Guest Post - A Conservative's Take on The Pack

I can appreciate the points Steve is attempting to make here, and the idea of refocusing on community. I just cannot get past the lens of today’s conservative talk.

Mainly the attack on universities that seems to be the low hanging fruit for anyone with a microphone wanting to grow their audience.

"In short, then, the American university has ALWAYS been progressive, indeed, was specifically designed to be progressive and to incorporate progressive values. And while this is all well and good, when applied to the physical sciences, when it is applied to the social sciences and the rest of the humanities, it is and always has been disastrous. "

The above section from the article reads in layman terms “Conservatives are good with free thought until it goes against their wishes” which is the exact point he is attempting to make against the State!

While trying to argue against the heavy handedness of the ruling class and State, he is advocating for a different kind of State and ruling class… just one that he agrees with.

Final point… talk about a slippery slope trying to bring “think tanks” into what is otherwise a nicely written article. It has become evident that these “think tanks” are nothing more than paid ad agencies with a morally questionable PhD willing to sell their name to the highest bidder. And this is not just a shot at political ones, it has infected every part of our life as well. To use Ben’s term, to NUDGE us into the proper way to “think”

There are some thoughts in this piece I agree with, but like the first commentor I’m skeptical. I don’t think we (collectively – including the Dreher and Soukup cohorts) have reached anywhere near the level of humility needed to catalyze the movement being discussed. Taking the most obvious example, I still do not hear in this any admission that we (particularly those of us in the financial services industry) have benefited from a lifetime of over-investment in financial innovation, both in terms of renumeration and status/power. This imbalance ought to be obvious, as should the attendant costs of under-investment in almost all other forms of work (civic/social/moral/cultural). Until we admit this connection and acknowledge our out-sized benefits (if not culpability), then I don’t see how any such movement gets off the ground. The change contemplated herein would require a significant sacrifice of our current advantages (e.g. earning power, civic power, free time, convenience, etc.), and a wholesale re-calibration of how society measures and rewards individual contributors. Until I hear more of that, my inner skeptic tells me this won’t get beyond rhetoric. I do hope I’m wrong.

This is a great article on so many levels…I live in HK…the all-demanding state is right in our faces here…they don’t even pretend about it…Thank you for putting this up…

Good thoughts, John.

Speaking, personally, I’m not sure. Obviously, Ben and I try to be pretty up-front about (and critical of!) the transparent benefits we’ve gotten simply for being fortunate enough to have Team Elite stamps, for example. So I’m empathetic to the VALUE of doing so. And I’m not convinced that it’s a sine qua non. There is a perfect-being-enemy-of-the-good feeling I get when I hear people say, “We can’t start doing X until these people recognize Y.” The formulation has a gyre widening feel to it, creating an almost untenable moving standard under which people with sufficiently different views will inevitably conclude that the Other Side owes them some form of justice before good faith coming together can take place. I’m not saying the “I can’t take them seriously until they admit…” approach to discussion is almost always a way to just avoid the discussion and maintain separate poles, but I’m also not NOT saying that.

If ideas like this are to be successful, I think two things have to happen:

1. We must demand those admissions you rightly mention from ourselves
2. We must lay down our right - at least when it doesn’t perpetuate some ongoing harm - to demand them from others.

Grace and mercy, if you will. Or Clear Eyes and Full Hearts. Same thing.

Rusty, I believe you may have mis-read me. The entirety of my comment fits within your #1. Nowhere did I declaim what anyone ELSE must say or do to initiate progress. I’m not some SJW. I merely stated what I think WE must say and do, and when I say “we” I mean we (I’m a C-level buyside guy with 20+ years in the industry). Real progress starts in any difficult conversation (esp. between opposing sides of a gyre) with honest admissions of fallibility, self-criticism, or at least confessions of ignorance about the other party. This is amazingly powerful. In the article’s context, if we want to discuss/solve the broad ails of society then the table stakes are a recognition that we (WE!) have been among the principal beneficiaries of lopsided mechanisms that got society into this mess in the first place. That’s critical because our interlocutors (insert your farthest socio-political opposite here) understand that we have attained our present gilded treehouses not by climbing prickly vines from the jungle floor, ala Tarzan, but by riding gov’t subsidized Team Elite escalators paid for with borrowings and tax policies that will haunt future generations (as you rightly point out in the Long Now). To even begin fixing what this article complains about, we’ve got to be willing to switch off/climb down those escalators and de-cartoonify the game. Yet I don’t hear that in this article. The lack of willingness to act-against-interest makes it a non-credible ante.

Thanks for these thoughtful comments, John, and I agree that “honest admissions”, as you put it, are the sine qua non for ANY strong social relationship, whether it’s a marriage or a friendship or a partnership or a family or a community. Or a nation. The problem, of course, is that as the scale of that social relationship expands and becomes more public, it’s easier and easier for these honest admissions to be used against you by people who treat you instrumentally for their own goals and ends. My overarching goal with Epsilon Theory - particularly the website and the idea of the Pack - is to provide a “safe space” where people can wrestle with the PROCESS of honest admissions (because it IS a process) and the CHALLENGE of opposing views (because they ARE a challenge) within a full-hearted, non-instrumental community.

Like you, I found much in Steve’s post to be challenging. Like you, I am engaged in a process of self-examination to walk-the-walk more effectively. Please trust me when I say that Steve is, as well!

Thanks, John. I appreciate both that you read the piece and your thoughtful response to it. I have thought long and hard about how best to respond to this without sounding defensive or whiny. And I’ve concluded that I can’t. So let me just start with a preemptive apology: this will probably sound both defensive and whiny and for that I am sorry. Neither was my intent, but c’est la vie. Here’s the thing: with a handful of exceptions (including Ben and, to a lesser extent, Rusty), nobody here knows me or the things that I have done and continue to do in pursuit of doing my authentic best to advance the interests and concerns of my pack/my community. If you’re interested, part of the backstory (as well as a good deal of enmity toward the People’s Republic of China can be found here: https://us16.admin.mailchimp.com/campaigns/show?id=627697). In brief, I, like everyone else in the world have made choices about the best path to take in life. I live with both the innumerable benefits and the very real and very serious consequences of those choices every day. Additionally, as Ben notes above, I struggle constantly to find my place in the pack/the community. I go to bed every night and wake up every morning analyzing the sacrifices I’ve made, the joys I’ve received in trade for them, and the possible compromises I will have to make in response. I am incredibly grateful to Ben and Rusty, not just for sharing a bit of my story with their pack, but for helping me crystalize my own thoughts on the these and related matters.

First, thank you Ben and Rusty for the diversity of thought embodied in posting this piece, that is valuable and worthwhile.

Second, the piece itself has a major mental process issue with the writing. Regardless of agreeing or disagreeing with the final conclusions, the authorship/rhetoric process used to get there is largely pompous claptrap. It’s opinion writing quoting other opinion writing and calling that eternal truth.

Take a moment to reread Steve’s article looking for “fiat history” – telling you how to think about the past rather than talking about what happened in the past – and the writing becomes just as hollow and problematic as all the narrative-pushing media Epsilon Theory works to illuminate.

As for the substance of the argument, what does Tocqueville’s view (or anyone else’s view) of federalist agrarian America matter to the best interests of the modern imperial superpower America? An understanding of where we came from, yes, but not much more than that. We put men on the moon, built an arsenal to lay waste to the earth, connected humanity to oceans of knowledge, and sowed multitudinous globe-spanning communities in the digital ether. How could a strict adherence to the old forms and values of community, church, and governance possibly accommodate this change? Reverting to prior modes of civic being is unlikely to be possible in today’s world, let alone successful.

This is where I strongly prefer the Ben/Rusty view of the pack. I think it’s a better formulation than Steve’s conservative nostalgia for pre-globalism/pre-internet small town communities. Stripped of fiat history narratives, old-style communities were bonded more by ethnic/religious homogeneity and physical proximity than anything else. And they were often flawed in ways we would not want today… resistant to growth, unscalable to urban population densities, often hostile to outsiders and Others to the point of violence. Very few people of color or religious minorities share Steve’s nostalgia for America’s former civic structure and all its baggage.

Where I think I disagree with both Steve and Ben/Rusty is the focus on statism. The idea that “more government versus less government” is a foundational dichotomy for the shape of society, and that the quantity of government is a chief determinant of human well-being, is… well… yet another narrative created to steer our thoughts and actions. It’s a view imposed on us by political ideologues to force us to take sides.

The reality of history isn’t as simple as Steve might have you think, with his examples that the Roman Imperium and Red Communism failed under their own statist weight and therefore big government must be bad. Democracies can self-destruct, local governance can be tyrannical, and devolved federal states can fail. Looking at today’s world, an honest observer will see more success with strong central government than without it. When we step outside libertarian fantasy constructs like Ayn Rand novels and Seasteading Institute proposals, the absence of a strong, secular, civilian central government with respect for the rule of law is directly causative of human suffering and failed states. Here in the real world, significantly weakening the central state leads to secession and warlords and religious fanatics, not enlightened local collectivism. But don’t take my word for it: this is a more or less testable assertion of empirical fact, and reasonable people can debate the evidence without needing to rely on subjectively-defined “eternal principles” to judge success or failure of societal organization methods.

I believe the metric with much better empirical predictive power for a society’s success is instead the degree of corruption versus rule of law. Kleptocratic oligarchies deteriorate, regardless of the economic and political systems they work within. Kleptocratic oligarchical capitalist democracies deteriorate. Kleptocratic oligarchical communist states deterioriate. When the dominant participants in the society’s power structure increasingly place their own interests above principle / law / country/ common good, that society will enter a widening gyre style decline.

In comparison, cultural and legal institutions that create fair systems, service-oriented public servants, and mechanisms to correct injustices will tend to be successful and self-correcting, regardless of the underlying organizational schema or economic system. Doesn’t matter if it’s a monarchy or junta or city council or representative democracy. The character of the people and institutions is what matters.

Meanwhile, our major political parties are telling us the other side’s ideas are so evil that it doesn’t matter whether your side’s leadership is corrupt or not. That’s the big con. That’s how the kleptocratic oligarchs win.

So I would challenge current participants in the “size of government” or “best location of goverment” debate to look perpendicular to that spectrum, and talk instead about how we re-incentivize our leaders (at any level) to place civic service above personal interest.

I’m just sitting here stunned by the intelligence of other Pack members writing in the comments section, and wishing we had a way to communicate with each other outside of the comments section. Is this how I make a Nudging feature request?

Ex-fooking-actly. Bravo!