Handle… this time at Bloody Shovel:
My observation is that birds of a feather like to flock together, and elites like to form exclusive and selective institutions, but have become global. Their loyalties have shifted from locality, community, ethnicity, or nation to, well, Davos – the self-congratulating global society of other global elites, and so now the trans-national jet set shares the same set of trans-nationally-focused institutions.
The inevitable result of these tendencies is to converge, and form enclave “cognitive concentrator communities”. You could exchange “cognitive” with “capital” or “communities” with “corridors” or “cities”. All the c’s are correlated.
Jim’s essential observations on Sovereignty and on Formalism.
Goulding on the real lessons of education. Powerful:
Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, a host of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. [Emphasis mine]
And speaking of equality vs. excellence, Isegoria sums up public health policy: “We can’t tell the truth, because some people might misunderstand it.” Seems to apply about as well to any public policy whatsoever, when the “public” is this great mass of “equals”.
“If ye dön’t eat ye meat, ye can’t have aneh puddin’. How can ye have aneh puddin’ if you dön’t eat ye meat? I’m still woitin!“… that is to say, for the final Meta-Magickal masterpiece.
[Addendum]: Since Jim, Spandrell, et al. have the apostolate showing the Catholic Church’s leaders acting ball-less, I’ll have to adopt the habit of reporting more of the good news: Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne has balls. (via JP’s comment at Bruce Charlton’s)
That’s it for now… til next “week”… The Reactivity Place, Over and Out.
Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Racialists, Masculinists, and Traditionalists will be featured in the next issue, ‘More Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment.’
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Thanks KB… so I can stop checking by every hour… and wait til’ oh… say… mid-day Saturday 😉
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I have to say I though Jim’s post on sovereignty was a joke. Alas, he apparently believes that a piece of paper can execute laws and act as a judiciary.
I don’t get it. Isn’t the essence of reactionary political philosophy rejecting that piece of propaganda?
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Hi Foseti:
I think in Jim’s defense, he’s starting off from the position that government is natural and innate (the stationary bandit theory) and that therefore constitutionalism is probably as good as anything else, and it would in fact work, only if every propaganda organ wasn’t trying to outrun the constitution and make the world safe for unlimited gov’t. Kinda like they did with the Bible…
It’s the Declaration that is the pure propaganda. The Constitution is rather less ideological. In fact the latter is so technical that only the very smart can even interpret what it says. They’ve both taken on a religious significance, so much so that everyone believes in them in almost exact proportion of their ignorance of their content (squared). Kinda like they did with the Bible…
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I thought so too, but I commented there and he doubled down. He really seems to think a piece of paper can govern.
The concept of the preservation of sovereignty is a very simple one – yet everyone makes it complicated. Sovereignty is decision making and someone (i.e. a living, actual person) makes the decisions. The process by which the binding decisions are made is sovereignty. It’s no more complicated than that. If a group of people make decision according to how they interpret a text, the group is sovereign. If the group is often overruled by an army, the army is sovereign, etc.
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Well, I think he’s saying that government naturally rests to some extent on the consent of the governed, and that as long as “the governed” believe strongly enough in this “piece of paper” (i.e., not hoodwinked by sovereign academics and journalists about its “living” interepretation or whatever), then they’ll sort of force the hand of the sovereign to live up to his explicit defined role.
I mean it’s a little like low-church fundamentalism… you’d think the congregations would be putty in the hands of the skillful preacher to believe whatever the hell he tells them to believe… and very often this is so… that’s how modernists & evangelicals are made. But the real fundamentalists, i.e., the ones that stay that way over multiple generations are really hard-core literalists, and when they hear their preacher saying some shit that isn’t in the Good Book, then that preacher is out on a rail. They take their congregational/anti-hierarchical structure quite seriously… and it results in very stable, even if anachronistic, religious systems.
So, I absolutely agree with you. Sovereign is as sovereign does. And he who is sovereign decides what “the constitution” means… But I see Jim’s point (assuming I understand it) that there’s a lot of nuance… at the very least a sovereign can be overruled by the people, and then THEY’RE sovereign (again… while it lasts…)
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This topic needs a lot more discussion. It’s complicated. Clearly the Moldbug-Foseti argument is a powerful one, but it has problems of its own. The ultimate implication is a Mao-style ‘power comes out of the barrel of a gun’ argument, hence Moldbug’s obsession with crypto-locked weaponry — but isn’t it obvious that the very real fact of massive constitutional violation in the US has very little to do with keeping the military on the leash (at least so far). So why doesn’t it? If real ‘sovereignty’ is effective personal authority, how does any symbolic authority acquire and exercise social force? Why does legislation matter at all? Surely any law has the same problem the constitution does, i.e. its effective implementation depends upon authorized persons and a concrete apparatus of interpretation? Belief is not a reducible component of sovereignty, whether personal or textual. An authority is legitimated — and thus made effective — through credible texts, no less than these texts depend upon the ineliminable discretion of interpreters and executors. Rule of law is far from unproblematic, but neither is it nothing.
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[I’ll try that last sentence again, retaining the quadruple negative, but making the grammar at least vaguely functional: “Rule of law is not unproblematic, but neither is it nothing.”]
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Nick L, I agree. People live in societies, there are game theoretic reasons to follow the leader, go with the flow, and get along. There are also sub-rational reasons to do so, maybe we took those reasons in with our mother’s milk. Pieces of paper take on a transcendant quality. So there are game theoretic reasons to force kids to take following the leader with their mother’s milk. Group interest is self-interest is national interest, all up until it isn’t anymore… and then the sovereign isn’t sovereign anymore… but there everyone has a game theoretic interest, etc., in getting a new one ASAP. So it just seems like a big jumbly mess to me… but history is a fairly good guide to what has worked well… and what has worked… less well.
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Interpretation — through words or actions — is never entirely unconstrained. For the Right it can never be constrained enough. For the Left, never unconstrained enough. But both can see the difference between a tendentious interpretation and an outright violation of the law, or an overthrow of the constitution. To simply give up on the very possibility of constrained administration strikes me as an excessive response to a difficult and subtle problem.
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We could talk about “pieces of paper” or we could talk about rules, and rules matter. As you (NBS) say, society is made out of games, and games don’t even have players in any meaningful sense if they don’t have rules. As you also say, there’s a meta-game — agreeing to play the game. That’s why crypto-locked weaponry doesn’t respond to any real problem. There aren’t enough people throwing over the table and storming off to make it the primary concern.
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@Nick L:
Well I wouldn’t say that interpretation can never be sufficiently constrained for the Right. Legalism and laxity are both excesses of the left. The Right seeks balance, prudence, exceptions, even if unprincipled, from the rules for hard cases, justice united with mercy, etc. We seek (or at least I seek) good government simpliciter. But other than that I certainly agree: real sovereignty is a delicate balancing act between “might makes right” and “consent of the governed”. And it is an act… i.e., of a conscious person, not merely a lifeless formula… Lifeless formulas, as well, are excesses of the Left.
That’s why monarchical systems worked so well when they were actually monarchical (NB: not imperial): The “constitution” and its authoritative interpreter lived together in the same, usually benevolent, brain. Politics, while it must need exist, is kept to an absolute minimum.
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I’d agree, in a higher trust environment than the Cathedral can offer. As things stand, however, I’ll take rigid interpretive constraint over official discretion every time.
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