Pro-Civilization and the New Right

I. Introduction

Political blogging is a dead genre. Its corpse is kept animated by ancient thirty-somethings left behind by a snapchat world. It’s fine whisky in an age of vodka and gatorade. 

Yet I have the stubborn impulse to keep alive this tradition of my people. I can’t help myself. Left idle, my hands start typing up new political ideologies. Blogspot.com: it’s a gen X thing.

The purpose of this post is to identify and define a new ideology: Pro-Civilization.  “Pro-Civilization” is an adjective I’ve been hearing lately in right-wing tech circles, and I find it evocative. Let’s uncork a bottle of #ProCiv, swirl it around the tongue, and see what impression it leaves. For me, it is one of the most intriguing vintages to come out of the modern Right. So I want to define it, examine it, and signal-boost it. 

By no means do I want to be on the hook for defending the whole of the political Right. Lord knows it has its share of bathtub swill. The question “why bother with the Right at all?” is a fair one. If you’re reading this, then you probably live in a place where the Right is not exactly the winning team. You aren’t going to win yourself any friends or social status by sticking around. Your local dominance hierarchy is best climbed by clicking the “x” button at the top of this browser tab. 

But if you’re the type of curious individual that just can’t help but poke around in dusty, overlooked corners seeking nuggets of insight, then stick around. 

II. What is it

Let’s start with a thousand foot overview. 

If the #ProCiv faction had a mission statement, it would be something like “create a great civilization that endures for a very long time”. It’s not defined by a set of policies or cultural practices, but rather it’s defined by a way of judging them. Each new innovation is asked the question: “does this increase the chances of our long-term thriving and survival?”. 

Pro-Civilization is characterized by a low time preference. It supports systematic and long-term thinking. It is downright bloodless compared to activist strands of Left and Right. It is also pragmatic; policy discussions are outcome-focused rather than morality-focused. 

I find political debate within ProCiv groups to be refreshing. Is immigration good or bad? Gun control? Abortion? Within a ProCiv group, one side of these questions may be more popular than another, but there is no moral stigma associated with arguing the less popular side. Debate proceeds by arguing that one policy is better suited than another for building and maintaining a good society over a long time horizon. Historical analogies are commonly employed as supporting evidence, and someone who is well-versed in a large range of historical periods and data sets gains social status. To be ProCiv leads to having interesting and brainy conversations ranging over the Byzantine Empire, Malthusian population models, superorganisms, science fiction, and evolutionary psychology.

This style of debate is in sharp contrast to that mainstream left and right-wing groups that have “Politically Correct” answers to every question - if you’re on the Left, then immigration is good, guns are bad, and abortion is good. If you’re on the Right, then your opinions are flipped. From what I have seen, there isn’t much debate. Moral feelings are the primary way that policy positions are solidified. To have the correct opinion is morally good, to argue for the unpopular opinion is to be morally suspect. Homogeneity is maintained through threat of punishment or ostracism. The rare appeals to evidence are one-sided - partisans seem unaware of evidence that would be offered to support the opposing point of view. 

The Pro-Civilization view fits in comfortably within Arnold Kling’s “Three Languages of Politics” model (there’s now a book). He argues that libertarians, the liberal/left, and the conservative/right often cannot understand each other in debates because they are using three different moral languages. For libertarians, the primary moral concern is about freedom vs. coercion. For the Left, it’s oppressors vs. the oppressed. And for the Right, it’s Civilization vs. Barbarism. ProCiv is an unapologetic and enthusiastic embrace of civilization as the primary moral concern of political systems. 

III. Details

Now that we have introduced this rare whisky, it’s time to get closer to examine its flavor and scent. Does it taste sweet on the tip of the tongue? Does it leave a hint of charcoal in the back? Is there an aroma of honey, gasoline, or some mix of both? 

(For the Jacob superfans out there, yes, this is the second time that I’ve used the whisky metaphor to describe a freshly minted political ideology. But it’s been nine years since the last time, so I’m giving myself permission to double-dip.) 

I should note that much of what follows comes from my own head. Some of it comes from conversations I have been part of or overheard. But what I’m describing is a tiny cultural trend. There is no ProCiv Institute with an official 20 point platform. I’ve had to use my own powers of extrapolation to fill in the gaps. 

The sets of policies and cultural attitudes favored by #ProCiv don’t fit neatly on the Left/Right American political spectrum. For example, it favors both large amounts of economic libertarianism (an American right-wing position) and environmentalism (an American left-wing position). Libertarian economics are needed because the wealth and power of a society largely come from productive market activities. In the long run a nation is either pro-market or prey for those who are. Environmentalism is needed both because destruction of the natural world threatens human civilization, and also because the natural world is part of humanity’s artistic and spiritual heritage. ProCiv is not interested in merely preserving human life for the long run, but also some amount of cultural continuity. 

Pro-Civilization has a complex attitude towards risk. It supports taking more finite short-term risks and putting more resources towards reducing long-term, unbounded risks. It’s a big proponent of projects that reduce existential risks to humanity, such as Elon Musk’s attempts to plant human civilization on Mars. A multiplanetary society is much more likely to survive than a single planet one. You can’t build a long-lasting civilization if you get sent back to the stone age or worse by getting unlucky on some existential risk. 

As for short-term risks, ProCiv takes a bolder approach than mainstream political movements. In democracies, lawmakers are incentivized to favor policies with short-run payouts and long-run costs, especially if they represent competitive districts. Voters are impatient for benefits and long-run costs seem fictional. Pro-Civilization has exactly the opposite bias. It prefers to pay costs in the present in order to reap future benefits. 

For example, ProCiv probably favors a daring approach to institutional reform. Institutions like governments, universities, and the health care system represent society’s collective intelligence. When they are operating well, society is effective, productive, and nimble in addressing crises. When they are operating poorly, they can suck up infinite money while producing less and less benefit, a process sometimes referred to as “institutional sclerosis”. There is good evidence that American institutions are quite sclerotic. Infrastructure is slow to build and expensive compared to the past. Education and medicine are skyrocketing in price while most of that extra money goes to hiring administrators and regulatory compliance. A ProCiv point of view advocates for paying the cost to make bold reforms now in exchange for upgrading our collective intelligence to manage the challenges of the coming decades. 

Culturally, Pro-Civilization favors getting married and having children, for two reasons. First, having children lowers an adult’s time preference and ties his plans to the world that continues after his death. Second, the well-raised children of the present, and especially the children of the current elite, are going to be the people responsible for navigating the ship of humanity along a precipice of destruction as our technology gets more and more powerful in the coming decades. The crises of the future will be decided by the well-prepared, competent humans we create now. 

Pro-Civilization is skeptical of romantic innovations that are justified by appeals to the pleasure and utility of the current generation of adults at the cost of family stability and child-rearing. It’s critical of the hedonistic infinite-adolescence of adult culture in many modern urban environments. It seconds Jordan Peterson in believing that the meaning in life comes not from the pleasures one enjoys, but from the responsibilities one carries. A 40-year-old should be doing something to contribute to the next generation, not bouncing from music festival to music festival. Doing both may be a fine option, as long as the responsibilities are prioritized first. 

To avoid writing more than my audience will be willing to read on pro-civilization tendencies, beliefs, and positions, I finish this section with a list of things that get the #ProCiv seal of approval:

• The Hoover Dam
• Chesterton’s Fence
• Tokyo
• Yosemite National Park
• Meritocracy
• Switzerland
• Space elevators
• Cathedrals
• Ancient Hindu temples
• Capitalism
• Marriage and babies
• Classical art and music
• Oxford libraries
• Dense urban cores
• City skylines
• The evolutionary mindset
• The Long Now Foundation
• Religion (especially old religions)
• Philosophy (especially old philosophy)
• Preparing for Black Swan events
• Self-sufficiency
• Transhumanism

Pro-Civilization aesthetics tend to be a mix of the new and the old. Its ideal is high civilization in harmony with nature, as if Chinese economic dynamism were mixed with Western environmental ideals. Perhaps Singapore does it best. The ProCiv vision is that 10,000 years from now, cyborg teenagers will be playing a Bach chamber music recital on a green school lawn on a terraformed planet in a nearby solar system. Or in a simulated uploaded colony ship. Or in whatever form human civilization will take. 

IV. Where it goes wrong

As a creature of the Right, pro-civilization suffers from the problems that right-wing ideologies have. I wrote about the generic Left-Right axis and the pros and cons of each side in this previous post. 

In short, the great problem of the Left is changing too fast and throwing out lots of traditions and institutions that work in pursuit of some imagined utopia. 

The great problem of the Right is changing too slowly, stagnating and failing to address changing conditions. Chesterton's fences crowd the landscape and you can't really drive anywhere. The Right procrastinates on overthrowing unnecessary oppression and is slow to adopt neutral or positive social changes. Whereas on the Left change is assumed to be good with little thought of the consequences, on the Right change can be rejected even when the expected value is positive. 

On the order-chaos spectrum, the failure of the Left is too much chaos and the failure of the Right is too much order. The Left might institute a terrible dystopia, but its philosophy of permanent revolution includes the seeds of its own undermining. The Right might make a terrible dystopia that really lasts. 

Personally, some of the people I know on the pro-civilization Right seem like real squares. I think they’d be more creative and productive if they allowed a little chaos into their lives. 

V. Relation to other things

I’m calling ProCiv an ideology of the political Right because that’s where it’s coming from currently. But as with all ideas that one favors, I hope it grows in popularity enough to transcend the eternal Left/Right hellmatch and thrive on both sides of the spectrum. It has enough deviance from the rest of the Right that it does not seem impossible for a Left faction to adopt it. In the past, when the foundations of the modern world were being laid, the Pro-Civilization mindset would have been on the progressive/left side of the spectrum. 

VI. Conclusion

I’m a political Taoist. I don’t hold any particular political position, but rather a meta-position that goes something like this: conflicting ideologies support different often-conflicting human values. Picking one over the other is a losing move. Rather, the right thing to do is to try to find the happy balance between them, allowing that balance to change in an ineffable dance with the circumstances of existence. 

So I’m not suggesting anybody adopt #ProCiv wholesale. But its variety of bloodless, long-term thinking is definitely of value. For me, it represents the best flavor of the Right. It’s the reason for not completely ignoring the Right half of the spectrum altogether. Let it be in balance with your other political values, and I think it will lead you to a better place. 

Building a Better Anti-Capitalism

In my first political awakening, I became an ardent pro-capitalist libertarian. There were some anti-capitalists to debate around my university and on the internet, but the average quality of their arguments were so poor that engaging with these folks deepened my convictions instead of challenging them.

But over the years I have seen first hand some of the failures of capitalism. Burning Man and its ethos of public contribution was a major turning point in my attitude towards capitalism, illustrating the great good that can be created outside of formal exchange relationships. Now I see that there are plenty of circumstances where free markets fail to create an optimal outcome, either by failing to properly incentivize things that we value, or by failing to disincentivize bad behavior. Market capitalism alone is not a complete recipe for growing a good society.

Today the world still suffers from low quality anti-capitalists. To protest capitalism, they break shop windows, burn cars, block streets, and fight with the police. This makes little sense. Plentiful shops and safe, convenient vehicles are some of the good parts of capitalism. And the streets and police are non-capitalist institutions that may be imperfect, but also provide vital services for society. I bet that neutral observers are turned off.

It's because I take the failings of capitalism seriously that I'd like to offer a better playbook for protesting capitalism. Each of the following opportunities for direct action addresses a failing of capitalism while making the world a better place

1. Love thy neighbors. Invite them over for dinner and don't charge
2. Volunteer to pick up trash in your neighborhood for half an hour
3. Volunteer at a Boys and Girls club or old folks home
4. Learn how to make something that you would normally buy. Knit a sweater, grow some vegetables
5. Produce a piece of public art that will delight people, amaze them, or make them think. Put it in your front yard or window
6. Host an adult sleep-over. Talk, play games, and read stories 
7. Perform a piece of music in a public space. Go caroling at Christmas time, or if you're not Christian, offer songs for the holy days of your tradition
8. If it's your thing, become part of a church
9. Sit at a table in a public place with a sign inviting people to play chess with you or converse with you
10. Share knowledge. Offer a free class in yoga, art, juggling, or something else you know how to do at your home for your friends and neighbors. For bonus points, make it a regular event

In a market-driven society, life can be cold. It seems like every option to enjoy oneself costs money. Every smile is a customer service. These practices take back a portion of life's activities and relationships from the marketplace. 

In many American cities, there is little public space where a person can simply be without paying money. For a certain sum, you can buy a temporary right to exist in a theatre, restaurant or yoga class, but when your time is up you gotta get going, buddy. For every hour you spend away from home there is an invisible meter following you, running up a tab. In some small towns, I hear people repurpose Walmart as their public square, sitting and chatting with friends in the furniture aisle, or strolling through the store on a late-night date. Walmart is the closest approximation to the missing commons. 

I suggest we protest capitalism by providing what the market doesn't. Create social connections that are based on mutual enjoyment instead of formalized exchange. And create space and time for people to simply exist without a running meter.

Do you have any ideas for how to better protest capitalism? Leave a comment.

The Importance of Privacy

The United States constitution is a very libertarian document and the Fourth Amendment is the most libertarian piece of it. As it's short and supremely important to American life, let's quote it in its entirety:

Amendment IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What this means for personal liberty is that the government can pass as intrusive laws as they would like, forbidding or mandating myriad behaviors, but unless those behaviors have impact outside your home the laws are unenforceable. The law may mandate that you sleep with an ostrich, eat broccoli for dinner, or keep your supply of toothpicks stocked to a multiple of five. But as these are private behaviors impacting only your private sphere, how are the police ever going to find evidence that you violated the law's mandates? Lacking evidence, they cannot get a warrant to enter your house, so your bed may remain ostrich-free.

Libertarians advocate that people should be free to do whatever they would like as long as their actions don't harm other people or their property. It turns out that harmless actions don't leak much evidence outside the sphere of private activity that is protected by the fourth amendment - your home, private property, and so fourth.

It is only because there exists a large sphere of private activity outside the law's reach that the law can evolve and change. There have always been moral busybodies that wanted to enshrine the social mores of the day into law. But the fourth amendment lets us violate silly intrusive laws. If violating the law isn't harmful, and is even beneficial, word will spread from person to person and more people will violate the law. Eventually culture changes, and the law catches up soon thereafter.

Widespread violation of law, shielded by the fourth amendment, has caused social change in a number of areas. It doubtlessly led to changing attitudes and laws concerning marijuana, and may change attitudes towards other recreational drugs with therapeutic benefits. Anti-sodomy law was largely unenforceable, as it regulates a behavior that mostly takes place in private bedrooms. Thus people pursued same sex romantic relationships illicitly in the privacy of their own homes, until culture and law changed to be more accommodating.

If law enforcement were perfect, we would live in a more static society. Our morals would more resemble the morals of the past because all the people who violated them would be in prison. The room for cultural experimentation would be small.

In a good society, law regulates the public sphere, and the private sphere remains a domain of individual freedom. It's important to keep these separate, to avoid the twin evils of anarchy (that is unruled which should be ruled) and tyranny (that is ruled which should be unruled).

Many historical court rulings have attacked the private sphere that the fourth amendment protects, allowing police to intrude into more places without warrants. The Cold War, war on drugs, and war on terrorism were used as excuse for the need for more intrusive police power, for example, ruling that infrared scans of your house or dog sniffs of your car in search of drugs are not "searches". But perhaps the biggest danger to privacy is the increasing digitization of life.

Law enforcement doesn't like the fourth amendment - it limits them. But in the amendment's defense it had the infeasible cost of surveilling the vast amount of private activity in the world. In the digital world, that is no longer the case. Surveillance is cheap, and automated systems can supplement the manpower needed to make sense of it.

As our life activity moves online, it enters an arena that is more exposed. The law is still evolving, and our intuitions are likely to guide us wrong. It might feel like your gmail folder is a private correspondence drawer, but the government may subpoena all messages older than 180 days without obtaining a warrant. It's easy to be lulled into thinking your phone is a private space, but it is not when you are traveling.

Courts and legislatures have not extended analogous rights to privacy to our digital lives that we enjoyed in our pre-digital lives. However, there still remain statutory limits to government surveillance in the digital world. Unfortunately, it is easy for branches of the government to violate those limits with impunity while remaining undetected and unpunished, as demonstrated by the NSA. If law enforcement were violating its limits as blatantly in the physical world, say by performing door-to-door warrantless searches, it would get noticed and would encounter stiff resistance.

As vitally important as the private sphere is to a good society, the momentum of history is all against it. That is why encryption is so important. Applications that use strong encryption, like the Signal messaging App, Tresorit's dropbox-like storage app, protonmail, ZCash, and others are a shield against the forces that would eliminate private space. Encryption is the door defining and guarding a private space in the modern world.

People working on privacy-preserving applications are doing the Lord's work, often under-compensated. To support them, consider becoming their paying customers. There is also room for political activism. I donate regularly to the EFF, the most prominent organization fighting for digital privacy rights.

The technology to create a true panopticon is getting closer, when all life will be public and none private. That sounds like a hell to me. Let's stop it in its tracks.

Look upon Syria, and despair

We should stay the hell out of Syria, the "rebels" are just as bad as the current regime. WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIVES AND $ BILLIONS?ZERO — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2013

American involvement in the Syrian civil war is stupid for the same reason that previous American actions in the Middle East have been stupid. There is no realistic end game.

Syria will suffer, and her neighbors will suffer, as long as she is at war. The most important strategic and humanitarian objective is to end the war. To obtain peace, some party must grab and hold a monopoly on the use of force in the region.

There is only one option for peace as far as I can see. The rebels are a fractious bunch that don't look capable of holding the country, so write them off. That leaves us with the existing Assad regime as the most likely and capable victors.

"But he's a dictator" you say. But what makes you think anything else can survive in a country where the borders were drawn on the back of a napkin by a British colonel? Democracy requires opposing factions to trust each other so that they won't be screwed over when they lose an election. Perhaps you notice that opposing factions in Syria are currently killing each other. The probability of convincing them to trade bullets for votes is low.

By using military force to aid the Syrian rebels, America prevents a stable equilibrium from being reached. Her intervention prolongs the conflict, and therefore the death and destruction. Short of explicit and thorough genocide, nothing is worse for a population than prolonged war.

The primary role of the United States in the Middle East over the last 15 years is that of a chaos monkey. It overthrows stable governments, installs unstable governments, and then abandons those unstable governments when the home audience gets bored. It prolongs conflicts by handicapping likely winning factions and supporting losing factions that have no realistic chance of pacifying the territory.

The result of all this is trillions of dollars wasted, probably a million deaths attributable to US actions, millions more made refugees, and a power vacuum that was the breeding ground of ISIS. Trump's opposition to this policy was one of the smartest things about his campaign, and his betrayal is disappointing yet unsurprising.

I have no doubt that the individual foreign policy minds in the United States government are far more intelligent and informed than I am. And yet somehow, you plug them into this bureaucracy, and they churn out the same stupidity for decades. Some of the faces change, even a supposedly radical outsider can win an election, and the bipartisan Washington consensus stays the same. This is both impressive and terrifying. If spitting in the face of 99% of the elite and by some miracle electing a man they hate and fear is not enough to change course, then what will it take?

The Outside

This is a conceptual post. I attempt to explain "the Outside", an abstract concept that I find useful in modeling the world. The Outside is not a single thing, but rather Inside/Outside is a pattern that frequently appears in human society.

The world of human values is a tiny island in an ocean of darkness. That darkness is The Outside. It is a place of complexity, illegibility, and indifference. It is not actively hostile to humans, but it is a wild and dangerous place. Humans build institutions to keep the Outside out. But somebody has to man the walls. And sometimes the Outside leaks in.

Service on the walls makes a person cold and hard. The defender learns objective reasoning, logic, effective violence, tolerance for ambiguity, toughness, and competence. These are the virtues needed to wring human values from a world of chaos.

The oldest human institution is probably the family. Within a family, parents create an illusion of safety for children. Food, shelter, and material goods appear for the children as if by magic. This is a bubble of Insideness. Inside, there is plenty, comfort, and play. It is a world where every human is cared for, where every person is gifted what they need to thrive with nothing asked in return.

The inside is less real than the outside. The maintenance of the bubble requires constant work and risk-taking. The breadwinners of the family interact with an outside world more hostile to the fulfillment of human desires, whether it be a farm, capitalist labor market, or jungle. If a breadwinner gets sick or injured, the outside leaks in, and the children know want and hunger.

In a modern society, nested institutions serve to buffer the people inside from some of the hardship of the outside. Human families ban together for mutual support in church groups. State welfare takes over for injured breadwinners. Police keep citizens safe from domestic predators and warriors keep countries safe from conquest.

Law, property, rights - these are not features of the natural world. These are fictions of the Inside that are maintained through constant effort. The presumption of safety is an artifact of this illusion. In the natural world, a person is always at risk of arbitrary accident or capricious attack.

Capitalism is a curious human institution that mirrors some aspects of the outside. We have heard of “the corporate jungle” and “social darwinism”. The ideal free market allows corporations to live and die, to suffer real consequences of risk, in a way that society has decided is inappropriate for individuals humans. This has benefits for society - it makes corporations more productive and effective.

Different roles in a corporation have different levels of exposure to the outside. Executives are in touch with the fragility of the company. They know that it must profit or die. There is no instruction manual for their jobs, they search through an infinite possibility space to find a solution for the company to survive. Each successful company's solution is unique.

Lower-level workers are shielded from this reality. They are given artificial quotas, rules, and goals in a framework created by management. For them, job performance is legible. They know which goals they need to make in what time frame in order to produce satisfactory performance.

The closer a worker is to the market, the more uncertain their job performance becomes. Salespeople are closer to the outside. Their performance is objectively measurable and highly variable. They have to deal with the complicated world of human emotion where there is no rulebook. It is possible for a good salesperson to have a bad quarter based on sheer luck. On the other end of the spectrum, a person working in HR faces almost no risk or variability at all. HR is nestled far on the inside of the organization.

Engineering is somewhere in between. The objective nature of the engineer's job is a whiff of outside air. The engineer’s product either works or it doesn’t, and it’s the engineer’s job to figure it out how to make it work. There are no A’s for effort. But the engineer bears no responsibility for the success or failure of a product after it is built. That responsibility falls on executives. In the work world, there is a correlation between responsibility, risk-taking, and the degree of outsideness of a particular role.

Startup founders bear a lot of risk and are constantly aware of the outside. Employees get free lunches, founders know exactly how many days of runway those lunches cost.

The cultural differences between people closer to the outside and the inside lead to a survive-thrive conflict. Outsiders have survival-based values, and they see Insiders as weak. Insiders have values based around self-fulfillment, and they see Outsiders as brutish.

Scientists and technologists fulfill a role in society with substantial exposure to the outside. They wrestle with raw nature, to make it legible to human minds malleable to human efforts. People who work in science and technology are often seen as cold and blunt by people in softer fields.

Superintelligent A.I. will be a powerful incarnation of the Outside or of the Inside. Intelligence is humanity’s greatest weapon in taming the outside. A friendly A.I. is a champion which will build a stronger wall than any human civilization could conceive of.

Ultimately, the outside wins. An implacable cold death creeps upon us. Physics dictates that the last particle of love will fade into the background radiation of the universe. Whatever bubbles of human values we create are destined to be temporary.

Election 2016 - A Plea for Understanding

I.

I grew up in a religious cult where disagreement with the doctrines was punished with ostracism. As a smart and honest kid, this was terrifying. I saw flaws in the doctrines of my faith, but I kept them to myself. I feared losing everything if I stated my doubts.

I couldn’t comprehend what it would be like to be cut off by everybody I knew. Would I be homeless? Would I starve? I was just a kid. I lived with a primal fear, paralyzing me, rooting me in place.

Officially, the Jehovah’s Witness organization prides itself on allowing open inquiry into its doctrines - which are collectively referred to as “the truth”. But it’s a farce. Every question has an official answer disseminated by the organization. Once you’ve received the official answer to your question, you’re not allowed to keep questioning. “This book’s argument for Creationism seems to have a flaw in its attack on evolutionary genetics on page 5” - nope, you're outta here.

You are also not allowed to seek the answer to your question in materials written by people of other faith backgrounds. JWs keep a closed information ecosystem.

As a teenager I lived a paranoid double life for years. In my secret thoughts I was an atheist. On the outside I continued to support “the truth” as Jehovah’s Witnesses taught it. I even dutifully evangelized it to others, as was required. Each day was torture. I fantasized about suicide.

II.

“There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses.  This is one of them.  Bad argument gets counterargument.  Does not get bullet.  Never.  Never ever never for ever.”- Eliezer Yudkowsky

When I read Sam Altman’s election piece, I gave half a cheer. As President of YCombinator, he came under pressure to oust Peter Thiel from his advisory role due to the latter’s support for the candidacy of Donald Trump (see here and here). Sam bravely refused.

In response, some in the tech press called for Sam to lose his position. He’s held on, but it wasn’t a sure thing. The tabloid press have claimed its share of heads.

Thank the God I don’t believe in that Sam refused. It’s tempting to mete out punishment to people that disagree with you if you have a large majority on your side. Few people in coastal California would blame you for ostracizing a Trump supporter and few will praise you for refusing to do so. The tech press seems unanimous against Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg for failing to cut off Peter Thiel.

But when disagreement is met with punishment, it’s bad for society. It creates an illusion of unanimity through a climate of fear. The collective intelligence of the social group is sacrificed as collateral damaged. Society grows stupid and narrow-minded as each member fears saying something which might offend the orthodoxy. The emperor can go right on having no clothes forever. This is exactly what happens in bizarre cults.

Peter Thiel can take a few bullets. He has a billion dollars. But he's not the primary target of his own attempted political assassination. It sends a message to everybody who is watching. Most conservatives in Silicon Valley can’t afford to lose their jobs. The rent here is damn high.

There’s not a central governing body deciding doctrine for the California tech industry but it feels like that sometimes. It seems dangerous to have conservative beliefs, even if your views are supported by half the country.

For me, personally, the firing of Brendan Eich in retaliation to his conservative political activities was a watershed moment. Other politically right-leaning people had been fired, but usually because they misstepped and said something offensive that got picked up by the clickbait press. Eich was never anything but professional, polite, and good to people around him.

With Eich’s firing, I got the message - the message of power. I panicked and endured some sleepless nights, thinking of blog posts I had published. I don't label myself a conservative, but I certainly entertain some conservative ideas. The fear won and I took down posts on controversial subjects like immigration or abortion.

Over the years I saw more persecution of right-leaning people: the firings, the conference disinvites, the attempts to kick them off of open-source projects. I learned to censor myself. I even deleted my favorite links page, fearing the contagion of linking to people who had themselves suffered punishment. It felt a lot like being 15 years old again.

I recognize that as a cult survivor I’m prone to feel the same patterns of thought control and persecution. I have to fight against a tide of paranoia and fear whenever I find myself on the wrong side of a passionate majority. I try to be self-aware to the fact that this is a triggering of my past trauma and not present reality.

But I think what's going on in the tech industry isn't only in my head. I don't see anyone threatened with professional consequences for supporting Hillary Clinton.

My past experience is a burden but also a gift. It brings the moral clarity that these tactics are bad. Even in service of a good ideal like creating an inclusive society, wielding power against heretics will corrupt you. It scoops out your brain. It turns you into a zombie pawn in the hands of people who generate outrage. If you succeed at manufacturing unanimity through use of power, the intelligent and curious people will stay silent or leave your group.

So thank you Sam Altman for preventing things from getting worse than they already are.

III.

I only gave half a cheer for Sam’s piece because it fails to embody another value that’s important to me - a good-faith effort to understand all sides of a debate. In some circles they call the practice of arguing convincingly for the other side the “ideological Turing test”. This is nothing new to someone who’s has been in a writing class or a debate team. Sam almost reaches for it:

“We should all feel a duty to try to understand the roughly half of the country that thinks we are severely misguided.  I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump.  But I’d like to find out, because we have to include everyone in our path forward.”

What’s stopping him from understanding Trump supporters? I don’t find it terribly hard to write an argument for either of the major candidates running for office and Sam is certainly as clever as I am. People are writing about it on the internet (here and here). Trump himself is doing all he can to tell people about what he believes. That’s what a campaign is for!

Maybe Trump supporters think uncontrolled low-skilled immigration hurts the most vulnerable members of the population and that it isn’t worth the net economic benefit.

Maybe their livelihood has been lost due to the globalization of labor and capital while the country has failed to provide any significant support. Futureshock is real.

Maybe they favor a conservative Supreme Court, and they fear what a 5-4 leftist majority will do to free speech, free association, property rights, and gun rights. With Peter Thiel’s extensive background in law, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was a big concern for him.

Trump sometimes has supported a more isolationist foreign policy. I am in favor of that. It seems to me that US military intervention created a power vacuum in the Middle East that left space for the rise of radical Islam.

Maybe Trump supporters fear the power of a President so cozy with the mass media as Clinton seems to be.

Western society is in a double-bind with regard to maintaining its liberal values while crafting an immigration policy for troubled muslim countries. Restricting immigration from these places as Trump proposes offends liberal values by discriminating against millions of innocent people. But a country is made of its people, and illiberal immigration creates an illiberal country. Also, more terrorist incidents committed by a tiny minority of muslim immigrants will increase demand for total state surveillance. Reasonable people holding similar values can disagree on which immigration policy is least bad.

Besides these very straightforward reasons for Trump, there are strategic and esoteric reasons. For example, I think Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to oppose state surveillance but that they are unlikely to do so with one of their own at the head of the executive branch. A President Trump would unleash the most anti-surveillance activism in history.

So why didn’t Sam come up with any of these ideas? My read on it is that people in our cultural group are so harshly condemning Trump that even demonstrating an understanding of Trump supporters seems contrarian and a little dangerous. Politics is the mind killer and ideas are soldiers. Entertaining the ideas of “the other side” is like giving aid to the enemy.

The group mind, as represented on my facebook feed, has judged Trump as racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and the American Hitler. Trump voters, like Thiel, are guilty by association.

I’m morbidly impressed with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, they have run a fantastically effective effort of demonization. More fevered mainstream commentary predicts that Trump’s election will ignite pogroms against Jews and people of color or perhaps bring back Black slavery. An old peacenik at a local coffee shop near me told me unbidden that he would shoot Trump in the head if given the opportunity. He was the second person to do so.

Sam Altman, like a lot of people in progressive industries, can’t understand conservatives because they aren’t making their voices heard. They have successfully been painted with the image of every demon in the American canon. It’s no surprise if they keep their heads down.

To use the language of my progressive friends: progressives are unconscious of the privilege they have to participate openly in political debates without fear.

IV.

I am not endorsing Donald Trump for President of the United States.

If he wins, which seems unlikely at this point, some part of me will rejoice. That part of me is the young boy who feared punishment for thinking and speaking the truth as he saw it. A Trump win will mean the tactics of demonization and punishment will have failed. In public we will be allowed to think a broader range of thoughts. As Trump himself shows, not all of these thoughts will be worthwhile. But my feeling of freedom will include the freedom to oppose the bad ideas of a President Trump.

But that is far from thinking that Trump will be a good President. I don’t have a good handle on what he actually believes.

In American politics, I find that things are never as good as I hope or as bad as I fear. A Hillary Clinton presidency will strengthen some values that I am opposed to, but life is long and there is plenty of time for political fashions to change. I don't desire a Clinton presidency, but neither do I fear it.

Venkatesh Rao makes a good case that voting for idealistic reasons, rather than strategic ones, is more in line with the culture of Silicon Valley. His argument made me feel like voting for Gary Johnson. I guess you could say I'm undecided.

V.

I feel a call to live my own values and try to understand the viewpoint of people calling for Trump supporters to be punished.

If I talk to an average enforcer of political correctness, I’m sure that they are not opposed to open debate. It’s a fundamental American value. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill used the term “the marketplace of ideas” to describe how open debate allows the best ideas to win and spread.

Libertarian-leaning people like myself shout this line of reasoning over and over at progressives as if they don’t get it. I think they do get it. But they notice that the ideas flying around in this marketplace are not neutral in the effect they have on society. Sometimes words hurt people.

For example, when we have public debate over what to do about Muslim terrorism, it might make people more biased against Muslims, the vast majority of whom will never be terrorists. That’s probably why the Obama Justice Department at first redacted mentions of “Islam” and “ISIS” from the transcripts of the 9/11 calls made by the Orlando nightclub shooter.

I bet that progressives don’t believe in punishing their political opponents, even if that’s what I perceive them to be doing. Rather, they believe that some ideas hurt people, and we should stop spreading ideas that hurt. This class of ideas is called things like “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “transphobia”, “Islamophobia” and “xenophobia”.

At the root of political correctness is a desire to care. Caring is noble. Caring makes it nice to be human.

This becomes problematic when it gets hijacked by politics. Partisans have a huge incentive to argue that the ideas of the other side aren’t merely wrong, but actively harmful. The American Left has been incredibly successful at making this case against Trump this year, who has done his best to make it easy for them.

Politics further corrupts care by limiting it to people on your side. Like the kind peacenik at the coffee shop who told me he would gladly shoot Trump in the head.

If you care about political correctness because you care about people, I want you to keep your caring. But I challenge you to expand it. This is hard. Empathy gets more complicated the wider you expand your circle of care. But this is the most noble challenge you can accept. It is the challenge of the bodhisattva.

There is another problem with preventing hurtful words. What if hurtful words are also true? For example, the Orlando Nightclub shooter really was inspired by Islam and claimed allegiance to ISIS. Learning this fact might make people biased against Muslims, but it is a fact. What are we supposed to do about unpleasant truths?

The divide over unpleasant truth is the most essential ideological divide between internet communities today. At the age of 18 I left behind everything and everybody I knew because of an allegiance to truth that wouldn’t let me stay a Jehovah’s Witness. I have a strong bias towards the side with an absolute commitment to truth.

But I understand the value of caring. So far there is no mass movement that has a good protocol to bring the two values into harmony. The internet right-wing revels in unpleasant truths and paints the left as budding totalitarians. The internet left maintains a scrupulous niceness and paints the right as brutes.

Perhaps Buddhism can offer a way. In the Buddhist tradition my girlfriend is studying, they are taught to speak kindly as a moral precept. But they are also taught not to judge or criticize how other people are living up to moral precepts. At the same time, Buddhism has a strong commitment to truth. Seeing things for how they actually are is pretty much the whole point of it. It seems to have the right ingredients for making kind truth-tellers.

Rationalism offers another way. Rationalists practice and celebrate changing their mind. The world could use more rationalist virtues.

I hope that we can grant each other a little patience, a little understanding, while we find a way together.

Time Orientation of Politics

The two major political orientations in American politics are conservative and progressive. But this pattern is not distinctly American - it is widespread throughout history. Late Republican Rome had their own conservative and progressive factions: the Optimates and the Populares. These orientations are persistent because they derive from basic psychological attitudes towards time.

Conservatives love what is. They delight in the present and the particular. They tend to be older than progressives. People become more conservative as they age and fall in love with the world. Conservatives in different places have little in common with each other because they want to preserve different things. Conservatism is local.

Progressives are in love with the future. Progressive thought tends to be abstract and speculative. It measures the present against its ideals and finds it wanting. At its best, progressivism is the conscience of society. At its worst, it is an overactive, guilty conscience that turns into puritanism. Young people, filled with a desire to leave a dent in the universe, tend to be progressive.

Reading these descriptions you might be tempted to pick which side is right. But this is the wrong way to go about it. These are two basic poles of the human psyche and they need each other to be whole. Every human institution is polarized in this way. Even a group of progressive activists will have its more conservative and progressive members*. Split a magnet in half and what you have is two half-sized magnets, fractally, down to the polarization of individual atoms.

It is the task of wisdom to balance these two impulses within individuals and within human institutions. Both orientations have failure modes when they are allowed to dominate.

The failure mode of conservatism is latching on too tightly to the existing arrangement of things. When conservatism is well balanced, it is the skeleton of society, defender of things worth defending. When it becomes too entrenched it calcifies the body politic. The society fails to address a building problem until it is too late and bursts forth into catastrophe.

The failure mode of progressivism is impatience. When progressives change things too quickly, they destroy pieces of the old order without regards to their value. The fragile, irreplaceable beauty of the world is sacrificed in service of some promised future utopia. Often, there is great bloodshed, such as in the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Iconoclasm in its old sense - the destruction of icons - is solely an actively of progressives.

In the abstract, both suffer from impossibility. The conservative must make peace that the present cannot stay the same and the progressive that the task of eliminating evil eventually generates negative returns.

The continuum of time is split into past, present, and future and so far we have discovered political attitudes that correspond to two of the three: present -> conservative and future -> progressive. There is one other basic political orientation but it is less common: the reactionary. Reaction is in love with things past.

To explain reaction and how it influences modern politics would be a large tangent that would distract from the elegant model so far developed in this post. So I will leave that for later. But a healthy psyche or good society will also balance reactionary feeling with conservative and progressive.


* Progressive movements, driven by the fuel of righteous anger, are especially tempted to purify the whole by purging more conservative members. See the infighting of the modern social justice movement, or more spectacular bloody purges of the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge