“The above obviously is nothing like a full list or analysis. But it gives a sense of some core basics. Getting these more right than your opponent is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being successful.”
Quote from your ‘how Labour could win’ post.
What would be a full list or analysis. What are all the conditions Labour need to get right to be successful?
Interesting. Maybe more interesting for someone who has not read those books but still.
You say new nations will be created in the next 20 years. Which ones specifically are you discussing? Because I think there's a greater chance of less nations existing (ie: a unified Korea and perhaps not the one we typically imagine).
I am however, deeply concerned by your notion that 100% of customers services will be LLMs. The question is should they be? In terms of making websites accessible, an LLM cannot navigate and change the Javascript code in order to create accessibility. Nor can it properly refer to a human figure. I have used Microsoft's LLM chat regarding Outlook, which refuses to recognise my user agent in an obvious server side issue. But it turns out Microsoft doesn't even test on non-edge browsers. An LLM will fall down this trap worse than Horizon. I do not see technology getting better in terms of error correction.
But like many of you substack posts there is a grand contradiction. The narrative of your posts shows two men. One is a "techno-tommy" who wants to "build build build" and go all in on 21st century processes Silicon Valley style. The Other is an Old School Conservative who wants to rally against the conveyor belt and return to a more ideologically pure time. One of these men is fake. But which is it? Maybe both. Regardless, THIS is an existential threat to TSP. The Regime Change will only be as good as it's Architects. And thus the Architects must be chosen as precisely as the Disciples of Christ himself. Otherwise the Devils will get in. This weakens your personal ability to fully control TSP. The goal is to find an individual with sufficient Ideological Purity.
What DC calls 'crises' is what I call democracy, universal democracy.
Anyone who studies modern quantum physics knows that the universe is best described as democratic.
The ONLY way to deal SUCCESSFULLY with universal democracy is to BALANCE with it continuously, statically and dynamically.
There are TWO ways of balancing; democratically or dictatorially. Only one country, Switzerland, balances democratically. This is why Switzerland has solved every 'crisis' listed by DC above regarding current events affecting it and every other country.
DC is clearly bent on balancing the non-Direct Democracy way. I'm balancing the Swiss Direct Democracy way. Universal democracy works universally.
I'd love to see a quantum physicist assessment of the uncertainty of time and the uncertainty of energy in response to history as cyclical rather than linear
cyclical crisis is inevitable as you well show - the question is who/what can be a Bismarck of this era? how do we create a counter movement against the revolutionaries, that equally doesn't seek to defend the existing regime? Vote Leave / Trump tapped into the right kind of dynamics e.g. clear, direct messaging through new channels the existing regimes can't control, but this seems to have stagnated. There isn't a clear movement against either the revolutionaries or the existing regime in the UK, and Trump 2020 is regressing on the ideas that made Trump 2016 successful.
Get on with TSP Dom! There are people ready and waiting to fight the madness. Even amongst my hyperwoke generation (97-03) there are plenty of people who reject the insanity of woke but still hate the system, crave change. As soon as the right movement taps into this, using the new methods available, something will give.
It’s fascinating that you claim to oppose the impact of academia and of courses such as PPE in Politics, because it’s in posts like these that it’s clearest that the corrosive influence of Oxford still has a hold on you. Be it the wannabe edgelord nature of OUCA, the inability to give a point straight and need to instead frame in vast, sweeping historical terms of Ancient and Modern, or the inexorable march towards everything having to either be philosophy or literature (as that it is the thing that successfully massages your own ego and that of the other students/academics) that feels like it sums up Oxford Humanities. Sure, the attitude may be different - a fair bit angrier perhaps - and it’s clear you were more of a ‘loner’ for lack of a better phrase than some others, but everything else is still the same as the people I live amongst day in and day out. For all that you may criticise those that originate from the same environment, I’d wager that you are still every bit the Ancient and Modern History student that you left the university as.
What I like is that if you wanna know about politics, study literature…
It’s interesting that you can read politics into great literature, I always read 19th century politics as if it were literature.
In a way people understand politics as if they were living in novels of their time.
Politics is tribal, great swathes of emotional entrainment based upon shared conceptions of the world. People’s hunches solidified and then being acted upon in critical, deciding moments.
It must have been great reading that serialisation in Moscow as it began cranking out in 1870.
Despite the realist gloom, and the reminder of baser instincts your piece stirs, literature also takes us through process of human psyche, socially and individually, because people enjoy altruism and seeing something noble play out too, they need a wheel to put their shoulder to over the course of a lifetime.
For this reason people hunger for politics which strives for meaning, dignity…
Every generation its own striving. Another reason why the west is a bit screwed - because ‘the rest’ can easily characterise the west as war mongers, egoist baddies whilst a ‘multipolar world’ aims to bring basic needs to humans everywhere so even the humblest person on the planet can work, rest and read great literature, unmolested by the ‘destabilisers’, the Boris types, into war flattening a place then western contractors moving in. There’s a lot of the world still crunching through a basic search for human dignity.
The Russians are well placed geographically to brow beat out of themselves great literature, constantly balancing east to west.
That 70 years they had of ‘equality’ that took them to hell in a handcart as command economy imploded, also gave them a great confidence to rest upon their literature and science. They squared up to the west. They still do square up to the combined forces of the west.
I love that you found the quote with Whitechapel in it. The modern UK is a droplet of the wider currents of the world. Whatever the Industrial Revolution wreaks, in terms of havoc abroad, is sent back to process, in droplets and reflections.
My questions for you are :
What do you recognise as productive, constructive, and what has potential in the political sphere in the UK?
And when you said ‘peace abroad, regime change at home’ was that part of this fatalism - (‘it happens every 50 years, we’re doomed’) - or were there any other thoughts related to political agency and TSP behind it?
It’s part of a bigger question, of who are you? Everyone knows that in no. 10 most of it is shit show management - it is the one’s who cut through that who have core principles that are political - they have a grasp on what society is really about and know deep down where they are driving and what they want to do with power.
I’m curious about this: is it true that if you want to create TSP, there’s got to be more than a realist nihilism to you? Or like those Moment of Zen people, is it part of your outlook to go in knowing that roads to hell are paved with good intentions? And do you think there are UK equivalents to the Moment of Zen people?
Re your idea for 60 second videos - lot of the podcasts that are gaining traction are collaborations that aim to plough a meaning through the cross fire confusion of current ideas. Like Campbell and Stewart,
Baddiel and Warsi. What do you think of that strategy?
If you had an old typewriter and the time now, what passages of what political treatises would you type out?
In the opening of the year 1604, it was publicly announced that a parliament would be assembled early in the spring; and never could any parliament meet for the consideration of more eventful questions than at that moment agitated the public mind. It did not require Bacon's sagacity to perceive this, or, looking forward, to foresee the approaching storm.
Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Political disturbances happen not without their warning harbingers. Murmurs, not loud but portentous, ever precede these convulsions of the moral world: murmurs which were heard by Bacon not the less audibly from the apparent tranquillity with which James ascended the throne.
"Tempests of state," he says, "are commonly greatest when things grow to equality; as natural tempests are greatest about the equinox: and as there are certain hollow blasts of wind and secret swellings of seas before a tempest, so are there in states:
"Ille etiam caecos instare tumultus Saepe monet, fraudesque et operta tumescere bella ..",~
Virgil, Georgics 1, 46-5
[ "He also often warns the blind that tumult is pressing, and wars are swelling under cover .." ]
These secret swellings and hollow blasts, which arise from the conflicts between power, tenacious in retaining its authority, and knowledge, advancing to resist it, are materials certain to explode, unless judiciously dispersed. Of this Bacon constantly warned the community, by recommending the admission of gradual reform.
"In your innovations," he said, "follow the example of time, which innovateth greatly, but quietly. The advances of nature are all gradual; scarce discernible in their motions, but only visible in their issue. The grass grows and the shadow moves upon the dial unperceived, until we reflect upon their progress."
These admonitions have always been disregarded or resisted by governments, and, wanting this safety-valve, states have been periodically exposed to convulsion. In England this appeared at Runnymede in the reign of John, and in the subversion of the Pope's authority in the reign of Henry the Eighth.
When the spirit of reform has once been raised, its progress is not easily stayed. Through the ruins of Catholic superstition various defects were discovered in other parts of the fabric: and the people, having been spirit-broken during the reign of Henry, and lulled during the reign of Elizabeth, reform now burst with accumulated impetuosity. So true is the doctrine of Bacon, that, "when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shaken, or weakened, which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure, men had need to pray for fair weather."
Another component (perhaps the most individually decisive, all told) of the historical cycling you describe is that it takes roughly an equivalent or slightly longer (c. 60-70 year) cycle of time for certain to-be-dominant ideas to emerge and then go through progressive degrees of circulation until they are eventually definitive of a whole intellectual class' method of looking at the world.
Just as it took Fichte's conception of German nationalism 59 years to find its climactic stage in the reunification of the states; just as there was 59 years between the Communist Manifesto/Cherny and the Russian Rev; just as there was about the same length of time between The Wealth of Nations and the pinnacle phase of British mercantile liberalism (harder to pinpoint given lack of signal event); so I think it is now that we are hitting the culmination point of Foucault and the continental postmodernists' reign in the halls of thought. I've heard some others be put forward as the current period's ancestral thinker (Adorno in particular) but I find Foucault's thought seems to be the most broadly prevalent and definitive in the key regions.
With the rise of AI instruments capable of modelling outcomes based on extremely disparate input factors, and controlling for lots of noise, it ought to be possible to at least begin assessing likelihoods that 'x' idea is most likely to become prevalent over the coming time, and even tracking them through the cycles. Humungous architectures required but rendered feasible by developments in the last 3-4 years as they never were before - though I wonder if interest in this kind of thing is really prevalent enough among the types of founders/engineers likely to be considered eligible for the magnitude of funding something on that level would require.
My gut goes with 60-70 years cycles, although history and social trends do tend to show 50 year patterns. I like to apply a 33/66 year cycle in personal/spiritual life - reflecting the Earth, Moon and Start returning to their original positions every 33 years (echoes in Christianity too). However, whilst being comforted by the thought that life and world events are mapped out in the skies, I do agree that databases/algorithms should be able to map and model the occurrence of seismic events, and have a general idea of what its precursor might be.
DC hasn’t quantified the “spasm of weird madness/insanity on campus/mind virus” he posits in this particular post, despite searching for answers in the history of Western spirituality. I suspect that it might be summarized as “trans madness” under the blanket umbrella of “woke”. The moral panic at the moment seems to ignore the 50 year cycles towards “androgyny” since fashion emerged as a cultural phenomena circa 1775 (Victorian slim torsos, rejecting tightlacing, flatchested flappers, 1970’s gender neutral jeans and t-shirt, braburning and now breastbinders). I’m ideologically against surgery and drugs for gender dysphoria, but I’m still struggling to understand how such a minority issue has become centre stage in political discourse. History shows that this too shall pass (would be great to have data to prepare us for 2066), but it’s incredibly corrosive and distracting. I work on a university campus, interacting with a multi-faculty group every week; I don’t see evidence of a “mind virus”, in spite of my best efforts.
I think the specifics of the current priorities in the identitarian/metropolitan set - I define the two as sort of separate but interlinked; I prefer these terms to 'woke' as they're more descriptive - are very much a rational follow-on from Foucault's doctrines, which are of course about power being definitive of all relations and all relations being zero-sum. Trans folk are, to this end, the kind of ultimate Foucaultian class for the identitarians, the ultimate outlet for their sentimental views of history, race etc. Identitarian views of most of the groups they nominally favour are usually entirely instrumental; I have no doubt this is also largely true of their views of actual trans individuals.
And for the record, I think the mind virus in question is in the administrative layer, not in the faculty. I attended one of the ground-zero unis for a lot of agitation around these issues. Faculty were by-and-large indifferent to the political avant-garde or soft-serve on it at best; but some of the administrators, for the sake of whose enrichment the faculty were being impoverished, were amazingly militant.
Appreciate a definition of terms (the response I generally get for when I ask for clarification of “woke” is a variation on “you know, the whole trans thing”). Shall consider the Foucault lens to deconstruct current “madness”. I’m pretty sure that the majority of actual trans people will be very relieved when the current love/hate focus on their existence subsides to proportionate, non-militant, levels.
"with everyone making their own highly confident judgements they ‘could not agree what to consider good and evil’. All social cohesion is destroyed."
This strikes me as the crux of the matter. The Enlightenment shifted morality from the objective (Jesus Christ) to the subjective (Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law). This has tangible consequences on the average maximum size of coherent networks available to an civilisation, whether it takes the form of neighbourhood communities, academic integrity or the economic ecosystem. The Apollo program rested atop a vast, high trust, highly coherent economy and society. Low trust societies that do not possess this coherence will never be able to bootstrap a project of that complexity.
In an open competitive environment, highly organised minorities outperform disorganised minorities. This applies in any sphere, be it war, sports, policing or politics. Ultimately, no organisation can beat a competitor that is more organised. The police can only catch criminals that are less organised than they are. A political party can only begin to win seats once they are more organised than their competition. The incoherence of moral values places a ceiling on overall performance at any scale. This is why the West is collapsing.
Any viable response to the end of the western empire must address this question explicitly if any long-term success is to be had.
Not my area, but the Lenin quotation about 'selling the rope' looks made up. It is doesn't seem to appear in serious works on Soviet history. When books/articles do give a reference for it, it is normally meaningless (e.g. they cite it from a dictionary of quotations, which in turn marks it as something like 'attrib.', helpfully). There is an interesting column by William Safire in the New York Times for April 12th 1987 on this and the 'useful idiots' quotation, which argues that they are not genuine and seems pretty convincing. The best-case scenario is that they bear a vague relation to something that Lenin allegedly wrote in some private papers. The artist Yury Annenkov claimed to have seen these in Moscow in the 1920s, but he published the extracts only in the 1960s. This looks very dubious to me - for one thing Annenkov seems to have left the USSR only six months or so after Lenin's death - but you'd need to consult an expert.
Seconded, great comment.
As a recent graduate this would be amazing.
Even some rough ideas would be very useful, I feel like I'm reaching into the fog with what I'm trying to do sometimes.
DC has repeatedly answered questions in this vein since this blog began.
What’s causing London’s knife crime problems? Is Sadiq Khan to blame? How could they be solved?
“The above obviously is nothing like a full list or analysis. But it gives a sense of some core basics. Getting these more right than your opponent is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being successful.”
Quote from your ‘how Labour could win’ post.
What would be a full list or analysis. What are all the conditions Labour need to get right to be successful?
Interesting. Maybe more interesting for someone who has not read those books but still.
You say new nations will be created in the next 20 years. Which ones specifically are you discussing? Because I think there's a greater chance of less nations existing (ie: a unified Korea and perhaps not the one we typically imagine).
I am however, deeply concerned by your notion that 100% of customers services will be LLMs. The question is should they be? In terms of making websites accessible, an LLM cannot navigate and change the Javascript code in order to create accessibility. Nor can it properly refer to a human figure. I have used Microsoft's LLM chat regarding Outlook, which refuses to recognise my user agent in an obvious server side issue. But it turns out Microsoft doesn't even test on non-edge browsers. An LLM will fall down this trap worse than Horizon. I do not see technology getting better in terms of error correction.
But like many of you substack posts there is a grand contradiction. The narrative of your posts shows two men. One is a "techno-tommy" who wants to "build build build" and go all in on 21st century processes Silicon Valley style. The Other is an Old School Conservative who wants to rally against the conveyor belt and return to a more ideologically pure time. One of these men is fake. But which is it? Maybe both. Regardless, THIS is an existential threat to TSP. The Regime Change will only be as good as it's Architects. And thus the Architects must be chosen as precisely as the Disciples of Christ himself. Otherwise the Devils will get in. This weakens your personal ability to fully control TSP. The goal is to find an individual with sufficient Ideological Purity.
Profound DC profound!
Your finest piece to date!
I agree
What DC calls 'crises' is what I call democracy, universal democracy.
Anyone who studies modern quantum physics knows that the universe is best described as democratic.
The ONLY way to deal SUCCESSFULLY with universal democracy is to BALANCE with it continuously, statically and dynamically.
There are TWO ways of balancing; democratically or dictatorially. Only one country, Switzerland, balances democratically. This is why Switzerland has solved every 'crisis' listed by DC above regarding current events affecting it and every other country.
DC is clearly bent on balancing the non-Direct Democracy way. I'm balancing the Swiss Direct Democracy way. Universal democracy works universally.
I'd love to see a quantum physicist assessment of the uncertainty of time and the uncertainty of energy in response to history as cyclical rather than linear
cyclical crisis is inevitable as you well show - the question is who/what can be a Bismarck of this era? how do we create a counter movement against the revolutionaries, that equally doesn't seek to defend the existing regime? Vote Leave / Trump tapped into the right kind of dynamics e.g. clear, direct messaging through new channels the existing regimes can't control, but this seems to have stagnated. There isn't a clear movement against either the revolutionaries or the existing regime in the UK, and Trump 2020 is regressing on the ideas that made Trump 2016 successful.
Get on with TSP Dom! There are people ready and waiting to fight the madness. Even amongst my hyperwoke generation (97-03) there are plenty of people who reject the insanity of woke but still hate the system, crave change. As soon as the right movement taps into this, using the new methods available, something will give.
It’s fascinating that you claim to oppose the impact of academia and of courses such as PPE in Politics, because it’s in posts like these that it’s clearest that the corrosive influence of Oxford still has a hold on you. Be it the wannabe edgelord nature of OUCA, the inability to give a point straight and need to instead frame in vast, sweeping historical terms of Ancient and Modern, or the inexorable march towards everything having to either be philosophy or literature (as that it is the thing that successfully massages your own ego and that of the other students/academics) that feels like it sums up Oxford Humanities. Sure, the attitude may be different - a fair bit angrier perhaps - and it’s clear you were more of a ‘loner’ for lack of a better phrase than some others, but everything else is still the same as the people I live amongst day in and day out. For all that you may criticise those that originate from the same environment, I’d wager that you are still every bit the Ancient and Modern History student that you left the university as.
I'll bet you he isn't
Same person? No - clearly a major ideological and attitude change partway through life. Still a clear product of the Oxford system though? Absolutely.
I feel the opposite of the above comment.
What I like is that if you wanna know about politics, study literature…
It’s interesting that you can read politics into great literature, I always read 19th century politics as if it were literature.
In a way people understand politics as if they were living in novels of their time.
Politics is tribal, great swathes of emotional entrainment based upon shared conceptions of the world. People’s hunches solidified and then being acted upon in critical, deciding moments.
It must have been great reading that serialisation in Moscow as it began cranking out in 1870.
Despite the realist gloom, and the reminder of baser instincts your piece stirs, literature also takes us through process of human psyche, socially and individually, because people enjoy altruism and seeing something noble play out too, they need a wheel to put their shoulder to over the course of a lifetime.
For this reason people hunger for politics which strives for meaning, dignity…
Every generation its own striving. Another reason why the west is a bit screwed - because ‘the rest’ can easily characterise the west as war mongers, egoist baddies whilst a ‘multipolar world’ aims to bring basic needs to humans everywhere so even the humblest person on the planet can work, rest and read great literature, unmolested by the ‘destabilisers’, the Boris types, into war flattening a place then western contractors moving in. There’s a lot of the world still crunching through a basic search for human dignity.
The Russians are well placed geographically to brow beat out of themselves great literature, constantly balancing east to west.
That 70 years they had of ‘equality’ that took them to hell in a handcart as command economy imploded, also gave them a great confidence to rest upon their literature and science. They squared up to the west. They still do square up to the combined forces of the west.
I love that you found the quote with Whitechapel in it. The modern UK is a droplet of the wider currents of the world. Whatever the Industrial Revolution wreaks, in terms of havoc abroad, is sent back to process, in droplets and reflections.
My questions for you are :
What do you recognise as productive, constructive, and what has potential in the political sphere in the UK?
And when you said ‘peace abroad, regime change at home’ was that part of this fatalism - (‘it happens every 50 years, we’re doomed’) - or were there any other thoughts related to political agency and TSP behind it?
It’s part of a bigger question, of who are you? Everyone knows that in no. 10 most of it is shit show management - it is the one’s who cut through that who have core principles that are political - they have a grasp on what society is really about and know deep down where they are driving and what they want to do with power.
I’m curious about this: is it true that if you want to create TSP, there’s got to be more than a realist nihilism to you? Or like those Moment of Zen people, is it part of your outlook to go in knowing that roads to hell are paved with good intentions? And do you think there are UK equivalents to the Moment of Zen people?
Re your idea for 60 second videos - lot of the podcasts that are gaining traction are collaborations that aim to plough a meaning through the cross fire confusion of current ideas. Like Campbell and Stewart,
Baddiel and Warsi. What do you think of that strategy?
If you had an old typewriter and the time now, what passages of what political treatises would you type out?
Bakhtin also worth reading on Dostoyevsky
Definitely your best post in a long time. Loved every word. Lots to think about it. Thank you.
From "The Life of Bacon", Vol 1, Part 2
[ https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_Francis_Bacon/Volume_1 ]
In the opening of the year 1604, it was publicly announced that a parliament would be assembled early in the spring; and never could any parliament meet for the consideration of more eventful questions than at that moment agitated the public mind. It did not require Bacon's sagacity to perceive this, or, looking forward, to foresee the approaching storm.
Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Political disturbances happen not without their warning harbingers. Murmurs, not loud but portentous, ever precede these convulsions of the moral world: murmurs which were heard by Bacon not the less audibly from the apparent tranquillity with which James ascended the throne.
"Tempests of state," he says, "are commonly greatest when things grow to equality; as natural tempests are greatest about the equinox: and as there are certain hollow blasts of wind and secret swellings of seas before a tempest, so are there in states:
"Ille etiam caecos instare tumultus Saepe monet, fraudesque et operta tumescere bella ..",~
Virgil, Georgics 1, 46-5
[ "He also often warns the blind that tumult is pressing, and wars are swelling under cover .." ]
These secret swellings and hollow blasts, which arise from the conflicts between power, tenacious in retaining its authority, and knowledge, advancing to resist it, are materials certain to explode, unless judiciously dispersed. Of this Bacon constantly warned the community, by recommending the admission of gradual reform.
"In your innovations," he said, "follow the example of time, which innovateth greatly, but quietly. The advances of nature are all gradual; scarce discernible in their motions, but only visible in their issue. The grass grows and the shadow moves upon the dial unperceived, until we reflect upon their progress."
These admonitions have always been disregarded or resisted by governments, and, wanting this safety-valve, states have been periodically exposed to convulsion. In England this appeared at Runnymede in the reign of John, and in the subversion of the Pope's authority in the reign of Henry the Eighth.
When the spirit of reform has once been raised, its progress is not easily stayed. Through the ruins of Catholic superstition various defects were discovered in other parts of the fabric: and the people, having been spirit-broken during the reign of Henry, and lulled during the reign of Elizabeth, reform now burst with accumulated impetuosity. So true is the doctrine of Bacon, that, "when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shaken, or weakened, which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure, men had need to pray for fair weather."
Another component (perhaps the most individually decisive, all told) of the historical cycling you describe is that it takes roughly an equivalent or slightly longer (c. 60-70 year) cycle of time for certain to-be-dominant ideas to emerge and then go through progressive degrees of circulation until they are eventually definitive of a whole intellectual class' method of looking at the world.
Just as it took Fichte's conception of German nationalism 59 years to find its climactic stage in the reunification of the states; just as there was 59 years between the Communist Manifesto/Cherny and the Russian Rev; just as there was about the same length of time between The Wealth of Nations and the pinnacle phase of British mercantile liberalism (harder to pinpoint given lack of signal event); so I think it is now that we are hitting the culmination point of Foucault and the continental postmodernists' reign in the halls of thought. I've heard some others be put forward as the current period's ancestral thinker (Adorno in particular) but I find Foucault's thought seems to be the most broadly prevalent and definitive in the key regions.
With the rise of AI instruments capable of modelling outcomes based on extremely disparate input factors, and controlling for lots of noise, it ought to be possible to at least begin assessing likelihoods that 'x' idea is most likely to become prevalent over the coming time, and even tracking them through the cycles. Humungous architectures required but rendered feasible by developments in the last 3-4 years as they never were before - though I wonder if interest in this kind of thing is really prevalent enough among the types of founders/engineers likely to be considered eligible for the magnitude of funding something on that level would require.
My gut goes with 60-70 years cycles, although history and social trends do tend to show 50 year patterns. I like to apply a 33/66 year cycle in personal/spiritual life - reflecting the Earth, Moon and Start returning to their original positions every 33 years (echoes in Christianity too). However, whilst being comforted by the thought that life and world events are mapped out in the skies, I do agree that databases/algorithms should be able to map and model the occurrence of seismic events, and have a general idea of what its precursor might be.
DC hasn’t quantified the “spasm of weird madness/insanity on campus/mind virus” he posits in this particular post, despite searching for answers in the history of Western spirituality. I suspect that it might be summarized as “trans madness” under the blanket umbrella of “woke”. The moral panic at the moment seems to ignore the 50 year cycles towards “androgyny” since fashion emerged as a cultural phenomena circa 1775 (Victorian slim torsos, rejecting tightlacing, flatchested flappers, 1970’s gender neutral jeans and t-shirt, braburning and now breastbinders). I’m ideologically against surgery and drugs for gender dysphoria, but I’m still struggling to understand how such a minority issue has become centre stage in political discourse. History shows that this too shall pass (would be great to have data to prepare us for 2066), but it’s incredibly corrosive and distracting. I work on a university campus, interacting with a multi-faculty group every week; I don’t see evidence of a “mind virus”, in spite of my best efforts.
I think the specifics of the current priorities in the identitarian/metropolitan set - I define the two as sort of separate but interlinked; I prefer these terms to 'woke' as they're more descriptive - are very much a rational follow-on from Foucault's doctrines, which are of course about power being definitive of all relations and all relations being zero-sum. Trans folk are, to this end, the kind of ultimate Foucaultian class for the identitarians, the ultimate outlet for their sentimental views of history, race etc. Identitarian views of most of the groups they nominally favour are usually entirely instrumental; I have no doubt this is also largely true of their views of actual trans individuals.
And for the record, I think the mind virus in question is in the administrative layer, not in the faculty. I attended one of the ground-zero unis for a lot of agitation around these issues. Faculty were by-and-large indifferent to the political avant-garde or soft-serve on it at best; but some of the administrators, for the sake of whose enrichment the faculty were being impoverished, were amazingly militant.
Appreciate a definition of terms (the response I generally get for when I ask for clarification of “woke” is a variation on “you know, the whole trans thing”). Shall consider the Foucault lens to deconstruct current “madness”. I’m pretty sure that the majority of actual trans people will be very relieved when the current love/hate focus on their existence subsides to proportionate, non-militant, levels.
"with everyone making their own highly confident judgements they ‘could not agree what to consider good and evil’. All social cohesion is destroyed."
This strikes me as the crux of the matter. The Enlightenment shifted morality from the objective (Jesus Christ) to the subjective (Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law). This has tangible consequences on the average maximum size of coherent networks available to an civilisation, whether it takes the form of neighbourhood communities, academic integrity or the economic ecosystem. The Apollo program rested atop a vast, high trust, highly coherent economy and society. Low trust societies that do not possess this coherence will never be able to bootstrap a project of that complexity.
In an open competitive environment, highly organised minorities outperform disorganised minorities. This applies in any sphere, be it war, sports, policing or politics. Ultimately, no organisation can beat a competitor that is more organised. The police can only catch criminals that are less organised than they are. A political party can only begin to win seats once they are more organised than their competition. The incoherence of moral values places a ceiling on overall performance at any scale. This is why the West is collapsing.
Any viable response to the end of the western empire must address this question explicitly if any long-term success is to be had.
Not my area, but the Lenin quotation about 'selling the rope' looks made up. It is doesn't seem to appear in serious works on Soviet history. When books/articles do give a reference for it, it is normally meaningless (e.g. they cite it from a dictionary of quotations, which in turn marks it as something like 'attrib.', helpfully). There is an interesting column by William Safire in the New York Times for April 12th 1987 on this and the 'useful idiots' quotation, which argues that they are not genuine and seems pretty convincing. The best-case scenario is that they bear a vague relation to something that Lenin allegedly wrote in some private papers. The artist Yury Annenkov claimed to have seen these in Moscow in the 1920s, but he published the extracts only in the 1960s. This looks very dubious to me - for one thing Annenkov seems to have left the USSR only six months or so after Lenin's death - but you'd need to consult an expert.
Thrilling read, cannot wait for Brothers Karamazov. Have you read any in Russian?