So Where are the American Gulags?

NIO linked this video describing the Asche Experiments in his recent Game Theory, The Asche Experiments and Mass Media. NIO’s work here is excellent. I’d described it as opening a new front in the guerrilla war neoreaction is waging against the mainstream media. If not a new front, then at the very least a huge store of ammunition and a method to get more.

The Asche experiments show the now well-known, well-understood result that people feel social pressure to go along with a crowd even when the crowd is wrong. It is for most neurotypical people a question of social and psychological costs versus benefits. What is the net harm to me for agreeing with wrongsters about the size of a line? What is the net harm to society for agreeing with them? What is the harm to me for truth-telling? Could there even be harm for society if I stubbornly insist upon truth-telling? What if the wrongsters are wrong about something far more important than the size of little lines, like the pervasiveness of “institutional racism” or “rape culture”? And what if a few annoyed or quizzical stares is not the only cost for the truthteller, like loss of social status or a job or worse?

There are some people who can psychologically withstand far more social pressure than is normal. For some, their commitment to truth-telling, “as they see it”, is so great they might endure any punishment or even inflict any social harm in defense of it. This is the dissident spirit of which John Derbyshire spoke so eloquently in the quotation at the bottom of the page. In an age of universal deceit, truth-telling is a revolutionary reactionary act. In a more honest age, however, it is easy to see how an overwrought commitment to truth-telling (“as I see it”) might be a social problem.

So how would we describe a subject in the Asche experiment who stubbornly insisted upon naming the correct length of line over and over again? What if the annoyed stares turned to tsks? What if all the wrongsters started tsking? What if they started insulting the truth-teller? Threatening him? Imagine our truth-teller fighting back, calling the wrongsters on their bullshit. Imagine him saying, “I can do this all day, guys. You’re all full of shit! F-you!!” In a word, this person is antisocial. He is overwhelmingly likely to be male. Also quite likely to be white and of well above average intelligence. He is more likely than average to be autistic, atheist, and hyper-rational.

Welcome to neoreaction.

In this Dishonest Age, the dissident is selected primarily from the most antisocial of the population. I was in a room last night with about 20 such habitual truth-tellers. Surprisingly, they were quite sociable. Alcohol is, of course, quite helpful to this end. But make no mistake: these were people who, in a saner and more honest age, might very well be a danger to the social fabric. Dissidents are dangerous. And the governors of states built on lies rightly fear them.

The Soviet Union was built on lies. The USSR wisely built up a system for detecting and punishing dissent. They set an internal network of paid spies and developed a culture in which many would volunteer to spy for free, and sent millions to the Gulags, which served not only to punish dissent but also isolate antisocial dissenters from mainstream society.

The United States is similarly built upon lies. And yet we have almost purely ad hoc methods for detecting and punishing dissent. We have no Gulags. This is not to say dissent is not punished. It certainly is, but at nowhere near the rates and severity that the Soviets did.

When everybody knew that everybody knew that everybody knew (and so on) that the USSR was just a pack of lies that no one believed, it crumbled like the house of cards that it was. So too, someday, will the United States. So where are the Gulags? America tolerates open dissent from the Mainstream Narrative™, punishes it haphazardly and less severely, using mostly volunteer SJW labor. America has its own versions of Tass and Pravda and even Крокодил, but where are the Gulags?

There are no American Gulags. At least not literal ones. And I think this betrays an almost unbelievable secret about the American Regime: They actually believe their own propaganda. What America has managed to do is not merely to get everyone believing that everyone believes that everyone believes (and so on) that the Constitution is the constitution, but also get its own leaders to believe it. When you read NYT or listen to NPR, you are on the one hand ingesting obvious propaganda spun by the regime; but on the other hand, generally at least, also ingesting the honest-to-goodness totally non-Machiavellian opinions of our power elite. They actually believe, in the main, most of the time, their own bullshit.

Dissidents should take some comfort in this. Ordinarily a regime that fails to guard against its own demise should be despised. How can they be that stupid? But this is not an ordinary case. The American regime despises particularity. It is an acid that eats away at natural bonds and social structures. It deserves to die. If they’ve left the back door unlocked, I’m not going to feel sorry for them when they are robbed. If they’re not going to ship me off to an American Gulag because they are genuinely liberal and believe in, at some level or are at least conflicted about, free speech, I’m not going to complain. Hey, sure, the Constitution is the constitution! Whatever.

[Addenda: A quick note to the disingenuous (or merely stupid) that by claiming the practical non-existence of American Gulags, I’m pointing out the failure of USG to imprison at any significant rate its internal political and ideological enemies. Of course the US imprisons criminals and those who war against her. I’m not particularly interested in that, but on net, I’m glad for it.]