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In a recent interview, Nellie Bowles described the woke phenomenon as a revolution of the lazy. The body-positive movement; the drive to get rid of accelerated math classes; the defenestration of SAT testing; the rejection of meritocracy; and the condemnation of virtues like objectivity, perseverance, and punctuality as products of “white supremacy” are all but designed to make people comfortable with and in their mediocrity. All this is of a piece with western-style welfare systems that are geared less toward getting people out of poverty than to make them comfortable with and in their poverty.

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What a nice phrase.

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Poor Ed Wilson was slandered and savaged his whole life (and even posthumously) for poking holes in the sacred narratives of Communism and egalitarianism. And this by ostensibly educated people who proclaim themselves apostles of love and tolerance—and who posit some form of a wholly united humanity while not even being wise enough to see that the mailce and envy they exhibit are one of the main impediments to their supposed telos.

More Bakunin, who really had the Marxists' number even 150 years ago:

'The words “learned socialist” and “scientific socialism,” which recur constantly in the writings and speeches of the Lassalleans and Marxists, are proof in themselves that the pseudo-popular state will be nothing but the highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will be liberated in entirety from the cares of government and included in entirety in the governed herd. A fine liberation!'

There it is: "the highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scholars..."

We will never be rid of this meddlesome clerisy of aspiring philospher-kings who imagine that their "critical consciousness" gives them divine right to rule, they seem to be a permanent caste in the post-Enlightenment West, taking after all the Popes, prophets, priesthoods and pseudo-Messiahs who preceded them.

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Yes, I kept wondering if Lorenzo was going to reach back to Plato, because Marx recycled him as well.

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I didn’t go there as I was more concerned with the notion of Marx as social scientist. Hegel recycled Plato and Marx recycled Hegel, so Plato matters in the intellectual history, but not so much on the matter of science.

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Marx understood branding like he's Trump. This was also a consequence of the Enlightenment - that science was raised above philosophy in general intellectual esteem.

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All roads lead to Plato

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Western Philosophy as footnotes to Plato.

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And Plato as footnotes to the Pre-Socratics

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And before the pre-Socratics we had shamans and priests who discovered how to turn belief into authority and profit.

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Bryan Hayden, ‘The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origins of Social Complexity,’ Cambridge University Press, [2018] 2020 is an excellent study of that.

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Economic Parasitism....Thanks Lorenzo for this brisk walk through of the history of those (unfortunately highly seductive) post-Marx ideological mind-games wherein plain old spite and envy got dressed up as 'social justice'. In modern times one aspect of Marx's 'Economic Parasitism' fallacy that still lives and breaths in the public mind ...even amongst free marketeers and conservatives is the widely accepted idea that billionnaires' billions have been 'taken from' the rest of us in a kind of zero-sum theft. I wrote about this a while back: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/blaming-it-on-the-billionaire/ Two fallacies:

"1) no human being, however greedy, can possibly personally consume billions of dollars. It cannot disappear down their throats or into their safe. (What the billionaire’s wealth DOES give them is a large degree of control over other people’s livelihoods...via the way they choose to invest their huge capital assets. )

2) every cent of the billionaire’s wealth, whatever they decide to do with it, is - at the end of multiple lengthy transactional chains - someone else’s livelihood. This applies to every piece of hardware and services consumed by them, whether directly or indirectly. And the greater part of those myriad transactions will be the salaries of countless thousands of employees in various manufacturing and service industries. All the way from relatively well-healed professionals, to office workers, factory workers, shopkeepers, waiters and cleaners. Even the millions paid for the private art collection will release capital that will end in someone else’s pocket, somewhere in the world; ultimately millions of pockets......"

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In a lovely irony, it is the cultural Marxists who now look down upon "vulgar" Marxism, that is obsessed with materialist exploitation. In one sense, it was a smart move, since they did so right at the time that classical Marxist analysis was falling on its face.

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Lukacs and Gramsci were wrestling with the failure of Marx’s predictions. Adorno, Horkheimer and especially Marcuse also wrestled with the material success of mercantile (“capitalist”) societies.

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I just finished Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - he had some interesting perspectives, particularly the non-Marxian branch of socialism.

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“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!”

This was the COVID response and subsequent debacle. When we hear people say, “Socialism just hasn’t ever been done right,” we should raise up the response to COVID because it’s how they thought/think it’s supposed to be done. And it went exactly like it has every single time in the past - disastrously.

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Woke ideology sees all limitations as "oppression," and seeks to free people from them. It sees reality as a "construct" and holds that constructs can be modified or replaced at will. The woke imagined construct is free of limitations/oppression. Dissent is evil or misguided and, since error has no rights, can be dismissed along with the dissenters.

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Another solid essay, with new things to learn.

"DEI produces diversity officer commissars and inquisitors who operate on the principle that error has no rights, and they can judge error, for they can judge all. "

The other day I read somewhere else the term commissars to describe the DEI cohort, and that rang true. Adding inquisitors further augments the language that we should use to describe and resist these fools and psycho's. Throw back at them that we know who and what they really are, and thus that they ought to be shamed and ridiculed for their false religion. It is certainly clear that they will not be reasoned out of what they never used reason to acquire.

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I think deficits/inflation are eventually going to force Western countries into adopting austerity policies, and woke higher ed has burned enough bridges that it will be among the first items on the chopping block.

https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/how-to-defuse-canadas-debt-bomb

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We’ll burn before that waiting for the problem to fix itself.

As for governments full of Rich Marxists doing the right thing…

😂

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Well then vote out the Marxists; the EU made a pretty good start recently

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Those who use democracy to gain the power they worship aren't about to yield it up democratically. Some emergency no doubt will arise, possibly a conflagration in Brussels. "Naturally, we'll only hold on to power until this emergency is settled".

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I'm Canadian - I've seen firsthand that emergency powers don't actually work all that well in the hands of woke rulers. https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/the-truckers-won-everything

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Trudeau is a splendid example. I don't think he'll ever give up power while he has breath, and he's not even the worst kind.

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Don't take this the wrong way, but if you're intimidated by Justin Trudeau then you sound like a total pussy.

I for one am not afraid of paper tigers.

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Vote? 😂

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You’d think so, but …

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"There is a persistent pattern of academics privileging Theory—which is their possession—over the inconvenient experience of others. As Arnold Kling notes, once an area of (purported) social science falls into “a tar pit of Marxism” it finds it almost impossible to escape. The appeal of the epistemic and moral authority of Theory is too great."---Lorenzo from Oz

I think this is true in macroeconomics too. The theories are running into huge structural impediments, such as chronic housing shortages, and bogus "free trade, and open borders," that theory cannot handle.

But that I mean you can't successfully fight inflation without first radically boosting housing supply. Actually, the argument is in the wrong ballpark. Macroeconomists should be howling about restrictions on new housing supply, not 2.3% vs. 2.7% rates of inflation. Canada, US, UK, Australia...living standards are way down in large part due to frightfully expensive housing.

Are Europeans really better off importing cheap labor...that does not want to assimilate? What does that do to wages and what about incredible social stresses? Yet open borders are a foundation stone of free trade. The theory rules.

Of course, if a theory is beneficial to the theory-holder..all the more it is held as divine.

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Marxists are always and everywhere the enemies of humanity. Lorenzo has persuaded me that for civilisation to flourish, Marxism and all offshoots must be destroyed. Marxists must recant or die.

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I would be satisfied with various forms of internal exile.

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"... we are a product of culture-gene co-evolution, but that is, in the words of behavioural scientist Herbert Gintis, a special case of niche construction, ..." Thanks for the link to this reference. I am looking forward to seeing how his ideas may relate to my thoughts on the parallel evolution of rationality and desire for transcendence. My top level thought is we will end up with "wheels within wheels" [or multitudinous feedback loops] in terms of identifying any causality.

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Not quite done reading this essay and have yet to review the comments but I wanted to comment on:

"Once you embrace the idea that history has a proper direction, then dissent is delegitimised."

This idea of historical direction seems to be manifest in how certain trends or general observations are described by historians: they say A happened on date X, then B on date Y, etc. where A, B, et al. do have some connection or relation, but X, Y, etc. are often years or decades apart, so ignoring the longer time spans between observations (or even just failing to acknowledge them), gives (or seems to give) directional coherence to something that the participants in real time probably did not experience. If the real time events are not experienced as the historian describes them, or their local time interconnection and sequence is not recognized, can that be proper history?

And not only is there separation in time, but probably among groups as well, such as only a subset of the population or group has the experiences being described; while their peers /cohorts are ignorant of that situation or its place in a historical thread.

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Causal patterns can grind exceedingly slow. But yes, different groups can experience the same things very differently. In particular, once you see the Anywhere/Somewhere distinction, it makes sense of a lot of history. And you become aware of how much of the evidence comes from the Anywheres of the time. (Much of the Russian aristocracy was not of Russian ancestry, for instance.)

However, generating a causal narrative is not the same as saying history has a proper direction. Prof. Timothy Snyder provides various causal narratives, but he is very alert to how the denial of historical contingency is profoundly anti-democratic.

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A good primer on the Destroyer of Nations. "Plunder your neighbor" is an easy sell to too many people.

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A good primer on the Destroyer of Nations. "Plunder your neighbor" is an easy sell to too many people.

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This tells it all;

"The perennial dominance of the state in extraction of surplus—and hence the creation of class structures—is nowhere more obvious than in Marxist states."

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No knowledge without faith upon which to assume. Anyone who hammers "the science" wants you to accept the underlying faith.

https://argomend.substack.com/p/by-faith-alone

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Brilliant.

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