It Was Never Going To Be Me

Well said. I agree totally with your prescription of an indirect approach of make,protect and teach that provides a counterpunch at a reduced scale rather than direct confrontation. My thinking his that your diagnosis may be a bit in the extreme. But I cannot argue with your track record of being on the right side of many major issues in the past 12 years. The turning of ET away from the recent focus on politics is past due. Let’s focus on on things at a more local level where our own packs can make a difference.

Thank you Ben. One of the great things about being an Epsilon Theory subscriber is your eloquence and ability to “see around corners “. This work challenges me and any preconceived notions I have. I.e. it forces one to think more broadly.
And that’s what I want.

I think that we would have been down a very similar path no matter what the election result was in the USA. The path to serfdom is in all countries, it’s details vary but the goal is the same. In Canada there is little to see of value to individual or individual thought in the current structures that govern our life. Our laws are more explicit, the city where I live anything that is said that someone finds distasteful can invite a visit from a bylaw officer and a fine. Dinner parties now consist of determining which side is entertaining so all the guests can adhere to the correct conversation, no matter what that may be. My Jewish friends are already following the serpent and dove path, hiding their true nature inside their homes along with their fear. This is my country. Trump is trying to change the role of America in the world and no matter what the end result is none of this is going to be pretty. But the political alternative, presented to you in America at the election is also what has created the current dystopia in Canada. I think it was Hayek that said Fascism and Socialism are one and the same. The intellectual infrastructure and social underpinnings of my 7 decades are now gone. My history is almost completely erased and is being replaced. My view is no matter if it is Trump or Harris or Polievre or Carney (Trudeau) your advice is well taken and should be considered by all. None will be better than the other. Serpent and Dove is the lifestyle I am already forced to live in my home in Canada and have for at least the past 4 or 5 years. Best of luck to all of us.

I’m still trying to find time to sit and write out more coherent thoughts about this particular Note as it seems to have sparked a number of things in me (and doubtless others too), but the one overarching thing I immediately thought of was this:

Trump is unique not just because his script is different, but because he also frequently reads the stage direction out loud.

One of the chapters in my upcoming book discusses precisely this - the metatheatricality is one of the most effective ways to make powerful symbols spread. At once it makes them both less alienating to those to whom they would otherwise be foreign and more powerful to those who might otherwise be hesitant, wondering if everyone knew just how significant that symbol was.

And it’s sort of what has gotten me about this whole affair. It isn’t that Trump is the first to act as if the constitution were just a piece of paper. It’s that he’s saying very loudly that this is what he is doing, and no one in any position of power or influence is doing anything to call his bluff. The metatheatricality is the dare, and no one has risen to it. That’s why this feels different to me, and has me a bit uneasy.

How could they at this point? Who could do it with a straight face?

Sassoon and Scotten aren’t power brokers but they’re not nobodies either.

I think that Adams going down is a real possibility and I think that it could be a wake-up call.

There is still hope.

Surprised that Ben doesn’t reference Leo Strauss’ “Persecution and the Art of Writing”, where Strauss (a contemporary of Hayek, although they seemingly never really co-mingled) writes: “Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.” Machiavelli’s the Prince comes to mind.

PS: free download of Strauss’ text here

I think Ben’s note hits a lot of the issues I’ve been wrestling with. With the Trump strategy of flooding the zone, I’ve been trying to ask myself how much this story matters for all of the outrage headlines that have gone around the past few weeks.

The disregard for separation of powers issues have been a big one, where the guardrails have been pushed to (past?) their breaking point have been a big one, and the other is this kind of imperialist direction in regard to foreign affairs. The reason (IMO) the whole Gaza Riviera idea caught the world off guard is nobody has seen such “What’s in it for me?” being asked in such an explicit way regarding international relations in our lifetimes.

I always love your writing and thinking Ben. If you will forgive two objections:

1. Trumpian politics and rule is inherently evil. Otherwise you might as well say Hitler’s attempt to make Germany great again was not inherently evil. If it wasn’t then you must mean it is banally evil or else nothing is evil or good. Nazi Germany was evil and this is. Evil is the promotion of unholiness (opposing wholeness)., of sadism and cruelty for their own sake and the inversion of the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’. It is the adversary to the powers of good in the world which see the commonality in all life and therefore act compassionately. The word Satan derives from the word for adversary.
2. You gloss over how much suffering has been caused by the USA particularly since WWII, mostly in illegal wars or support of dictatorships. Trump is not a discontinuity but an acceleration of an existing and very strong fascist racist tendency in America. “Chickens coming home to roost” one might say, Chomsky has largely been on point for most of this in the last 60 years. https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-20-years-after-iraq-war-vote-us-continues-to-flout-international-law/
   See also his very prescient take on US politics and the move to extremism of the GOP in 2013: De-Americanizing the World | Noam Chomsky

Thanks for the note Ben. Thought provoking as usual.

I would think that this is well explained in the exploration of your ideas around epimorphic and epimemetic shifts in communication.

The metatheatricality feels something like the Emperor himself being the one to call out his own nakedness to the crowd. The Emperor could never have done so in the past in the absence of the epimemetic changes, and he knows this very well, creating a first to market advantage because instinctively realized it much earlier than most. In the past the people would’ve still collectively laughed and ridiculed the naked Emperor. But now the new epimemetics makes it a virtual impossibility that anyone can rise to the dare. Not merely because of lack of willingness but because they know they are doomed to fail. The crowd will simply see them as being even more naked than the Emperor.

There is so much to say about epistemic complexity in almost every thread these days. I fear the below can be seen as pedantic, but I don’t think it is, rather I think it is important, and I’m seeing it everywhere all the time. Hell I usually think it was ET that taught me this lesson!

The overwhelming response I am going to get to this note

How do we know what we think we know when we discuss the reactions of others? Simply picking on Ben in this instance, but who are these respondents and where does he experience their reactions? I experience people doing this all the time…“why is such and such group in a rage about issue Y?” Do we come to believe that other people are upset because headlines say so? Or because lots of social media commentators say a thing? Value judgements rooted in this kind of epistemology are badly flawed and should be treated with a lot of skepticism. And I think we will find a lot fewer reasons to get upset when we do so! Maybe I’m wrong but I suspect few people who speak to Ben in the real world will convey the opinion that he is calling here the ‘overwhelming response’.

I literally had to explain epistemic complexity to my poor mom the other day because she wanted to know ‘why everyone in my generation is upset over plastic straws’.

I will be told that what Trump is doing is a natural, even healthy corrective to the excesses of the Democratic Deep State in general and the Obama/Biden Administrations specifically. I will be told that the pendulum swung too far in one direction and now maybe it’s swinging a little too far in the other direction,

In Bonfire of Mandarins thread @drrms posted a bit about cycles that is relevant here also. I felt the ‘pendulum’ part of this note strawmanned a much better, and important, cyclical argument, which is about the widening gyre. Widening gyres are themselves part of a natural cycle. But the left/right swings of the pendulum are much too quick of an oscillation to be the cyclical forces that matter the most in the context of cultural decay. The left/right swings should be viewed as more akin to noise on this longer timescale.

Here’s a specific example. Ben of course clearly made the point that his critiques of the left were easy to find throughout the Biden admin, and I certainly agree, so that is not my critique. But in the same vein as above, I think it’s a notable mistake of timescale to identify Hayek’s Step 1 with something as recent as covid, and it contributes to a sense of a recency or high frequency bias which strawmans the natural/cyclical argument.

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It is not especially useful to argue over when Step 1 actually occurred or what it was (in fact the persistent and natural desire we feel to try to diagnose exactly when the prior steps occurred is another control mechanism of the structure, as it wastes our action). I only feel that Step 1 must be seen as having been much longer ago than covid. When does a collection of sticks become a pile? It’s not generally interesting to argue over too much, but if there are 1,000 sticks and someone says “oh now it is a pile” I would have to disagree.

I also think the question of whether ‘national planning’ is really the ‘Step 1’ cue is interesting (I’ll have to ponder this more). Again, not to be pedantic, but I find it an interesting question because I think Rusty’s ideas on epimemetics also have created a sizeable shift in the nature of the triggers in these early steps relative to our experience of totalitarianism from the 20th century. Which then would beg the question of what are potential concomitant changes in the later stages.