Thread by @0x49fa98

Conviction is easy when you have someone to hate. Hatred is the glue that holds societies together at scale. It's hard to agree what is good, easy to agree who to hate. It's not wrong to define yourself by what you oppose, but it does cause a problem if that thing stops existing

Two reasons the leftward ratchet continues: 1. leftism in practice creates the conditions it claims to correct. 2. it has an extremely legible scapegoat. Let's start with the second one.

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1020322404751441921

The left hates men, and it hates whites, in that order. The reason for this boils down to "fuck you, dad", but if we are slightly more nuanced, they hate whoever is above them, and they define "above them" as white men. It's clean, tautological, and impervious to empiricism

In contrast, whites and men don't hate anyone in particular. We are at the end of a decade-long campaign to redefine hatred as "not giving up all your possessions and prestige to enemies." This is necessary because American whites are among the least hateful people in the world

You can justify hatred if you can claim that the object of your hate despises you already. For this reason it is necessary to redefine hatred as "passively allowing this injustice to continue." A meditation on the redefinition of justice is left as an exercise for the reader

In contrast to this, the right has no legible scapegoat. Contrary to the propaganda, we don't hate blacks or women or any other such thing, except under the orwellian and inverted leftist definitions of hate. Lately we've been able to join together to hate the woke. A good start

The problems with scapegoat-based coalitions are legion, among them that they necessarily overlook the conditions that create the scapegoat. Wokism itself is a scapegoat-based coalition that needs to exist in a state of permanent revolution in order to sustain itself

Hating wokism is good because it's easy, which means it scales well, but it's also a weak position if you refuse to understand the circumstances that give rise to wokism, namely liberalism

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1212034852041699331

Liberalism claims to facilitate difference but it does so by suppressing difference. That's fine, contradiction is the motor of ideology. The important thing is to understand that liberalism can never be an end itself, its definition is freedom from telos

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1134883752318910465

You should always treat liberty as a liminal state between goals. Liberalism is always just an attempt to wrestle an equilibrium from multiple competing illiberalisms. The liberty of the American constitution was supposed to be the liberty to worship God

Equilibria between illiberalisms is fragile. If one of them ever gets the upper hand, then decadent transitory liberalism collapses into a stabler, illiberal state.

It goes against every instinct we have to share philosophical space with our enemies. If someone has values that contradict yours, their mere existence is an attack. Hatred makes strong coalitions, and here we are.

Never believe the woke when they say they don't hate you. They do. If they think you are one of them, they will drop the mask and tell you the truth. They want to persecute, immigrate, and cancel middle class whites out of existence.

We suspect it might be possible to dampen hatred (which would stabilize liberalism) if only we could turn off the social media machine that feeds us these irreconcilable, antagonistic narratives. I often think this. Let me tell you why that won't work.

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1212035710540083200

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the internet is a communication tool. Everything it does, it does by making communication faster. All the money in tech was made with the same trick: find a market with information asymmetry, clear it faster, take a cut. That's all it is

The easy money in tech dried up when all the previously slow markets began clearing at the speed of internet. When information moves faster, capital flows faster. Industry operates at the speed of capital. Anyone who uses the internet will out-compete anyone who fails to

The problem with all this is that there is also a market for ideology. All ideology is illiberal, for the same reason all predators are hungry. Twitter is to politics what Amazon is to retail. Conflict is the product, and now it has same-day delivery

So we can't turn off the ideology market accelerator because we need the FIRE economy accelerator, and as long as the communication pipe exists, we won't be able to stop ideology from flowing through it.

If you personally divorce from the cloud, all that happens is you get "left behind". This same problem exists at the national scale as the individual. If a whole country shuts off the cloud, other countries just eat its lunch.

You can't afford to do that because information (even a glut of information) has value, and separating the wheat from the tares is a mathematically intractable problem. Whoever curates your information feeds owns your soul.

This is also the reason that all flavors of localism are dead on arrival. If your plan to save the world involves no one ever defecting from an equilibrium where we all have a voluntary handicap, I have some bad news

To recap: Liberalism destroys itself because it's unstable. Communication technology is an accelerant. If you hate Wokism, the answer isn't liberalism, it's to find a better illiberalism that is antagonistic to wokism

The American Civic Religion is defunct, because wokism is civic religion 2.0. A high frequency trading computer out-competes a room full of nerds with calculators, and wokism out-competes the american civic religion 1.0 for the exact same reason

The American Civic Religion's incompatible premises of liberty and equality could only persist because of what Lawrence Auster called Unprincipled Exceptions. Unprincipled exceptions can only exist when information markets are inefficient. Wokism is what happens when they clear.

You can now understand why trying to roll back wokism to American Civic Religion 1.0 is like trying to roll back high frequency trading algorithms to a room full of dweebs wearing pocket protectors. We don't get to choose the arena where our counter-ideology has to compete.

Unprincipled exceptions are a strategy ideologies use to implement fault tolerance. In the world of efficient information markets, the strategy fails, and liberalism stops working, because it depends on them.

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1229944119193006080

As long as high tech communication technology exists, successful ideologies will have to be illiberal in order to compete. When information markets are efficient, humans, who are stupid, demand that ideologues conform to their principles

Now, I will grant you, that in fighting with the left, they do not seem to be principled at all. In fact, it seems that the only principle is friend/enemy. That is true, but I am not writing to the woke. I am writing to the people "on my side" who make principled concessions

The left is correct when they say you can't turn back the clock. Part of the reason the woke are winning is that liberal principles necessarily concede to woke demands. The old equilibria won't come back without a technological collapse

Reject the dying liberal values that have brought us to the brink of malaise and decrepitude, and work instead toward building an illiberalism that affirms the vitality, beauty, and strength of the greatest