Clash of Worldviews: The Paradox of Late Modern Conservatism

MODERATOR: Welcome to another episode of Clash of Worldviews. Tonight we’re fortunate to have with us in the studio Fred Gulpa, self-described alt right transhumanist; Rich Goldfarb, a fiery young Jewish conservative debater; Adam Garnett, noted liberal secular humanist; and Heather Fogarty, hypermodern skeptic and gadfly. Welcome to all of you and to our viewers joining us from around the world. Tonight the topic is postmodern conservatism. What does it mean to be a conservative in the twenty-first century, under advanced technoscientific, postindustrial conditions? Who would like to start us off?

RICH: That’s a preposterous question and you’re an imbecile for asking it. Your hair is all messed up and I’m appalled by your cheap aftershave, which I’m aghast to say I can smell all the way from over here. So you must be a closet liberal, which is unfortunate because all liberals are evil.

MODERATOR: Uh, oh…kay? That wasn’t quite the response I was looking for. I understood that you’re a professional debater, Rich. Have you learned about ad hominem attacks?—not to mention red herrings, since I’m just the moderator here.

RICH: You see that’s just like a liberal. Run from your liberalism all you like, but it’s a disgrace.

You want to know what conservatism means today. I’ll tell you: it means standing up for divine or natural rights against tyrannies like the liberal state that holds a gun to your head to push corrupt liberal values down your throat and to collect ill-gotten taxes to grow its Mafioso hold over the population. The liberal government is an incompetent bureaucracy that can’t do anything right except shake down its citizens, disrupt the free flow of market competition, and expand the cushy public sector for the pack of liberal cronies. Conservatism means respecting the traditions that connect us with what’s right in the world so that we can oppose what’s evil. And liberalism is evil. Liberalism boils down to kleptocratic communism: the liberal state wants to redistribute money that was earned in market transactions, which means the government steals from the rich to give to the poor—like Robin Hood, except that instead of a hero, the government is evil. Stealing is wrong. And like cancer, the liberal state needs runaway growth in its tyrannical powers to protect unnatural liberal morality, including silly rights for women’s equality with men, for the killing of babies, for politically-correct recognition of absurdities such as the wholesomeness of homosexuality, and for government boondoggles like its nonsolutions to the overhyped problem of global warming.

ADAM: I mean: wow. Just, wow. It’s safe to say there must have been a hundred strawmen in that screed.

RICH: Everything I just said is obviously correct. You’re an execrable monster and a charlatan and a demonic insect for suggesting otherwise.

HEATHER: Uh, Rich, I think someone neglected to inform you that Clash of Worldviews isn’t like the infotainment newshour shows or campus debates you’re used to having, in which the goal is to pwn your opponent with vile hate speech and cheap zingers. We’ll actually expect some arguments here and won’t be impressed by schoolyard tactics.

RICH: Thanks for the tip. But everything I said is still obviously correct. There is no counterargument for liberals, since all liberals ever do is call conservatives bad names. Liberals are the ones with no arguments, and that’s because liberals are—

ADAM: —evil. That’s what you were going to say, right? Yeah, that shtick’s going to get old real fast. You’re starting to sound like Ben Shapiro.

RICH: I’m waiting for the rebuttal.

Theocracy, Natural Rights, and the Tyranny of Liberalism

ADAM: Alright. First of all, you said a lot more about liberalism than about conservatism, even though liberalism isn’t our topic. But fine, maybe we can arrive at the nature of conservatism indirectly, by focusing for a while on its opposite.

So just for starters, your slide from social democracy, or the so-called liberal establishment, to communism or tyranny is a grotesque oversimplification. In a democratic country with a capitalistic economy like the United States, the government needs certain powers to protect the social fabric and thus to prevent an outbreak of chaos, as in what’s called a failed state. The selfish impulses that capitalism nurtures are utterly amoral. For example, enterprising businessmen in early American history had no compunction against selling slaves; likewise, even today there’s a thriving business of human trafficking of sex slaves. Responsible governments collect taxes not just to protect private property or to defend against foreign enemies, but to preserve the public welfare, which means upholding its culture’s ideals. Slavery is against both Christian and Enlightenment values, but as long as there’s a supply of and demand for slaves, capitalism itself isn’t going to end slavery. Thus, the government needs to step in as a bulwark against capitalistic greed.

I mean, there are a hundred other grotesqueries in your rant, but let’s leave it there for a minute. Tell us, then, how are all liberal governments communistic or tyrannical? 

RICH: A social democracy is communistic and tyrannical because it’s the same principles that are being violated, regardless of the differences in the degree of evil. Stalin killed millions of his citizens and Obama didn’t lower himself to quite that level, but both idolized the state and prized the bureaucracy over the welfare of the majority. Obama didn’t care about the average citizen when he bailed out the big banks or when he subsidized irrelevant green energy companies. He cared only about his donors and his elitist comrades. Instead of letting all Americans face up to their responsibilities as free individuals and trusting in their ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, Obama propped up failing institutions, offsetting the costs onto consumers in the form of higher taxes or inflation. Obama weakened the economy by rewarding risky lenders, borrowers, and investors, setting us up for the next bust in the economic cycle.

HEATHER: No, Obama tried (and failed) to de-rig the economy which nature had rigged under Clinton’s and Bush’s years of deregulation. Obama protected the majority from a second Great Depression that could have occurred, had the big banks been allowed to see their greed through to the bitter end. It was nature in the form of the selfishness and short-sightedness of the home-buyers and bankers—which are essential to unregulated capitalism—that left Obama with the remnants of that ticking time bomb of an economy. And why is nature so volatile and indifferent to the majority’s welfare? Why in the wild do predators prey on the herd? Because there are no rights in nature, nor is there any god in control.

How ironic for you to demonize neoliberal politicians like Obama, who didn’t take even a rhetorical stand for a public option in the healthcare debate and who thus never represented progressives, when the real villains in the economy are obviously your plutocratic heroes who don’t deserve their wealth because they perpetrate frauds like the housing market, corrupting or circumventing regulators and market analysts like those at Moody’s and putting the whole country at risk. If anything, redistributing much of their ill-gotten gains does the plutocrats a favour, by lessening the temptations which tend to turn the wealthy into rampaging psychopaths with god complexes.

You say regulators cheat the economy by picking winners and losers and preventing entrepreneurs from saving the day, as would allegedly happen in the more natural or godly course of events in which market competition is allowed to unfold. But the same counterfactual point can be turned against you. Plutocrats like the Koch brothers and the Wall Street bankers and the big donors to political campaigns and the rest of the top one percent of the American population that has such a disproportionate influence over politicians who write the tax code and the loopholes in the banking laws—those titans of industry and of financial fraud likewise prevent the little guys from getting ahead, by being instrumental in the decline of American unions, for example.

So your economic picture is warped. You depict a meritocratic market being tampered with by arrogant government officials, but that description is incomplete, at best. There’s an additional source of manipulation in the economy, namely the machination of the richest one percent. Indeed, the government’s interventions are needed to counter those of the lords of the private sector. It’s not as if the economic playing field would be leveled in a perfectly deregulated marketplace, were the government almost nowhere to be found. On the contrary, monopolies and oligopolies would form, wages would be lowered as unions are crushed, demagogues would bamboozle the consumers, and prices would reflect perceptions that have been distorted by masterful market manipulations that ignore the long-term costs of that rapacity, to the world’s detriment.

ADAM: I’d add that there is, of course, an enormous difference between communism or tyranny and social democracy: the latter is more self-governing than the former. In a democracy like the United States, the majority have a say over the identity of their political representatives. Granted, in practice there are numerous flaws, including gerrymandering, the Electoral College and so on, but in a dictatorship there isn’t even a theoretical possibility of removing the tyrant until he dies from his debaucheries. So it’s merely a bizarre rhetorical trick to call a liberal state tyrannical.

FRED: I’d like to weigh in on the merits of democracy. The United States is indeed democratic and that’s why it’s doomed. Capitalism and personal freedom flourish in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, and those populations don’t have to worry about their country being looted by elected politicians and bureaucrats who aren’t invested in the people’s welfare, because they’re hired guns at war with opposing parties and so they’re inclined to salt the earth after their transient time in office, to sabotage their opponent’s administration. The attention span of elected authorities is narrow and so democracies are inefficient at addressing long-term issues; the infrastructure therefore tends to decline, for example. Moreover, democracies are prone to being attacked by demagogues who exploit the free-flow of information in the media, filling the culture with disinformation, which burdens the public with a blinkered view of reality, causing it to elect politicians who are, at best, only superficially suitable for high office. What keeps the overall standard of living from declining, at least in parts of a liberal democracy, is the competition for profit in the market, which leads to innovation and to a decrease in the price of goods over time.

ADAM: Some of those criticisms apply much more to so-called conservative politicians than to liberal ones. Democrats believe in good government, so to protect their brand, as it were, their incentive is to project at least the appearance that a democratic government can work, whereas Republicans trust more in the market and so they have reason to enlist foxes to guard the hen house and to act like a wrecking crew while in office, as Thomas Frank pointed out in his book by that name.

But let’s not get bogged down in an amateurish either-or debate. No one except for Captain Overstatement here is saying that one side is purely evil and the other purely good. Democracy has its problems and so does capitalism. We’re not here to debate their comparative merits so much as to explore what it means to be a late modern conservative. Isn’t that oxymoronic, to live in a new world but to hold on to an old one? How is conservatism even possible now? Aren’t today’s so-called conservatives nothing of the kind? I mean, what are they conserving when they say a postindustrial marketplace should be allowed to operate without governmental intervention?

MODERATOR: It’s a fair question. Rich, do you want to address that? What makes you a conservative?

RICH:…

HEATHER: I think he’s sulking.

RICH: No, I’m just disgusted that I have to sit near useful idiots who make excuses for the evil government’s theft of private property and for its bullying of hard-working wealthy Americans.

HEATHER: Yeah, the top one percent of power elites who’ve gotten all the increase in American income growth over the last several decades sure do need a tax break. Watch me shed a tear for the billionaires.

Wait a minute. I think I see the key to all this: it’s Judaism. Rich’s zealotry must stem from his Jewish upbringing. He already said conservatives defend the only source of rightness in the world, which is God’s Word or natural normality. So God commanded that we not steal or be jealous of others’ private property. Therefore, a tax-and-spend liberal government that coddles a lazy underclass is sinful. Is that about right, Rich?

RICH: Of course liberalism is sinful and not just wrong on the economic technicalities.

HEATHER: Well, that’s because nothing is really right or wrong on those technicalities. Economics is a pseudoscience and economists use fancy math like squid ink, to hide the counterfactuality of their models. 

RICH: Whatever! The government has no right to steal money from the rich and to give it to the poor.

ADAM: No right, because God said so?

RICH: That’s what I believe as an Orthodox Jew.

ADAM: Ah, but that’s an embarrassment, isn’t it? It’s one thing to speak with an aggressive, commanding tone, talking a mile a minute and piling up the personal attacks as though your opponent didn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s another to admit that something as quaint and silly as theism is at the bottom of all your politics. You have the nerve to speak of liberal bureaucrats as acting like mafia bosses, but there’s a reason they call Vito Corleone the godfather. Indeed, has there been a more tribal, tyrannical, Trump-like man-baby of a god than Yahweh as portrayed in the Jewish scriptures? Arguably not.

RICH: That blasphemous remark is an abominable hate crime against my religious identity, and my lawyers will be in touch. In any case, I don’t appeal to Judaism to publicly support my social philosophy.

HEATHER: Well, what then do you conserve as a conservative, if not for God’s Word? It must be natural law. Is stealing supposed to be unnatural? What a joke that would be. Have you ever seen a mouse sneak into a kitchen and eat food from the cupboards? Or how about the cuckoo bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests to avoid having to feed its oversized babies? How about a beta wolf that mates with the alpha’s squeeze on the sly?

RICH: Obviously animals don’t have freedom or private property, so they can’t be guilty of crimes like murder or theft. 

HEATHER: That’s right. And so humans are rational persons who set up unnatural societies befitting our anomalous skillsets. Do you see where that takes you? It means that as far as we can manage, humans aren’t beholden to so-called natural laws. Our rights flow from the artificial laws we conceive of, not from instincts produced by natural selection. So why should any human society appeal to natural rights when those are suitable, at best, only for animals?

If we work hard and earn a pile of money, you say we have a natural right not to have that property be stolen by anyone, including the government. In so far as that right is merely natural and not justified by anything like a political constitution or philosophical declaration of rights, the right to private property rests purely on power. Might makes right, money equals power, so the right to keep your earnings amounts to the warning that thieves had better watch out, because the aggrieved party may still have power enough to take vengeance. Or else the power itself will corrupt, and so the thief should think twice before trying to acquire power in such an underhanded way.

But if that’s the primitive basis of conservative social policy, it can easily be parodied with the sort of Just So stories you find in evolutionary biology. Maybe men are stronger than women, so men have a natural right to rape them. Maybe some nations are stronger than others and so the weak should serve the strong as slaves. Where does that anti-progress end? Why not just annihilate human civilization with nuclear bomb blasts and get it over with? Why did our primordial, protohuman forebears struggle to achieve self-awareness in the first place if their “conservative” descendants were just going to spit on those miraculous acts of transcendence and whine that we should stop acting like civilized persons and be more primitive? What a joke!

Technolibertarianism and the Instrument of Unchained Capitalism

FRED: All this talk of miracles and transcendence coming from an atheist? That’s the joke that amuses me. You’re getting hung up on Rich’s brand of adolescent self-righteousness, but you’re missing where the action is in conservative circles these days.

It’s a question of means and ends. The viable conservative’s ultimate goal is the transhumanist one of becoming godlike due to a superabundance of technoscientific power. A crucial instrument for achieving that goal is capitalistic competition, which drives businesses to employ the top researchers and engineers, thus incentivizing the innovative production of sellable goods. Many of the products need to satisfy our chief demand, which is to become godlike—now that the fictional deities are known to be dead, as culture critics from Nietzsche to Yuval Harari have recognized. Unchained capitalism that proceeds at a breakneck pace towards achieving that ultimate end entails social hierarchy. In that analogy, liberal qualms are the chains or the brakes that only delay our destiny as a species, and the result of liberal sentimentality is the imposition of artificial social equalities which hinder the great work of capitalism.

That, then, is the crux of the matter for late modern conservatives. It’s not about defending ancient moral codes as being good in themselves, because some god allegedly commanded that women should submit to men or that homosexuals should be stoned or that humans ought to have dominion over the sea and the earth. That’s paleoconservatism, and it’s an embarrassment that has no chance of withstanding science-centered skepticism. What we need is neoconservatism that makes peace with the strongest elements of modernity, such as technoscience and capitalism, while abandoning the weaker ones such as democracy, rationalism, and maudlin liberal morality.

Neoconservativism began in the US in the 1960s, as a backlash against the pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War. Rather than being theocrats, those neoconservatives were the often Jewish and therefore comparatively atheistic cold warriors who advocated a hawkish foreign policy in the name of spreading democracy in the furtherance of capitalist interests. Most of which was thoroughly wrongheaded. Those neoconservatives seem to have gotten caught up in Leo Strauss’s double game; they bought into their noble lies that were meant only for the unphilosophical masses. What are now called the neoreactionary conservatives—including Steve Bannon, who’s the resident philosopher king of the White House—reject democracy precisely because it doesn’t sit well with capitalism. Democracy works only when the masses who indirectly rule are equally in possession of the traits that would make them worthy to look after their national affairs. But the brutal truth of capitalism is that it creates a hundred losers for every winner, and the losers naturally stagnate, making them unworthy of a vote.

Capitalism, though, is the greatest force for good on Earth, because it’s the fuel for technoscientific progress, which is our only hope of salvation. Read your Moldbug and your Nick Land: capitalism is the answer not just in economics but in politics. Instead of stealth oligarchy, such as we have now in the US, we should be open about the greater efficiencies made possible by living under the promise of profit and the threat of literal bankruptcy in all walks of life. Instead of a nation we need corporations; instead of a government we need a board of directors and corporate officers such as CEOs. Power relations should be formalized and made transparent so that politics can be run efficiently as a business. And again, what makes this conservative is that we should embrace the resulting inequalities and hierarchies as steps we need to take on our way to the posthuman future.

ADAM: Again, wow. What an odious worldview you have there. No wonder your fellow deplorables hide under a rock in their mommy’s basement, playing video games, trolling chat forums, and emerging only at night to offend women in clubs with their “game.”

FRED: And I thought Clash of Worldviews was about arguments, not personal attacks. You see, this is the liberal’s sentimentality I was talking about. It’s like the feminist’s double standard: she wants equality but she also wants to be treated like a lady. She can’t have both, but she expects men to look the other way and to play along, because it’s supposed to be rude to shatter the illusions of the weak-willed folk who need them. So instead of rubbing the feminist’s nose in the ugly truth, that she’s been duped by the liberal culture, we neoreactionaries run our game on these women, and with every sexual conquest we prove that the value of social equality is based on a lie.

Likewise, Adam thinks he can stand on the mere offensiveness of the harsh truths I’ve just told. He thinks he can fall back on his effeminate protests against a manly worldview that could be responsible for “offending” women in night clubs. Horror of horrors! Meanwhile, his liberal rationalism is a form of worshipping human nature, which causes him to hide from the holocaust we members of developed countries are perpetrating on most other animal species. Is he man enough to hunt for his meat? No, that’s now a conservative’s pastime. So he’s either a hypocrite or a vegetarian, but if he’s the latter, he must be a radical rather than a secular humanist, since the humanist always puts human pleasure first. Either way, he’s a hypocrite.

ADAM: Just because I’m offended by your bestial notions doesn’t make me less of a man than you.

FRED: Then why not try specifying what’s wrong with neoreactionary conservatism?

ADAM: Again, where to start! I agree that capitalism by itself generates and preserves social inequalities. So who is supposed to be cheering for this posthuman end point, the wealthy who will likely be the only ones to reap the benefits or the masses who will be thereby enslaved? The whole thing is incoherent.

FRED: Is it? Most people only want to worship a god, while some want to be gods. The former are consumers who should be duped by capitalists for the greater good, instead of by liberals for the democratic state which retards progress. Those who want to be gods are the psychopaths who tend to elevate themselves to high positions in their dominance hierarchies. So there’s no such incoherence, and once again we’re left with the worries of a feminized beta male.

HEATHER: Ugh! Enough with the penis-measuring contest. I’m not interested in that macho nonsense. Let’s get down to philosophical business here and discover where the truth lies.

I thank Fred for his presentation of what indeed looks like a late modern form of conservatism, one that marries Silicon Valley technolibertarianism with a Nietzschean or Lovecraftian reaction against the Enlightenment. We’re meant to embrace the empirical knowledge and technology that have made possible modern economic growth, while spitting on democracy and the liberal ethos that have provided for the civic religion that’s placated the masses who might otherwise have been disgusted with that growth. As you suggested, Fred, we’ve been swimming in noble lies about reason, freedom, and the American Way. The Enlightenment was itself a reaction against the Christian theocrats’ dogmas, which held back scientific progress. And now the neoreactionaries want that progress without the noble lies. That strikes me as a dangerous game to play.

FRED: Are you saying you’re a friend of the noble lie? I thought you were a cynic and a skeptic, eternally vigilant against any sign of self-deceit. Surely you haven’t fallen for the liberal’s work of megafiction. And if you say you and some minority are enlightened while the masses should be left in ignorance, there you have the makings of an inequality and a social hierarchy.

HEATHER: Not exactly, since for me the truly enlightened individuals should be mere gadflies, not godlike psychopathic dominators.

FRED: Fine, but that still means you’re not exactly a liberal; you’re not an egalitarian warrior for social justice, sworn to rectify every offense taken by a spoiled millennial.

HEATHER: If you’re asking whether social equality is my highest value, I’d say no it’s not. But that doesn’t mean I’d rejoice at the prospect of any old hierarchy, such as the sort that’s left in the wake of heartless capitalism. You say economic inequality is a necessary evil of the unregulated, selfish hunt of profit, since while that kind of capitalism devolves into a free-for-all for sociopaths and their cronies who naturally double-cross the know-nothing consumers, greed and cruel struggles for profit are instrumental to some transhuman future. The liberal imposition of social equality, then, is supposed to be an act of feminine cowardice, an intrusive restraint on progress. 

But is transhumanism meant to be just a substitute myth to replace faith in a pre-existing deity? Or are we supposed to take that extreme merger with technology seriously as a physical probability?

FRED: It’s both. Transhumanism serves as a religion that isn’t wildly irresponsible in light of our current state of knowledge and power. Yes, it’s speculative to think we’ll decode the brain and be able to recreate consciousness in a computer. Yes, it’s speculative to think nanoengineering and cloning and all the rest will solve all our problems. But unlike the premodern religions, these science fictional scenarios aren’t mere escapist fantasies.

Moreover, even should transhumanism turn out to be a crock and we’ll never be more godlike than we are now, running with capitalism and disposing of milquetoast liberalism would still be the noble course. We have a chance to serve in a grand enterprise that may succeed or fail, or else to languish in the limbo foisted by neoliberal centrism. Neoliberal triangulation only balances the left and the right so that the country goes nowhere: you enable capitalism and the welfare state, but only so far so that either side ends up holding the other back. As Adam Curtis explains in his documentaries, the public loses faith in politicians because it looks like they’re technocratic system managers, cloaking their nihilism in serious-sounding pragmatic rhetoric.

HEATHER: Well, I agree with some of that, but I couldn’t sign on to a transhumanist religion.

FRED: Why? Because you only want to criticize but never to join a movement, because you want to look at everything from above, with ironic detachment, so you never have to risk feeling disappointed if the plan doesn’t work out? You don’t want to give yourself to anything greater than yourself, because deep down you’re an individualist and a narcissist to boot.

HEATHER: I am an individualist. As I said, the evolution of self-awareness, language and reason which make our autonomy possible are virtual miracles in the universe, meaning that they’re intriguing anomalies. So any mass movement which denigrates our potential to enlighten ourselves and to seek honour in a flawed world is an unsavoury con, in my judgment.

FRED: But transhumanism celebrates personal liberty! The goal is to use technoscience to deify us so we can do whatever we want.

HEATHER: Unfortunately, that myth is hampered by its literary debt to ancient theism. Gods go crazy because they become corrupted by their power and isolation. That’s the history of monotheism and of the popes and caliphs and kings who ruled in their god’s name. Human gods would be just as disastrous as the model gods they worshipped. And anyway, most people wouldn’t enjoy the technologies in question, since the tools and enhancements would be hoarded by the power elites who are the least in favour of competition, by the way, since they seek to establish monopolies or oligopolies at every opportunity.

ADAM: I’d like to step in here and remind everyone that liberalism is the progressive force, not conservatism. Equal rights for minorities are signs of progress, whereas racism and misogyny, slavery and patriarchy have always prevented the freedom of thought which is the cornerstone of scientific and technological development.

FRED: In previous empires, perhaps such traditions did blind the masses to the benefits of secularism, but that’s only because they were upheld by theistic fairy tales. The point of neoreactionary conservatism is that we can have the inequalities without the dubious myths. Instead, we have natural relations between means and end. Sacrifice in the capitalistic struggle for selfish advantage so that the techno gods might be born!

ADAM: But which inequalities would you excuse? Are you saying whites should rule over blacks, men should dominate women, and heterosexuals should persecute homosexuals?

FRED: Any hierarchy which is a byproduct of unvarnished capitalism is worth it if that social order improves the chance of our realizing the next stage of our evolution—because human nature as it is now won’t cut it.

ADAM: But let’s just take one of these vaunted inequalities as an example. You say egalitarianism has held back progress towards realizing the transhumanist dream. For centuries, patriarchy kept women out of the marketplace, but after the rise of Western women in the last century, productivity increased tremendously because women could finally educate themselves and apply their professional talents in competition with men. So that’s a case of social equality benefitting capitalism, contrary to what a neoreactionary would have predicted.

FRED: Again, only those equalities that are grossly artificial, which have to be sustained by enormous governmental effort and which impede the cutthroat competition in the marketplace that spurs growth should be eliminated. As for working women, much of their equality with men is illusory. Many have lower incomes than men in the same line of work, because women need to take off more time to raise their children. In any case, as long as women are competing with men with no unfair advantage from government aid, the market will sort us all into a dominance hierarchy. Only when such a hierarchy arises do you know you have a working capitalist economy, rather than a stale socialist one with centralized power in the hands of know-it-all bureaucrats. A conservative prizes the inequality as a sign that great struggles for power are taking place, with the byproducts of winners and losers. And we should hope that the end of that struggle is a glorious, posthuman form of life.

HEATHER: The vast economic inequality in the US, between the richest one percent and everyone else isn’t the result of any such noble struggle. The postindustrial economy is based on financialization, which is the rise of a class of con artists, bearing pseudoscientific economic models, who don’t make anything but just prey on host countries with massive frauds. So no, I’m afraid not all social inequalities are signs of hard work or progress. Some competitions are rigged to go nowhere or even to self-destruct. Like Rich, the Fox News memes of the culture war have blinded you to the fact that power can be concentrated not just by a government but by a cadre of plutocrats.

RICH: Well, I’m intrigued by Fred’s new form of conservatism. Where it errs, in my view, is its discounting of the benefits of a modest welfare state. So-called unregulated or unvarnished conservatism would descend into anarchy and would indeed self-destruct. Some taxed protections of the losers in the marketplace are needed to maintain public confidence that their country isn’t a cesspool that deserves to be reduced to ashes by an almighty God.

FRED: Alas, there’s no such God, but a religion inspired by science fiction can provide new justifications for a doubling down on capitalism, as I’ve explained.

RICH: The American Founders embraced Judeo-Christian morality as the basis of their Declaration of Independence. Some form of welfare state is needed to protect our God-given or natural rights, and taxes are needed to preserve the infrastructure that enforces those protections. By contrast, purely private interests would dictate that the losers deserve their failure and should be left to rot. No one should want to be part of such an amoral, heartless wasteland as the one you envision.

FRED: There are no such inherent rights because there’s no such Creator. We have to work hard to create the divine, posthuman beings that would manifestly have the absolute right to rule. And I hate to burst your bubble, but postindustrial behaviours, as opposed to the noble lies we tell ourselves, are already amoral and heartless. Again, we’re devastating the ecosystem and we support dictators or otherwise illiberal governments abroad to protect the young wage slaves who mass-produce the junk we so greedily consume. Yet we don’t hesitate to identify with America, with the land of the free and the home of the brave, because we buy into the myths. All I’m saying is we could use new myths, ones that wouldn’t bolster such shocking self-deception.

MODERATOR: I’m afraid we’re out of time, guests. Perhaps the upshot is that conservatism under postindustrial conditions will have to look very different from its traditional, theocratic form if it’s to avoid being largely ridiculous. At any rate, I’d like to thank you all for this stimulating exchange of ideas. Stay tuned for mind-numbing platitudes and distractions meant to keep you in the dark until you’re dead and buried. 

Selengkapnya →

Civilization requires Myths, and Myths are Absurd

There’s good reason to think that the culture of any mass society depends on myths which are fictions, which is to say lies we’re too polite to identify as such because these lies achieve a higher good. But what are the implications of this hypothesis, for moderns and liberals who flatter themselves that they’re rational and not so credulous?

Myths Define Cultural Identity

Every large society is founded on myths which are fictions that collectively distort the population’s perception of reality to maintain its group cohesion. In his book, Sapiens, Harari sets forth one explanation of how these myths arose, which begins by pointing out that our social instincts were adapted to stabilizing small tribes of around 150 members. In such groups we can use gossip and memory to form social bonds, based on familiarity with each other. But the agricultural revolutions in the Neolithic Period drew masses of thousands and millions of strangers together, which created the problem of unifying these masses to prevent them from splitting into more manageable subgroups. The solution was that although in the actual world a multitude may have many reasons to split due to natural differences of race, gender, character, and opinion, belief in an alternative, fictional world could compel everyone to imagine themselves as having a single, collective identity. This solution was made possible by our large, flexible brains, which allow us to dissociate information, to mentally model possible worlds and to overlay values and counterfactual interpretations onto sense data. For millennia the myths that sustained nations and empires were religious and cosmological, instilling in the citizens their collective values, and constructing theological or philosophical justifications for them in the myth’s narratives.

A second cause of the prevalence of myths is apparent from the Handicap Principle in biology. In a context in which deception is often in creatures’ self-interest, a signal is more reliable if it’s delivered at a cost to the signaler. Thus, an animal may really be formidable if it can afford to squander its strength on ostentatious displays. For example, the male peacock signals to the female that it’s a worthy mate, by finding a way to cope with its gaudy and comically-oversized tail feathers. (This has given rise to the term “peacocking” in the game of pickup artists.) In the same way, conspicuous consumption indicates that the consumer has money to waste on frivolous and often self-destructive entertainments. And whereas our imagination and reasoning may be geared to planning on how to exploit regularities in the natural environment, to increase the chance of our survival under the condition of nature’s indifference towards us, a decadent population finds itself able to squander these mental resources by entertaining outlandish scenarios and having them colour its perception of reality. Thus, the more absurd the myth, the greater the population’s apparent willpower. A foreigner might be led to think, “They can afford to believe the most errant nonsense without dying of embarrassment, so their group cohesion must be superhuman.”

This leads to a third root of our large-scale reality distortion, which is that the more counterfactual the cultural narrative, the greater the test of an individual’sfaith in the collective identity. A classic example of this is Tertullian’s boast that he believes the Christian creed becauseit’s absurd. The fideistic rationalization of that faith would be that a doctrine’s absurdity may be a sign of its supernatural, transcendent origin. Similarly, Saint Paul said that the wisdom of the natural world is foolishness to God, and Jesus is alleged to have said that we must be childlike to enter the kingdom of God. These would be rationalizations, of course, not epistemically worthy justifications of faith, because not every childlike act of avoiding the natural world need be a sign of some connection to a supernatural reality. Even if there were some higher realm that we could access only nonrationally, many nonrational expressions may be merely insane or serving the purpose of a fraud, as in the case of cults, for example.

An unsettling implication of this hypothesis, that every large population holds itself together by suspending disbelief in a cultural fiction, is that even the so-called modern, secular West depends on myths in that respect. As Harari also points out, these secular myths are economic and political rather than explicitly theological or cosmological. Since the Renaissance, Westerners have trusted in science, capitalism, liberalism, and above all in individualism. We believe individuals should be free to decide how they should live, and that scientific exploration and capitalistic struggle for private profit are progressive. In The Age of Insanity, Schumaker distinguishes between modernity in general and the Western, American-led form of it. Modernity after the Scientific Revolution he characterizes as “a postindustrial order whose primary features are commodification, consumption, social marginality, technological encroachment, amplified organizational power, homogenized drives and tastes, deregulation of volition and emotion, incomprehensible abstract systems, simultaneous communication, and the shift toward reflexive knowledge.” The values of the Western form of modernization are “personal autonomy, self-reliance, future orientation, a strong appetite for change, capitalistic heroism, and success-mindedness.”

But there’s another implication, which Harari doesn’t consider, which is that because these myths are fictions, they’re necessarily preposterous when viewed from an outsider’s vantage point. Unless you identify with the characters in a work of fiction, the fiction will seem merely counterproductive to the extent that it departs from the pressing features of the apparent world. The greater the author’s license to misrepresent the facts or to imagine a farfetched alternative, the more absurd the story will seem and thus the harder it will be for a foreigner to avoid ridiculing the believers for entertaining their bizarre worldview. When you emotionally identify with the characters, you share an identity with them which allows for cathartic release or for collective action. But when your values are based on your commitment to a myth that monopolizes your emotions, so that you can’t spare empathy for the plight of the mythical characters that bedazzle the foreigners, you’re disposed to belittle the mob that succumbs to that foreign piece of fan fiction. Moreover, in so far as you can be sociologically objective about allsuch myths, including the domestic ones, you can find yourself an alienated outsider to humanity in general, so that the conventional way of life that happens right in your midst will likewise seem as absurd as the one you’d find in a remote land or time.

Medieval European Absurdity

To see this, let’s compare how Westerners view the medieval Christian mindset and behaviour, with how an objective future historian might regard Western modernity. It’s commonplace for us to mock not just medieval peasants for their astounding ignorance, but also the priesthood and medieval intellectuals in Europe for their lack of originality, that is, for their dogmatism. Although our understanding of the period has been influenced by rationalist propaganda, medieval Christianity is still palpably absurd from our vantage point. Racism and sexism weren’t just nurtured in secret suspicions of others’ inferiority; ideological hatred motivated horrific collective action in the barbarities of the witch trials, pogroms, crusades, and inquisitions.

It seems impossible even to speak now of the medieval practices of conducting full trials of animals, including pigs, horses, rats, and even insects, and of often executing the accused on that preposterous basis, without feeling condescending pity for the childlike naivety of those involved centuries ago. From Wikipedia:

Animal defendants appeared before both church and secular courts, and the offences alleged against them ranged from murder to criminal damage. Human witnesses were often heard and in Ecclesiastical courts they were routinely provided with lawyers…If convicted, it was usual for an animal to be executed, or exiled. However, in 1750, a female donkey was acquitted of charges of bestiality due to witnesses to the animal's virtue and good behaviour while her human co-accused were sentenced to death.

The lunacy which passed for normality in that period extends to the fact that these “trials” were “part of a broader phenomenon that saw corpses and inanimate objects also face prosecution.” Needless to say, animals considered “familiars” of witches were burned at the stake along with the witches.

Comedians often use logic in their rational presentation of an absurdity, to help the audience suspend its disbelief for the sake of having a laugh. That is, a comedian might begin from a silly premise and follow through with a dramatic telling of what would logically happen next in the possible world in which that premise were actualized. With that in mind, the medieval animal trials seem now as if the witnesses, lawyers, and judges were staging a comedy: their assumptions were absurd, since even if animals had moral agency, they lack the means to communicate with us, not to mention a shared culture with their accusers, so that they couldn’t hope to understand the trial. But the medieval folks went to great lengths to put those assumptions into practice. Yet those folks were obviously not acting as comedians. Their myths and superstitions supplied them with a cultural identity, but those fictions had the byproduct of causing the population not just to detach from reality, but to land itself in what seem to us—having no cultural investment in those ancestors—like so many epic failures. Some of these trials were meant to assuage the guilt of peasants for killing what they deemed to be God’s creatures, as in the case of a French bishop’s order of “three days of daily processions where the slugs were told to leave the area or be cursed, thus making them free game for extermination.” Still, this only pushes the absurdity back a step. How bizarre must their beliefs have been for the peasants to have been able to feel less guilty about killing slugs when the slugs were merely cursed in an ecclesiastical ruling!

Imagine witnessing the plight of the pig that was put on trial for damaging property, or that of the rat that was tried and executed for running across the floor and upsetting a woman. These animals would have been just as clueless about what was happening to them as they are when they’re fed to be slaughtered or are killed by rat traps. But if a time traveler visited one of those animal trials, she would likely have felt that the practice was unseemly, because morally innocent creatures were roped into an insane conspiracy by deranged, self-righteous fools who must have congratulated themselves on their Christian virtue, for giving those animal “criminals” the benefit of the doubt. The practice was enabled by theological dualism, which was needed to justify the religious faith in an afterlife despite the body’s decay. If immaterial spirits are responsible for personhood, the physical difference between species is irrelevant and so a pig or a rat could be just as noble or as evil as a human.Liberal Westerners after the Enlightenment don’t share those medieval assumptions and so can scarcely believe that anyone could take them so seriously as to have engaged in such madness.

To take another example, Jews were demonized because some ancient, cherry-picked scriptures scapegoated them to curry favour with the Roman Empire, depicting Jews as those most responsible for failing to appreciate the god in their midst, Jesus Christ. And so Jews were murdered by Christians throughout Church history. Even Shakespeare demonized them. Again, Judaism can be rationally criticized, but here we’re talking about the necessary absurdity of how it will seem when a myth motivates a population to dissociate from reality, to act as though the fiction that emotionally binds the masses were worthy of being taken so seriously even when the myth is plainly fanciful.

Modern Western Absurdity

What’s shocking is that on the foregoing analysis, our secular culture must be capable of being perceived as being just as ludicrous as medieval Christianity (or as any ancient or foreign culture in its peculiar myth-ladenness). This can be tested if we manage to de-familiarize ourselves with our culture, perhaps by some rhetorical trick, so that we come to feel that same twinge of condescension—except now for our neighbours and for our encultured selves. We should be able to find a striking example of any of the features that Schumaker picks out (quoted above) and then imagine how that behaviour would strike someone who doesn’t share our culture. But let’s take just modernity’s fixation on abstract systems. This is a carryover of scientists’ use of artificial languages for the sake of greater precision in their predictions and calculations. The symbols in natural languages have intuitive, metaphorical undertones, and thus are counterproductive when the goal is to objectify and to quantify some phenomenon. Abstract systems dominate in the bureaucratic jargon of businesses and governments, in the dehumanizing rhetoric of militaries, and in the mass production of merchandise.

Take, for example, Big Agriculture’s practice of torturing millions upon millions of domesticated beasts to cut down on the costs of feeding pampered, short-sighted consumers such as you and me. Pig farmers keep sows in isolated gestation crates that are so small, the sows can’t turn around. The female pigs spend their entire life in these steel crates, except for the brief periods twice a year when they give birth. Whereas medieval peasants had no conception of the brain’s importance to the mind, biologists today understand that pigs are highly intelligent and social animals, so that we have no such excuse for failing to realize that not being able to turn around or interact with other pigs must constitute torture for those animals.

Thus, while the peasants personified pigs by trying them in court for imagined criminal offenses, we sophisticated modern folk imprison and torture pigs because our myths enable us to regard the animals as machines whose suffering serves a greater good. Medievals thought in terms of divinely-mandated hierarchies, of Creation as being governed by a benevolent deity so that no subject could be divorced from moral evaluation. Everything served God’s purpose, including the devil who badly miscalculated that he could rebel and establish an independent order of being, according to the myth. By contrast, moderns assume there’s no such overarching moral order, nor any immaterial life forces, so that all that remains are natural mechanisms, some of which add up to living things. As this Slate article points out, medievals “saw aspects of animal behavior that we don’t see anymore,” because they lived daily with animals, whereas consumer societies delegate farming to huge corporations that serve not God’s laws but the capitalistic imperative to struggle greedily to maximize profit. The gestation crates are kept from public view, so that most moderns never see living pigs. All we care about are the products we pay for, the bacon and hamburgers and ribs. Thus, we deride the medievals for their naivety in treating animals as though the animals’ behaviours were morally relevant, for going as far as to prosecute them for criminal offenses. But our callousness and cowardice involved in keeping the torture of livestock out of sight and mind must be just as bewildering from an alien perspective. Christian theology is gratuitous in its disregard of natural facts, but so is the modern penchant for abstract systems which blinds us to the anomalousness and thus the preciousness of life.

Living pigs are not really objects or machines; they’re just mistreated as such by faceless corporations that compartmentalize unpleasant truths. For example, no report on bacon profits in a Big Agra office will refer by name to the individual pigs which that corporation owns. Instead, the livestock will be quantified by an abstract system of calculating materials, costs, outputs, and the like. Perhaps the pigs are assigned a numerical designation. The sow’s happiness would matter to the food producers or consumers only if the moral question entered into our individual concerns—because as moderns, we’re individualists who worship our autonomy. If profit can be maximized by ignoring the sow’s unhappiness, because her ability to socialize doesn’t affect the number of piglets she can produce, and if the squalid state of corporate pig farms can be kept from public view, on the grounds of private property, to avoid a boycott, the moral question becomes irrelevant for capitalistic purposes. And if modernity is defined by the myth that capitalism matters more than traditional spirituality, the inhumane practice of torturing millions of animals for the mass production of food will continue as though we needn’t be ashamed of it, just as the practice of animal trials persisted for centuries because the medievals didn’t know better.

Moreover, if consumers can ignore the fact that to furnish us with our cushy modern lifestyle, most wild animal species have had to be exterminated (due to encroaching human habitation and industries), leaving mainly the domesticated, tortured animals, so that the bacon’s taste isn’t tainted by unwanted knowledge, we consumers will perpetuate the disparity between how the world really is and how it seems to us, given our ideological filter. The disparity is more unseemly in the modern case, because we have only false consciousness, not wholesale ignorance to enable the dissociation that sustains our myth-laden practice. We know that pain and pleasure are matters of biology, not immaterial spirit, and being individualists we glorify personhood as the pinnacle of natural creation, even though we must differ from animals only by degree. Thus, the fact that we consumers indirectly torture millions of sentient creatures, by demanding their meat for food and by participating in a neoliberal society that prioritizes economic evaluations must be as sad and grotesque as the medieval’s childlike ignorance, although in our encultured mindframe we can’t appreciate the absurdity.

Myth-Making in Politics

This assessment of the cost of social unity can be applied to the mystery of Trumpism. Liberals wonder how Republicans can afford to lie with so little shame, but liberals thereby miss the point of authoritarian propaganda. As one author puts it in the New York Times, the goal of such propaganda is “to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power” (my emphasis). If Democrats are more loathe than Trumpian Republicans to publicly stray from a literal reading of facts, this shows only that Republicans operate at a meta-level of myth-making. Liberals are beholden to the Enlightenment-era myths about the individual’s sovereignty through rational self-control, while Republicans understand that politics isn’t a science but an exercise in maintaining social unity through the cultivation of a mass fiction. What Trump is doing is bypassing feminized, obsolete liberal myths and reframing American social issues in terms of authoritarian fantasies that spring from his gut reaction to the anecdotes he comes across in his binges on late night television. Instead of creating his religion in the traditional manner, by sojourning in the desert like Jesus or on the mountaintop like Moses, Trump aggregates the upshot of infotainments that bubble up to the surface of social media. The result may be an uglier, regressive American self-image that befits that country’s lesser standing in a multipolar world. In any case, the fact that Trump doesn’t attempt to hide the political process of fictionalizing daily events to unify the public is itself evidence for the above analysis. Trump’s motives aren’t selfless, but the public nevertheless needs an imaginary collective identity to avoid brutalizing the strangers next door at the slightest grievance.

What’s more, though, the liberal reaction to Trump’s audacity is likewise evidence that Trump opposes a received myth to which liberals are unwittingly enthralled. The conventional wisdom is that political leaders should be honest and rational, because democracy, like capitalism, is meritocratic. In a free society, we strive to better ourselves, taking advantage of opportunities to gain knowledge, and politicians and businesspeople will be modest managers whose power is reined in by the voters or shareholders. That so-called wisdom is mythical and fantastic. In reality, the chance to exercise power over others attracts not the best but the worst members of society, namely psychopaths. Decent individuals would abhor the opportunity to dominate others, fearing that such a temptation would naturally corrupt their character. Meanwhile, zealots with the most ambition who leap at the chance to “serve” the nation or the market are actually the most likely to be inwardly monstrous. Outwardly, these “leaders” will be attractive, since the electoral and promotional processes are superficial, but ethically the winners will be disproportionately predatory or parasitic.

Now Trump represents a backlash against that liberal convention. The “elites” and the “establishment” are blamed for double-crossing the middleclass, which they’ve done non-stop since Ronald Reagan was president. Trump won’t address the problems of globalization or automation, since there are no political or economic solutions to them. A technological miracle will save the bulk of humanity or there will be a wave of neo-Luddite slaughter and all-out war against the top one percent. But what Trump is clearly trying to do is to reframe American culture to lend the white male have-nots some self-respect. Trump’s fantasies and lies and spins are laughable, but that’s irrelevant since every culture is laughable, being a practically-necessary mass fiction that requires the believers’ suspension of disbelief. Liberal faith in democratic and capitalistic institutions is also laughable. As this article explains, these institutions are currently in the business of putting most humans out of work. Robots are taking over—and not just in science fiction. Liberals want to raise the minimum wage and improve education to ensure the masses have good jobs, but those measures are obsolete and even counterproductive. Raising the minimum wage, for example, will escalate the outsourcing of jobs not to foreigners but to machines that work for free.

Trump is an abomination, but so is civilization which condemns us to lie to each other. Trump is only exploiting the depravities of a social order that’s operated on principles first devised twelve thousand years ago. The leaders must lie to the masses, and those lies must be captivating so that the masses will beg for more. The alternative is to stare reality in the face with no protection by way of self-serving myths. That existential confrontation is deathly and suitable only for the marginalized. Mass society itself is possible only if the majority is put to bed by a lullaby, otherwise called the myth that defines the population’s cultural identity. Liberals are free to oppose and to ridicule Trump, but they shouldn’t pretend that myth-making is unknown to politics, because that gives their game away and makes them look foolish in turn.

Selengkapnya →

Clash of Worldviews: The Meaning of Trumpism

MODERATOR: Good evening and welcome back to Clash of Worldviews, the show in which we try to get to the bottom of big issues. You may have heard that President-Elect Donald Trump is a charlatan and an ogre, and that Hillary Clinton is crooked and phony. But Trump’s election has cast doubt on so much of our conventional wisdom that we’re still wondering—as though lost in a wasteland—just what the true meaning of Trump’s election might be. To help answer that question, we’ve asked Adam Garnett, famed liberal humanist and Hillary Clinton supporter, and Fred Gulpa, a Donald Trump supporter and self-described member of the alt-right to be with us to discuss the matter. Gentlemen, who would like to begin? What is Trumpism all about? 

ADAM: In a word, Trump is about himself, while his supporters are about having a laugh at the country’s expense. They’re not downtrodden, these older white working class folks; they’re just venting because they’ve fared badly under globalization, they know the days of exclusive white power or imperialism are over, and they mean to take the country down with them. If they can’t rule any longer like they used to in the first half of the last century, they’re going to pollute the discourse with their vulgarity and send a bull into the china shop.

FRED: So “they’re not downtrodden,” but they’ve also “fared badly under globalization”? Which is it, I wonder? You see how the elites can’t even think straight? No wonder they were ripe for being humiliated by Trump and by the rise of the alt-right!

ADAM: I meant that these Trumpists have benefited from governmental support. They’re part of the middle class, but they’d like to blow up the social system, thus committing collective suicide by voting against their economic interest. Trump, in other words, isn’t an expression of revolt against the powers that be. Instead, he’s a rogue power, an agent of anarchy.

FRED: Keep telling yourself that, Adam! Keep patting yourself on the back. You’re one of the good guys, right? Not some useful idiot to plutocrats.

ADAM: And who are you, Freddy? What vile hate speech will you treat us to this evening? I can hardly wait to plug my ears.

FRED: Yeah, because you’re a feminized liberal who can’t stomach the naked truth. You think Trump’s supporters are all morons and only liberals have reason on their side. That’s where you’re wrong. Many of Trump’s voters aren’t highly educated, but that doesn’t make them stupid. Just look at what foolishness was wrought by Clinton’s neoliberal class of professionals: they’re the Ivy Leaguers but they got it all wrong. Their polls, their history lessons, their self-serving analyses were so many paper tigers squashed by the juggernaut Trump. You think Hillary Clinton deserved to win, because she was the more rational and responsible candidate. That’s what that euphemism was about: Trump supposedly lacked “the demeanor to be president.” But you know what Hillary Clinton lacked? An honest bone in her body. She couldn’t speak the unpopular truth to the public and she lost because hardly anyone trusted that she would change the United States for the better.

ADAM: And what will Trump do? Wave his magic wand and make American great again? Is that supposed to be some profound truth he told?

FRED: Trump doesn’t speak in fancy academic double-talk. I’ll grant you that. His language is seldom precise, but the essence of his diagnosis was highly negative and thus accurate. Trump’s view of America’s standing in the world is apocalyptic, as even the Democrats pointed out. Maybe Trump exaggerates for rhetorical effect, but his main point is that the United States isn’t doing well on the whole. That’s the truth that Hillary Clinton couldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, because she had to own Obama’s legacy. The public no longer respects the system, they were disappointed by Obama who ran falsely as a change candidate, and they wanted a leader from outside the corrupt establishment who would at least have a fighting chance of effecting radical change.

ADAM: Who is supposed to benefit from Trump’s administration? Surely you don’t mean the older blue collar whites who have been misled by Republicans for decades. Surely you’re aware that the Republicans have used social wedge issues to stir up animosities and compel these folks to vote against their economic interest. Surely you understand that trickle-down economics just further enriches the top one percent while everyone else falls further behind, that a smaller government with fewer taxes gets out of the way only of giant corporations which are already as powerful as some entire countries, but that the little guy may need government support if he’s going to survive globalization.

FRED: But he’s notgoing to survive globalization. Again, that’s the sort of dark truth you don’t want to hear. The system that maintains the economic status quo is rigged against him. That’s the system that Obama and Hillary defend as the technocratic managers they are. That’s the system we want Trump to destroy. 

ADAM: And your street smarts are supposed to enable you to divine the contents of Trump’s mind? When you psychically peer into its depths, how do you get past the boatload of mental disorders to discover his true intentions?

FRED: Oh, is Trump unfit to attend one of your dinner parties? Is he too coarse for polite company? And that would be the company of smug liberal professionals like you, the company of system managers and consumers who boast that they’re “progressive” when the system they’re upholding is impoverishing billions, enslaving or exterminating all nonhuman animal species, and destroying the planet.

ADAM: When did alt-right conservatives become tree-huggers?

FRED: I’m not opposed to eating meat. But I am disgusted with Big Agriculture. We should be upstanding men and women who earn what we have. If you want to eat meat, go out and hunt; be sustainable in your way of life. Don’t be a sissy who whines when you discover there are bad chemicals in the plastic-covered beef you buy at the supermarket.

ADAM: So now you want a sustainableway of life? What happened to Trump blowing up the system?

FRED: There’s no contradiction there: it’s the global system of crony capitalism that’s unsustainable, so it has to be destroyed to give us a chance to put something else in its place.

ADAM: And do you really think Trump will destroy the system that he admits to having gamed for decades to enrich himself?

FRED: I’m not a psychic or a prophet. I don’t know what Trump will do as president. But we’re not talking about Trump. We’re talking about Trumpism. The meaning of Trump is that he rose to power on a wave of resentment against the neoliberal social order.

ADAM: Resentment against social progress, you mean. Trump ascended thanks to a global backlash fuelled by churlish contempt for foreigners who threaten whites’ narcissistic, nationalist delusions of grandeur. You don’t want to share power with blacks, gays, or Muslims, so you empowered a regressive champion, like they’re doing in Europe.

FRED: Minorities and women have played the race card and identity politics for several decades now, but when white men stand up for themselves they’re being racists and misogynists? That’s a tiresome double standard.

ADAM: Yeah, it’s double because there are two things there. Blacks were literally slaves under whites, and women were oppressed in patriarchies around the world for millennia. White men benefited from those inequities, so now they’re not just “standing up for themselves”; they’re trying to reinstitute imperialist power structures.

FRED: Your beef then is with nature. You think we progress by departing from what’s natural, but that bit of liberal humanism is as delusional as belief in a sky-god with a white beard. Nature is filled with inequalities. Men aren’t the same as women, and races aren’t culturally or even biologically all the same. These are some more of those dark truths that terrify liberals.

ADAM: Races aren’t biologically the same, eh? So we’re back to the quackery that drove fascism in the Second World War?

FRED: Tell me, then, why wouldthe races be biologically the same? What would make them identical, overriding the genes that cause different skin colours, for example? You sound like Isaac Newton who assumed God must be holding the orbits in place, preventing planets from falling into the sun.

ADAM: Liberals don’t think races and sexes are identical. Obviously men and women have different physical characteristics, and blacks and whites, for example, have different skin colours. The point, rather, is that all people should be held in equal regard, the physical differences between them being irrelevant to their human rights.

FRED: That’s the liberal myth alright. But there are no human rights, you know. That’s a fiction we’ve been telling ourselves in the modern world, to replace the old religious stories that rationalized how we thought the world should be. You may prefer to treat men and women the same, but that civic religious dogma of yours is currently backfiring. When men treat women the same way they treat men, for example, that’s unromantic. Even if women are too politically correct or clouded by feminist platitudes to call metrosexual men on it, they won’t appreciate that sort of equal treatment. It’s boring and unsatisfying to them. That’s why their soap opera daydreams and romance novels tell a very different story. A woman wants a world to correspond to her fantasies in which a heroic man sweeps her off her feet.

ADAM: I’m pretty sure women have been clamouring also for equal pay for equal work.

FRED: Sure they have, because like children they don’t know what’s best for them. It’s in their best interest to be led by strong men. They may think they want to do men’s dirty work in business and politics and the like, and perhaps some women are exceptions and that’s what they truly want. But many feminists are lying to themselves and only pretending to be content with modernity. And I note again the shadiness of this talk of equality: the flip side of human rights is our domination of other species, which will lead to our downfall.

ADAM: Authoritarian men like Trump may prefer sheepish women, just as white bullies may presume that the white race has a manifest destiny to rule the planet while so-called inferior races are doomed to languish under the whip. But these are atrocious stereotypes, not dark empirical truths as you would have us believe.

FRED: They’re truer to nature than is your liberal humanistic happy-talk! You have to be blind and deaf in a bubble of political correctness to think the races are all the same. Think of races as breeds. We breed dogs or horses and we prize pure breeds, the ones that best display the characteristics of their type. A mutt, by contrast, is a dog with mixed blood and muddled traits that don’t allow it to excel in a particular environment. Natural selection works the same way, so when we interbreed as humans, we pollute our gene pool and lose the traits and skills required to excel or even to survive. 

ADAM: There’s just one problem with that bit of eugenics: natural selection doesn’t work the way same way on our species, because we’re not mere animals. Animals are slave to their programming, but people are self-aware and autonomous. That’s why blacks can be enslaved for generations, but an African-American can still be educated and can rise to become President of the United States. Likewise, a woman such as Hillary Clinton can study at Yale and Oxford and become as qualified as any man for that same position. As individuals we can defy our programming and our “blood,” and that’s the source of our equality: we have the equal potential to excel as free beings, liberated from the natural laws that rule over the animal kingdom. But your throwback rhetoric would have certain out-groups regress and be treated as animals so they can be conquered by a so-called exceptional class, by the “power elites.”

FRED: You establishment liberals need to listen more closely to the progressives you’ve ignored. Bernie Sanders and leftists such as Thomas Frank, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi recognize that there are power elites and plutocrats who run so-called democracies behind the scenes. I agree that humans have greater self-control than animals. But our freedom isn’t supernatural and it can be overcome by the environment. Look at what happened since the advent of Neolithic farming: we became sedentary and formed unequal, hierarchical societies—regardless of the culture or style of politics. Democracy is based on the assumption that voters have equal rights, but the ancient Greeks understood that democracies devolve, because demagogues arise, whip up mass resentments, and establish a tyranny of the majority. So instead of one from many, as it says on the American seal, we have inequality from equality. The clash between Democrats and Republicans this election cycle was between different economic classes vying for power, but because Trump is a far superior demagogue, he was able to energize his base and get them to vote for radical change. Despite Clinton’s superb self-control and intellectual heft, her voters were uninspired by her tired rhetoric. So where then was our vaunted equality? Our nonrational side got the better of us, and the more beastly class—the white older males and blue collar workers—took political power from the demoralized and decadent millennials and liberal professionals.

ADAM: So what’s your solution to this imperfect state of modern democracy? Elect the most egregious demagogue possible on a wing and a prayer that you just might be left standing after he hurls us all into the apocalypse?

FRED: You still don’t understand. The apocalypse is all around us; it’s been there since the beginning. It’s the state of nature. All human efforts are taken on a wing and prayer. We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re supernatural agents, free from natural processes so that we can forge our path in the wilderness. And being the hypocrites we are, we condemn out-groups who are likewise as deluded by their myths which are unfamiliar to us. You say the alt-right demonizes minorities and other groups, but Hillary Clinton was quick to demonize the alt-right as a “basket of deplorables.” Instead of exercising our autonomy and empathizing with others, we circle the wagons, applauding our tribe and howling at our opponents—just like a troop of monkeys. Instead of listening to what the alt-right is saying, liberals cherry-pick unflattering quotations from this or that website, and thus still don’t understand what the election was really about and why they lost to Trumpism.

ADAM: I know what the alt-right is about. It’s the Frankenstein monster created by the Republican establishment, including Fox News; it’s the set of wedge issues that kept the Republican base in line until the Great Recession unleashed the Tea Party which morphed into the birther movement, joining forces with a thousand conspiracy cliques on the internet, whether it be Alex Jones’ Infowars, the 911 Truthers, the pickup artists, the videogamers, and even the white supremacists. The alt-right is a form of conservatism that speaks to the underclass rather than to “the establishment” or to the wealthy managers of the Republican infrastructure. Instead of the neoliberal, globalist myths peddled by the New York Times and the like—the myths of the free market and of entrepreneurialism, upward mobility, and the need to get the government off our backs—you have the more vulgar myths that sprouted in the dark alleyways of the internet such as 4chan and Reddit.

FRED: Your analysis is incomplete, because the backlash against neoliberalism is global. The internet merely allows for freer communication. So we had Occupy Wall Street and then the Arab Spring, Brexit, the ascent of Putin, China, and Iran, and a rightwing insurgence across Europe. And now we have Trumpism. We use the internet to find the ideas that most interest us, but we mustn’t confuse the messenger with the message. The internet doesn’t cause hostility to free-market capitalism, globalization, and democracy; chat rooms and blogs, Facebook and Twitter merely bring that uprising to the fore. To understand Trumpism, you have to recognize the fault of liberalism, but you’re too invested in your myths to scrutinize them.

ADAM: You’re muddying the waters. Liberalism isn’t responsible for globalization, for so-called free-market economics, or for the libertarian frontier culture. Liberalism is just the modern faith that humans are obligated to be godlike, because we enlightened Westerners discovered that a nonhuman god is irrelevant and probably nonexistent. We’re free as individuals from the religious dogmas and traditions that oppressed the masses for most of our history. We have the right to self-determination, to find our own way to be happy as long as we don’t interfere with other people’s equal right to the same. The U.S. Declaration of Independence is a classic liberal document.

FRED: Sure, that’s where liberalism starts, in the ideal of self-determination, because the rational individual must take over for the old gods we’ve left behind. But the institutions of capitalism and democracy arise from that ideal. “Let the individual sellers and buyers select their prices and what to produce or purchase.” “Let the voters choose their political representatives.” We invest power in all of us, because we worship ourselves after the death of God. But look what happens to liberal economies and governments. Monopolies, oligopolies, and plutocracies emerge, and the wealthy exercise their unequal power to entrench their privileges, manipulating the laws to their advantage and going round and round the revolving door between the private and public sectors so that the majority falls far behind with stagnant wages and no political power. And when developing countries adopt the neoliberal Washington Consensus, we have a global competition and a race to the bottom for the sake of private profit, further hurting the chances of millions of Americans to “find their own way to be happy.”  

ADAM: But the irony here is appalling! The so-called Washington Consensus was established mainly by Republicans. Free market ideology grew out of right-wing, libertarian think-tanks.

FRED: Then how do you explain Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal or his repeal of Glass-Steagall?

ADAM: Clinton had to triangulate to outmaneuver the Republican-led congress.

FRED: No, that’s a pitiful excuse. The Clintons and other Democratic leaders are one with establishment Republicans in their neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is just a name for the bipartisan consensus that’s based on the sacrosanct classic liberal ideal of individual freedom. Bill Clinton was indoctrinated into neoliberalism under Carroll Quigley at Georgetown University, subsequently influencing his wife and thus another leader of the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama adopted the cutthroat, careerist culture of neoliberalism at Harvard Law School and was further indoctrinated by the neoliberal establishment figures he had picked for some reason to fill out his economics cabinet (I’m referring to Jaimie Rubin, Geithner, and Summers). What do these Democratic leaders have in common? They’re fatalistic about the powers that be, so that these neoliberal Democrats conclude that only incremental, not radical social change is possible. They take a neutral, “scientific,” hands-off, “no-drama” perspective on world affairs, seeing themselves as mere technocratic managers, because the system is already in place and functioning as it should. The system in question is capitalistic and democratic: it spread from Britain in the Industrial Revolution to the United States and then to other parts of the world. Liberalism was almost defeated by Nazi and Soviet ideologies, but the West won out and the American way of life is supposed to stand now as the goal for all humanity, the United States being the indispensible, exceptional nation that can do no wrong. That’s what all the American power elites believe on both the left and the right. Except they’re wrong and there’s both domestic and foreign revolts against neoliberalism, that is, against the American forms of capitalism and democracy which enrich the few at the expense of the many and which even play out as stage-managed hoaxes. A 2014 study showed that America is plutocratic, not democratic, because most voters’ interests never get translated into public policy; their representatives heed the directives only of their wealthy donors and patrons.

ADAM: Well, allow me to introduce an alternative interpretation. Again, it’s rich hearing this radical progressivism from an extreme right-winger. This looks to me rather like a cynical act of rebranding. After Obama was elected, the Republicans tried being friendlier to minorities, to address the demographic realities which must be unsettling to proponents of the trusty Southern Strategy. But that didn’t work, because the Tea Party took over the Republican Party, casting out the moderates and leaving Republicans with Trump whose crudities can’t be papered over. So there’s a new strategy: excuse alt-right radicalism by blaming it on the left, by pretending Trump is just like Bernie Sanders.

FRED: Your academic labels are unhelpful since they have you looking at the trees so you can’t see the whole forest. Progressives and the alt-right do have something in common: they’re both radical! They’ve both been shut out of the mainstream American discourse, so now the corporate media are scrambling to find labels to box us in, to normalize and co-opt us, to shut down the revolution and protect their privileged positions. Trump was elected precisely because of his vulgarity, because out of all the nominees and candidates, he was seen to have by far the greatest chance of being a genuine outsider who will destroy the establishment, who will drain the swamp, as he put it. That was the aim of the voters who mattered most this election, to subvert the neoliberal social order, to embarrass the power elites but also to rollback globalization, free trade, and the culture of stifling political correctness.

ADAM: Good luck with all that! The most likely outcome of this revolt will be its signaling that America has already declined past the point of easy retrieval. Cynics are lashing out but they have no idea how to solve our real problems, so the election of Trump is a symptom, not a cure for our disordered culture. Trump will probably succeed only in humiliating all Americans. At least he’ll entertain us, the way the violinists kept playing as the Titanic sank.

FRED: And when progressives are evidently so demoralized that they speak of the end of American greatness, you know you’ve got them beat.

ADAM: I’m just observing that this rightwing backlash against globalization is futile, because the heroes you’re electing, whether in Britain or here in the U.S., are actually bumbling imbeciles or charlatans who can’t govern a child’s birthday party let alone a superpowerful nation. What happens when a horde of troglodytes storms the battlements? Does it create a shining new world order or is nature using that manifest barbarism to wipe us all out? Sorry, but a businessman with the early advantages Trump had, who went bankrupt several times and is now hiding his true net worth by not releasing his tax returns doesn’t inspire much confidence that even if he could run the country the way he ran his businesses, our fate would be in good hands. But don’t worry: when Trump wrecks our economy the way he wrecked his businesses, it will be the Democrats who pick up the pieces. And bless the short memory of troglodytes, since that will prevent them from feeling the shame they ought to feel for having disgraced themselves with this reckless course of action. Indeed, they’ll have disgraced themselves before their white male forebears who were the classic liberals of early modernity, who were ingenious and highly creative renaissance men. Donald Trump is no renaissance man.

MODERATOR: That will have to be the last word for now. I’d like to thank our guests for their stimulating exchange on the meaning of Trumpism. Tune in next for a reading of the tea leaves of Trump’s latest tweet. 

Selengkapnya →