[RD] Successor ideologies

[Mouthwash]

Using the old political compass, I made a chart of four 'successor ideologies' (more accurately, worldviews) which are emerging online in place of the old political spectrum. I'm not sure of the actual demographics of them all versus normies, but as the new generations grow up and take their place in society we're probably going to be seeing them a lot more.

I suppose it's possible that one or all of them are just passing fads and I'm deluded. In whatever case, it is a useful map of the current online culture wars. I doubt that either of the two left-corner factions will ever gain mainstream acceptance, but that doesn't mean they won't stick around to influence politics for possibly decades to come.

So here it is:

I've tried to be as fair as possible. The ideas placed on top of the black borders are held by both factions, while the ideas in the corners are the most extreme vision proposed by them. Of course I am not saying that all members of a faction accepts every idea I placed in their corner or can't believe in any idea outside of it.

Spoiler The factions :

1) The rationalists, upper left corner. They're autistic to a man (and yes, they're all men) and quite obscure; probably never going to penetrate the public awareness to the same extent as the Tea Party or Libertarians. However, they have lots of adherents among the rich and powerful, especially in tech, and there have even been a couple of Singularity-themed sci-fi movies, so they aren't entirely absent from pop culture.

2) The woke, upper right corner. Basically the mass movement of traumatized kids and exploited minorities revolting against the current system. They have a strong anarchist streak but aren't focused on class issues (and reject the sexually libertine Marxism that was advocated by 20th century radicals). The woke have both numbers and momentum, everyone knows who they are, and the media, professional class, and universities are all sympathetic to them. By far the most powerful faction at the moment.

3) The alt-right, lower left corner. They originated from former libertarians disillusioned with the way things were going in America, and were able to broadcast their message online to people deprived of meaning and frustrated at the dominance of the woke faction. They have the lowest numbers of all the factions, by far the worst PR, and on average are pretty dumb (their thinkers are usually immigrants/escapees from the rationalist faction). Their one advantage is that the woke media keeps playing them up as a threat to spur political action, but they're not going to be running things anytime soon.

4) The reocons (couldn't think of a better term), lower right corner. This is my own faction - a part of the religious right that abandoned the mainstream when Reagan-style neoliberal conservatism started really collapsing. We've rejected the alliance of Mammon and God and are very suspicious of modernism as a whole, wanting to revive tradition and end our poisonous dependence on technology. Unfortunately, we have as few active members as the alt-right (and they're usually more Catholic than the Pope) and the least media coverage, but the working class and majority of normies are probably most sympathetic to our view of things.

The rationalists and woke don't like each other (the rationalists deplore the woke shutting down their open debate and the woke will sometimes mob a rationalist blogger after he posts about feminist 'fallacies') but usually don't turn their guns on each other, either. The relationship between alt-right and rationalists, and the alt-right and reocons are about the same.

The alt-right and reocons are both currently at war with the woke. We're also at war with the rationalists and view them as our number one enemy, but strangely enough (despite their extreme anti-theist origins) they're not hostile to us and view us as silly but interesting specimens to learn from. That's probably due to Scott Alexander's influence.

Comments and criticism are welcome but please make them in good faith.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I like it. It is a good start.

 

[Synobun]

What do I win?

 

[Mouthwash]

What do I win?

To clarify, I don't think that merely holding an idea as true is what's important here. It should be important to you and worth fighting for. Remember, this is just about which section of a political battleground you're in - if you sorta kinda want Medicare but are really gung ho about our mission in Iraq, you're going to vote for Bush.

You've never advocated for effective altruism (if you did your political posts would be trying to convince people to ignore police shootings and focus on the Third World) and you've loudly condemned those, including me, whom you see as holding offensive and parochial beliefs (also 'taboo-free discussion to determine how to run things' doesn't really go with the woke emphasis on personal experience). So I don't think you should have those options circled.

 

[Synobun]

To clarify, I don't think that merely holding an idea to be true is what's important here. It should be important to you and worth fighting for. Remember, this is just about which section of a political battleground you're in - if you sorta kinda want Medicare but are really gung ho about our mission in Iraq, you're going to vote for Bush and the former opinion will be irrelevant.

You've never advocated for effective altruism (if you did you likely wouldn't talk much about anything but the Third World) and you've loudly condemned those, including me, whom you see as holding offensive and parochial beliefs (also it doesn't really go with the woke emphasis on personal experience). So I don't think you should have the 'taboo-free discussion' or 'utilitarianism' options circled.

Well, if someone's policy ends in oppression or misfortune, I don't much consider it to be rational. The marketplace of ideas should mean that ideas which clearly cause material harm are no longer "sold." It's not rational to believe two ideas equal after consideration, but it is rational to consider every idea.

I also think "ills can be socialized away" is heavily related to "universal sympathy should be wired into human brains." Proper education and healthcare, as core principles of society, would significantly reduce destructive behaviour. Teaching toddlers basic emotional control has a significant impact on relationship building in their youth, and we're only twenty or thirty years removed from the gold standard of "beat your kids into compliance."

 

[Mouthwash]

Well, if someone's policy ends in oppression or misfortune, I don't much consider it to be rational. The marketplace of ideas should mean that ideas which clearly cause material harm are no longer "sold." It's not rational to believe two ideas equal after consideration, but it is rational to consider every idea.

The matter is epistemic - do you believe someone's experience prima facie or is your instinct to demand proof, a study showing that their suffering reflects a larger problem that ought to be prioritized? Even if you use the middle ground (incorporating both experience and evidence), where does your worldview come from in the first place? By which means are accurate beliefs usually delivered? Is it a better strategy to go out and live amongst the people or to dedicate yourself to analyzing statistics?

Once you know how someone answers, you'll know a whole lot more about them.

I also think "ills can be socialized away" is heavily related to "universal sympathy should be wired into human brains." Proper education and healthcare, as core principles of society, would significantly reduce destructive behaviour. Teaching toddlers basic emotional control has a significant impact on relationship building in their youth, and we're only twenty or thirty years removed from the gold standard of "beat your kids into compliance."

Ha, no, I forgot that people don't have as much experience with the rationalists as I do. I meant literally rewiring the brain to feel equal-opportunity sympathy for everyone, so that a mother will ignore her own baby in a burning building to rescue two more if she can.

That's something you'll hear a lot from transhumanists. One of them referred to strong personal attachments as being a 'bug' in the human software.

 

[Synobun]

The matter is epistemic - do you believe someone's experience prima facie or is your instinct to demand proof, a study showing that their suffering reflects a larger problem that ought to be prioritized? Even if you use the middle ground (incorporating both experience and evidence), where does your worldview come from in the first place? By which means are accurate beliefs usually delivered? Is it a better strategy to go out and live amongst the people or to dedicate yourself to analyzing statistics?

Once you know how someone answers, you'll know a whole lot more about them.

Both, but I'm only a loose believer in relativism. I know people have different perspectives and that each has some measure of validity. There are people who see universal healthcare as a great evil because for them, that kind of empathy and unconditional help is anathema and a fatal flaw. This is something I don't adhere to, and would go as far as saying is outright objectively wrong, so on a personal level I don't recognize everything as equal on delivery. I think anyone who does is far too detached from the human experience.

Ha, no, I forgot that people don't have as much experience with the rationalists as I do. I meant literally rewiring the brain to feel equal-opportunity sympathy for everyone, so that a mother will ignore her own baby in a burning building to rescue two more if she can.

That's something you'll hear a lot from transhumanists. One of them referred to strong personal attachments as being a 'bug' in the human software.

Ah, well. Yes. Scratch that from my Bingo card, then.

 

[Mouthwash]

Both, but I'm only a loose believer in relativism. I know people have different perspectives and that each has some measure of validity. There are people who see universal healthcare as a great evil because for them, that kind of empathy and unconditional help is anathema and a fatal flaw. This is something I don't adhere to, and would go as far as saying is outright objectively wrong, so on a personal level I don't recognize everything as equal on delivery. I think anyone who does is far too detached from the human experience.

But both options explicitly repudiate the other (intuition and feeling is just bias, or it weighs the most). I think that believing in only one method is something very correlated with faction membership (perhaps the most correlated), so if you're in the middle ground you should include neither.

 

[Hygro]

SomeTimez being that, we should do that tile sometimes, not all times.

Inspired by Synsensa and props to Mouthwash for building this and conceptualizing it.

 

[Mouthwash]

There are several contradictory opinions you circled there...

I also may have overestimated how much unspoken meaning the text actually conveys. Using incentives to engineer a better society is meant to be a contrast to respect for local knowledge and cultures, for instance, and an immutable ethical code of kindness and respect is a contrast to 'power to secure our survival', which has some heavy implications for what we ought to do.

 

[EnglishEdward]

There are several outright contradictory opinions you circled there...

I also may have overestimated how much unspoken meaning the text actually conveys. Using incentives to engineer a better society is meant to be a contrast to respect for local knowledge and cultures, for instance, and an immutable ethical code of kindness and respect is a contrast to 'power to secure our survival', which has some heavy implications for what we ought to do.

"power to secure our survival" can be interpreted in many ways from "power over others" to "empowerment to look after one's family"

the contradiction only occurs when the first interpretation is used.

 

[Catharsis]

There are several outright contradictory opinions you circled there....

The standard political compass test allows for contradictory opinions, it'll just average them out to a centrist viewpoint. I suspect your aim here wasn't actually to recreate the dumb test we all put in our signatures but if it was, you could do it like this (apologies for my shaky line jobs and lettering):

And then if you take on Hygro's completion of the graph a circle as an 'Agree', a cross as 'Disagree', and the ? or SomeTimez as an 'Unsure/No Opinion', then multiply by the appropriate positive or negative or zero, you get this:

And then you sum the products of the second and fourth row to get the raw Nihilist/Meaningful score, and the third and fourth to get the raw Impersonal/Personal score. If I added my numbers right the max score you can get on the first is 60 and for the second it's 42, so divide by that to get a fractional score that preserves sign, and then I multiplied the final score by 10 to make it look more like the standard political compass score.

How this shakes out is that Hygro earns a final score of (0.7, 2.8) (that's in (x,y) notation so imp/pers first this time, and nihi/mean second). Congratulations Hygro you are slightly woke.

(I wasn't thinking too hard about this so correct my mistakes or bad process if you see it. Also I didn't do Synsensa's answers because he didn't say if the ones he didn't circle were disagrees or 'no opinions'.)

 

[Senethro]

The top row. Just pump it directly into my veins. Mmmmmm.

 

[amadeus]

If anyone wants to do @Catharsis-style analysis on themselves, I've made a .txt file that I think can be imported to a spreadsheet program. I didn't compare every cell, but I think it's accurate. I'll upload my own thing shortly.

 

[Senethro]

You know what, I'm going to go on the defense before someone even questions my taste. And so: Brave New World has ceased to be a dystopia.

Fordism as practised by the inhabitants of BNW does what it says, says what it means and has an intellectual integrity underpinning its society that is lacking from our own. Having grown to manage consumers and the wants of consumers (very directly) it is able to practice sensible and far sighted resource management according to a principle they call stability, but modern readers will recognise as sustainability on a societal level.

It even has the ability and remaining mercy to incorporate outcasts and individuals who are poor fits for their society to a reasonable degree, which is pretty good for such an impersonal authoritarian society based around the management and minimization of free choice.

Our current society openly has many of the vices of the people in the Fordist world, (which makes sense as huxley as a social satirist) and covertly has all the remainder while having none of Fordisms practical virtues. We have become the dystopia of squabbling nation states competing to die with the most toys and Fordism a utopia.

 

[Mouthwash]

Looking back, I should have switched 'unity' with 'genetic determinism' and 'technology' with 'rational discussion', but it's not that big of a deal.

"power to secure our survival" can be interpreted in many ways from "power over others" to "empowerment to look after one's family"

the contradiction only occurs when the first interpretation is used.

It is about how we should act. Whether power (your own or your group's) is ultimately what the world revolves around, or should we have to treat others kindly no matter what.

The standard political compass test allows for contradictory opinions, it'll just average them out to a centrist viewpoint. I suspect your aim here wasn't actually to recreate the dumb test we all put in our signatures

Not at all, but you're welcome to do it.

 

[amadeus]

I tried to make a spreadsheet file that would automatically calculate a score between +10 and -10 in either direction, but it seems that with different answers that “pull” from both directions it is possible to have a maximum score of (10,5) and not (10,10)?

Am I doing the math wrong on the spreadsheet?

 

[EgonSpengler]

It looks like I'm on the middle of the horizontal, Personal-Impersonal axis; leaning up towards Nihilistic on the vertical axis, but definitely not all the way up.

 

[Catharsis]

I tried to make a spreadsheet file that would automatically calculate a score between +10 and -10 in either direction, but it seems that with different answers that “pull” from both directions it is possible to have a maximum score of (10,5) and not (10,10)?

Am I doing the math wrong on the spreadsheet?

I think you are right, the way I calculated it the only way you can be +10 personal for example would be agreeing with all the ones on the right side and disagreeing with all the ones on the left side. But then you'd necessarily be 0 on the other axis. You can't be any of the extremes. Thousand year reich off the table boys

 

[Farm Boy]

Brave New World has ceased to be a dystopia.

That it may have mainstreamed doesn't necessarily mean it isn't dystopic. De facto noble blood rulers and the jeering unwashed convincing those that possess the desire to build mandalas to kill themselves... I mean if we track the differential suicide rates across demographics I think you're right. We're doing it. But I'm not quite to the point where I think thinking it monstrous is droll.

This is interesting to me, not a personal attack. I've long thought A Brave New World had the beat of some really hot horrors.