Most failures to innovate can be attributed to failure to recognize the contingency of culture. For example, the current problem the Air Force has with incorporating combat drones, due to its ingrained ‘pilot culture’.
If institutions like the Air Force had some way to represent their own culture, diagrammatically or in a metalanguage, they could not merely recognize its contigency, but understand and master that contingency. They would then be able to easily adapt to changing circumstances.
There are things institutions do to adapt to changing circumstances – rewarding behavior they like, making crude attempts to change their language, etc – but they are clearly inadequate, otherwise we wouldn’t have to rely on ‘disruption’ and ‘creative destruction’.
At a larger scale, recognizing, understanding, and mastering our culture as contingent is the only way to create a truly long-lived civilization. It’s the only way to ensure that we can adapt to the full range of conditions we might face (physical law permitting).
Recognizing the contingency of our culture does not lead to moral relativism. In actuality, it clarifies morality. Vice and decadence and corruption can be defined as those things that render us insufficiently adaptable in meeting changing circumstances.

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More from @mr_scientism

Feb 13
What drives ‘politics’ is policy fads among elites, which are driven by fads in theory. Elected representatives are just another avenue for this. Voters know little about policy and still less about theory. What drives theory adoption is the private philanthropic networks.
There’s been attention drawn to the role of think tanks in the adoption of ‘neoliberalism’ but it’s really like that all the time. An endless parade of economic, political, administrative, and managerial theory emanating from academia and think tanks, funded by private interests.
The plutocracy rules through theory-selection.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 12
"In Popper’s book ... which lays the foundations for the ideology of open society, we read that those who attribute a special value and a special mission to their own nation or political community are the enemies of open society and are ... building tyranny and oppression."
"This view [Popper's Open Society] is perhaps the most influential and most destructive conclusion of post-World War II Western thinking." Viktor Orban's worldview is literally anti-Popperism.
"The concept of open society has deprived the West of its faith in its own values and historical mission, and with this now ... it is preventing the West from setting its own mission against the rising intellectual and political power centres."
Read 4 tweets
Feb 10
The liberal picture of society is essentially a gas with atoms exerting forces on one another. An 'autocracy' is a gas with one super-powerful atom that exerts force on all the other atoms, which have no power of their own. The 'solution' is to distribute power among the atoms.
The other possibility is to note that there's only one autocrat atom but many regular atoms, so the mass of atoms, if it'd just coalesce in a thermodynamically improbably way, could exert force against the autocrat atom. Distributed power, it's thought, makes this more likely.
The problem is that this picture isn't true (it doesn't even make sense) and the 'solutions' proposed on the back of it have to be translated into real world terms and whenever you translate them into real world terms they become proposals for corruption.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 10
Western liberals imagine the ‘autocrat’ as ‘an absolutely corrupt congressman’ because they’re incapable of imagining a different system. But a genuine autocrat would have too much power for corruption to make sense; he faces directly the existential question of what a nation is.
A stably corrupt state requires a special set of conditions. It must have a ruling class of absentee owners who care only about their position in the game of finance. This is the basis for a perfectly corrupt system, not autocracy. The US is such a state.
There are 3rd world kleptocrats but the possibility of looting a nation-state only exists because Anglo-American financial institutions make it possible. You can loot a whole nation because you can put the money in an off-shore account and spend it in the ‘free world’.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 10
Looking through this 2013 Pentagon study on 'Chinese racism' and how the US can supposedly use it to its advantage. Highlights so far: Includes a dynastic chronology; chapter 1 is on the evo psych origins of racism; no primary sources in the bibliography. esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Doc…
"The Chinese commonly believe that they are cleverer than others, and so may shape events in an oblique manner or through shi [势], the strategic manipulation of events. This conceit among the Chinese that they can manipulate others is supremely dangerous for Asian stability."
I skipped to the part on the Communist era and he says the Communist Party doesn't have explicitly racist views but when they talk about class they secretly mean race. His only source for this is Frank Dikötter.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 26
'Wokeness' and 'identity politics' are just the latest in the long line of methods the plutocracy's philanthropic networks have used to gain and maintain power. In this case, they fund and staff organizations that purport to represent minority groups.
An earlier iteration of this strategy was to build political power through 'experts' who were trained and funded by the philanthropic networks. This was followed by the promotion of 'civil society', which was just organizations funded by the same philanthropic networks.
These strategies are embodied in academic movements and these movements tend to criticize one another, masking the fact that they're funded by and do the bidding of the same organizations. Thus, the current movement criticizes the 'technocratic' nature of the older movement.
Read 4 tweets

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