework to justify and motivate those pre-conceived conclusions.

What he created was not, in any serious sense, scientific—although both he and Engels pretended to themselves, and so others, that what was what he was doing. What Marx created was degraded scholarship—degraded by having a priori conclusions imposed on the analysis so that his Theory filtered what counted as evidence and his use thereof.

This methodology of using Theory to filter evidence has—especially via Critical Theory and its offshoots—been disseminated through academe, creating toxic activist scholarship at an ever-increasing scale. Hence the increasingly endemic pattern within academe of mountains of bullshit being erected on molehills of truth.

Source.

This is also precisely how activism degrades everything it touches. By imposing its a priori demands on realms of human action, it thereby degrades each realm of human action by diverting or blocking it from operating by the processes inherent to it. Processes that are, of course, deemed to be morally and cognitively inadequate if not “sanctified” by passing through the “purifying” attentions of said activists. For, in activist-world, the proper moral purpose is not to describe, but to change, and only the commitment to such change provides “true” understanding.

This is catnip to the professional-managerial class, whose entire conception of itself is as the superior—because expert—deciders. The ideas of activist Theory add a very welcome layer of moral superiority over the top of their claimed expertise. Even better, such Theory—albeit quite spuriously—generates more ways for them to be “expert”. DEI “training”—so often just activist struggle sessions—provides the archetypal contemporary manifestation of such spurious expertise: an actively destructive form of spurious expertise.

Why Was This Groundbreaking Study on DEI Silenced?

The politics of the professional-managerial class are not only inherently authoritarian—they can decide much better than those dreadful plebs. Such politics is inherently totalitarian—they can decide better about everything. Finding ways to extend their superior “deciding” to every and all realms of human action means extending their social leverage. (The other side of this is a refusal to leave folk alone.)

Hence they are so attracted to the politics of Word Magic—words that harm; words that cause offence; words that are violence; silence that is violence; words that mis-inform, or dis-inform, or mal-inform.² Their expertise, their Theory, their activism, is all massively empowered by being the policers of discourse. Hence we get BBC journalists acting as “finger-wagging hall monitors of truth”.

That the professional-managerial class has both massively expanded and feminised expands its social significance while increasing the inclination to see “bad” emotions as threat and seek to manage their public (or even private) expression.

Source.

Narrative enforcement is status, power and moralised self-satisfaction to the professional-managerial class. Media that caters to them becomes narrative-enforcing media. It becomes Pravda model media.

Thus, we in the West do not live in Party-States. We increasingly live in activist-network states. Activist networks that encompass academe, schools, non-profits, government and corporate bureaucracies (especially HR departments) and practice non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

Activist-network states where, for example, private-public partnerships do end-runs around law and, even more, accountability. They do such end-runs to censor. Or to debank people, to cut them out of ordinary commerce and finance, for political and policy purposes. (The Covid vaccine-mandates provided a working model of compliance being required to participate in the ordinary affairs of life.)

But these are not Party-States. There is no centrally-directed Party running all this. There is no equivalent of the NSDAP or the CCP.

What we have instead is networks and (interactive) signalling. Indeed, a crucial role of mainstream media—despite its declining audiences—is to provide such coordination. To let folk know what are the current narratives that they must believe to be of the Moral and the Good. What narratives they must follow to be members, in good standing, of the professional-managerial class.

Hence we get journalists who are in favour of censorship. For, to contest those narratives is not only to undermine both their own sense of being one of the Moral and the Good but also to undermine the narrative-enforcement that has become central to their institutional role.

Since this is a shared moralised status-and-social-leverage game, sharing the game can be networked. It can become a network good—it is more and more beneficial to belong to such a network, more and more expensive to not so belong. Hence you get the monopoly effects, especially within institutions, of such network goods.

Which raises the question of how such coordination works? Is it centrally directed? Perhaps via the World Economic Forum. Perhaps via UN bodies. Perhaps via activist scholarship within academe. Perhaps via various advocacy non-profits. Perhaps via media email-lists.

The short answer is yes. Except not as something centrally directed but as a series of nodes and networks that select for whatever ideas prove effective at such coordination and social leverage games.

Source.

So, the sort of hierarchy that YouTuber Aristocratic Utensil offers above—or the inner circle, outer circle, follower model that James Lindsay suggests—is not quite right. Yes, Critical Theory and its offshoots absolutely offers framings, ideas, narratives that spread if they resonate across this mass of networks spanning the relevant institutional milieu.

Any idea has to resonate into order to replicate. Yes, certain networks are way more institutionally and financially powerful than others. But precisely because all this is open enough for entrepreneurs of ideas, entrepreneurs of activism, of feel-good (and feel-compassionately superior) narratives, to offer their wares, we get the power of selection rather than the difficulties of direction.

We really are dealing with the activist-network state, not some ersatz Party-state.

Yes, the activists degrade all they touch. Yes, because it is coordination-by-activism, we see all the mechanisms of social control of Party-states in updated, networked, form.

Yes, we get commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism (see, for example); and censorship (originally paraded as “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information). But we get such in networked, interactive-signalling, form.

This generates advantages as a form of social coordination as it avoids the information difficulties of central direction. It can both select for whatever works, and abandon what does not within the relevant institutional milieus, using far more dispersed information than central direction permits.

Not that either the use of information, or the adaptations, never misfire. There are definitely still media silo effects.

Also, the fundamental premise—that the professional-managerial class are comprehensively morally and cognitively superior deciders—is simply false. Their expertise—when it is real—is very narrow.

Indeed, it is a reasonable question whether that limits the benefits of open selection. The claim to be pervasively superior deciders naturally gets in the way of feedback—by limiting what counts as feedback, due to the need to preserve the moralised sense of cognitive self-satisfaction. Two recent posts suggest that this is a factor.

The Peasants Are Revolting

Losing Alignment: Why have establishment politics become so destructive, immoderate and self-defeating?

The selection is very much within particular institutional milieus, rather than the society as a whole.

From Marxism to the latest spin-off from Critical Theory, all these activist Theories claim that their adherents are superior knowers, superior in their moral purpose, so superior deciders: hence being catnip to the professional-managerial class. They are also all iterations of moral narcissism as, even when they claim to speak for disadvantaged groups, the Theory defines each said group—including its boundaries—and their “proper” role. Theory adherents get to judge members of said groups as much as anyone else, and dismiss any contrary judgements they may make; or even cast them out if they do not conform.

Mikhail Bakunin’s critique of the implications of Marx’s ideas—in his The State and Marxism, written in 1867—applies to all the iterations of Critical Theory, and has even greater resonance in our age of “The Science”:

It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!

Activists and audience

You have to understand the dynamics of the beast in order to successfully combat it.

Which is why it is important to pay attention to Eric Kaufmann’s argument about the origins of “woke”—the dissemination of what I call Post-Enlightenment Progressivism³ as relying on liberal humanitarianism. Yes, the Critical Theory academic networks provides ideas and framings. But those ideas and framings replicate because they resonate among the professional-managerial class more widely, most of whom are not adherents of any sort of Critical Theory.

This was especially so given that—as Prof. Kaufmann explains—liberal progressivism never had any leftward limits in its cultural politics, while the moral success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s generated what became an all-embracing anti-racism taboo. Something that—as Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania point out—got institutional resonance from the implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

It is ultimately the simplicity of “capacities are equally distributed among all human populations, so all groups should do equally well, so if they are not, malign forces are blocking them” that sells. Equality, or its lack, is easily “determined” by just finding any such inequalities of outcome. Which, as capacities are not equally distributed among human populations, will always be found.

This provides an emotionally resonant folk ideology, as Professor Kaufmann explains:

Well, the definition of woke—as I mentioned in the book—is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. That’s it, that's the one-sentence definition and that is also … what I would describe as the kind of big bang of our moral order and out of that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology which says: so these to the sacred groups, those groups cannot be offended.

So, anything you say that might be interpreted by the most sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a a blasphemer. You’re profaning the sacred. You must be excommunicated, i.e. canceled.

The other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources between these groups. So, for example, you can't have a race gap or a gender gap in terms of the boardroom, in terms of admittance to elite universities, and so on. It’s got to be zero.

So equality plus emotional safety, these are the two pillars of this ideology. But the point I make is this ideology is not some kind of system, like Lockean liberalism or even Marxism. That is, it is more of a bottom-up empathizing rather than a top-down systematizing, cognitive thing. It’s much more emotional.

We’re attached concretely to the black civil rights movement, to the indigenous, to the LGBT, movements and it's our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our meaning and that's primary in the system. It’s not a set of ideas like Marxism. It’s actually a set of emotional attachments and so this is very much emotional and it's driven from the ground up.

This is absolutely the sort of emotional folk ideology that can be spread by interactive signalling through networks.

What the Critical Theory spin-offs provide is a whole series of invisible sociological gremlins to “explain” those unequal outcomes, along with the “expertise” in “spotting” and “combatting” them. They also provide a whole series of formulations and justifications for Word Magic—used to coordinate moral display, mark in-group membership, provide social leverage and do narrative protection.

None of which can understand properly if we do not grasp that:

1. we increasingly live in activist-network states,

2. this is catnip for the professional-managerial class, and

3. this is coordination by signalling across networks, not central direction. Not even by ersatz central direction.

References

Robert P. Abelson, ‘Beliefs Are Like Possessions,’ Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16, 3 October 1986, 223-250. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5914.1986.tb00078.x

Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Marxism and the State,’ [1867] in Michael Malice, The Anarchist’s Handbook, Chapter 7, 2021.

Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Bloomsbury, 2018.

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2. https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2

F. A. Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ American Economic Review, Sep. 1945, XXXV, No. 4, 519-30. https://statisticaleconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/the_use_of_knowledge_in_society_-_hayek.pdf

Ann Krispenz, Alex Bertrams, ‘Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,’ Current Psychology, 20 March 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, ‘Moral Grandstanding,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016, 44, no. 3, 197-217. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/papa.12075

Robb Willer, Ko Kuwabara, Michael W. Macy, ‘The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms,’ American Journal of Sociology, Volume 115, Number 2 (September 2009), 451–90. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/599250?journalCode=ajs

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358989232_The_marketplace_of_rationalizations

1. As how commerce works—and can thereby generate an income—can be mysterious to outsiders, all market-dominant minorities can be vulnerable to some version of this accusation. Especially if part of their success is from high trust within their group due to their “clannishness”. Hence the long history of massacres of market-dominant minorities.

2. All based on Media Effects Theory which decades of evidence show is not true in remotely the way it would have to be to justify the push to censor. But the push is about moralised social dominance, and the tendency of women to feel threatened by negative emotions, not about human flourishing. In fact, such censorship and moral bullying tends to degrade public discourse and increase distrust in institutions and expertise.

3. Though popularisation of Critical Constructivism also works.