Category Archives: Justice

Marxism as Priestly Strategy, Communism as National Calvinism

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Ben: I think I have a decent working definition of Marxism: A commitment to construe {locally and originally economic inequality, globally and convergently adaptive diversity} as conflict1, with a decorative camouflage of a jargon-laden pseudotheory with which a priestly caste can mark itself, and the lure of posturing in favor of victims and the intention to rectify injustice which helps it recruit well-intentioned people.234

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Parliamentary and Other Powers

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Reading Jonathan Healey's The Blazing World and Curtis Yarvin's recent article on the difficulty of reforming the US Government through the exercise of the executive power has got me thinking about the nature of the parliamentary power. The parliamentary power is commonly said to be "the purse strings," e.g. the power to, if a tax-funded organization such as a police department flagrantly violates the law or otherwise acts in ways intolerable to the parliament or those who it represents, cancel their budget, but while this has some descriptive merit, it fails to explain why, how, and under what circumstances such a power emerges. "Because the written constitution says so" is a triply bad explanation, first because it fails to explain why written constitutions tend to identify and separate some particular powers with some consistency across contexts, second because it fails to account for the existence of states with well-articulated constitutions that, while they may be described in writing, were not established through a formal written constitution, and third because it does not explain why, how, and under what circumstances people can be persuaded or compelled to obey a written constitution.

I prefer functional explanations; if there is a sufficiently strong use case for some expensive form of organization, then existing institutions that fill that role have some bargaining power when they can credibly threaten to withdraw their services. This is sufficient to establish distinct powers.

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Levels of Republicanism

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On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen

Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program!

Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explore and investigate the environment, and add to the total knowledge and capacities of the community. Local subsystems that are part of a larger economic community that is fundamentally extractive may decide to temporarily become less wealthy in nominal terms in order to become more self-governing through import replacement. For a more detailed well fleshed out theory with many examples on the level of the municipal or state economy, see the published work of Jane Jacobs, especially Systems of Survival, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Economy of Cities, The Nature of Economies, and The Question of Separatism.

At each stage of the process, the import substitution has to pay off fast enough for the community to be able to reproduce itself, which limits the extent of possible import substitution; we do not want to become North Korea. The Amish represent a more appealing prospect along the efficient frontier; they abstain from television, which we permit, but retain the capacity to build enough new housing in desirable locations to meet new needs, which our civilization has lost.

I would like to increase the scope of trade for a community of people whose minds are increasingly integrated, fully endorsed parts of their survival and reproductive strategies, and who constitute a language community that can describe itself and whose members can increasingly honestly describe themselves. For now, comfortable survival as an individual in our society requires adapting to mores that are perverse, anti-intellectual, and promote self-hatred, which makes it much more expensive to retain a nonperverse and prointellectual internal attitude. (See On commitments to anti-normativity, Guilt, Shame, and Depravity, The Order of the Soul, Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency, and Can crimes be discussed literally?.)

Here are some ways I can imagine forming various small republics within the current American system. I am less familiar with foreign regimes but I imagine some elements of this generalize well.

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Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency

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Since Enlightenment cultural assumptions and expectations seem to have collapsed in our society and been replaced by distant simulacra, I have been looking into the circumstances that caused the modern European Enlightenment in the first place, in the hopes that - combined with an understanding of the causes of the collapse - this might lead to an idea how to reproduce the phenomenon.

One striking thing to be explained is that in a fairly short period of time, a few apparently quite different changes happened in Europe, in something more like a sudden explosion than a gradual accretion of know-how. A presumption of the value of censorship was replaced with free speech. Joint stock companies suddenly sent ships across vast oceans on highly profitable commercial ventures. Physics was no longer a talky subject of effectively useless speculation, but a science with mathematical precision comparable to engineering which quickly yielded practically useful results. Medicine and biology wasn't mathematized, but also quickly developed from a way to show care for the sick by bothering them in speciously systematized ways that frequently did more harm than good, to a body of reproducible knowledge that formed the basis for new technologies.

17th Century England and the Dutch Republic seem like important focal sites for the emergence of Enlightenment civilization, and I've just finished reading through Jonathan Healey's book The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, which gives a good overview of the English civil war, which turned a censorious and deeply corrupting monarchy into a republic with freedom of speech, which lasted for decades and only collapsed after Oliver Cromwell died of old age.

One thing in the book that struck me as puzzling and potentially important was the importance of Calvinism in the process by which the republican party found itself, and the immediate recognition by everyone involved that Arminianism was a complicit, Royalist theology.

I'm used to thinking of the Enlightenment as more philosophical than religious; figures like Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Voltaire seem central to the story; theologians do not, with the notable exception of the Quakers.

Even among religious theories, Calvinism in particular had previously not seemed to me like a plausible a priori candidate for a liberatory theology, since the idea that God has predetermined who is a member of the Elect, will be saved, and will repent of their sins, and who on the other hand is permanently damned, seems disempowering. Arminianism is basically free-will Prostestantism, which would seem on the face of it more consistent with Enlightenment values - anyone can freely choose to be good. Reflecting on the roles played by Arminianism and Calvinism in the English civil war, and the context within which those roles emerged, led me to a very different conclusion.

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What is a republic? A Roman aristocratic perspective.

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Colleen McCullough was a well-respected mainstream novelist (The Thornbirds), with a background in neurology, and a personal interest in Roman history. I found out about her on a Reddit thread when I was looking up terms for Roman military commanders for my in-progress book on Spinoza.

McCullough seems to have been mainly trying to make sense of the late Republican period and the transition to the Imperial model. Some things in the secondary sources didn't make total sense to her, so she resorted to the primary sources, and reasoning. She used the idea that everything happens for a reason to infer events not explicitly recorded, when they were the best explanation for the historical record. The sorts of inferences she permitted herself include reasoning backwards from their words and actions about the likely character, motives, and unobserved circumstances of the people involved. For instance, she infers from Marius's occasional incapacitating fits, and changed, erratic behavior late in life, that he suffered a series of strokes. And she infers from the signs of an unlikely friendship between Marius and Sulla, connections between Sulla and the Dictator Julius Caesar, and some extant marriage records, that Marius and Sulla married into the Julius Caesar family and thus became friends. She also considered the possibility that the record could be distorted, so long as that was consistent with the motives, circumstances, and characters producing that record. For instance, she has to alter the date of one of Cicero's speeches for the purposes of her story, but permits herself to do so because it was a speech that would have been embarrassing for Cicero, but less so if its date were misrecorded, so he had a motive to get the date wrong.

Masters of Rome is her attempt to lay out what she thinks actually happened, in the form of a series of historical novels. And while the series has some literary flaws*, especially in the first book, it's also by far the best vampire story I've encountered.

More precisely, it seems like an attempt at a realistic, historically accurate account of the kinds of people and events that very obviously would have inspired a vampire myth.

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Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

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Everyone knows what it is to be tempted.  You are a member of some community, the members of which have some expectations of each other.  You might generally intend to satisfy these expectations, but through a failure of foresight, or some other sort of bad luck, feel an acute impulse to consume something that is not yours to take, or in some other way break commitments you would generally want to honor.

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It is immoral to condemn the player but decline to investigate the game.

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Context: Sadly, FTX

FTX defrauded users in a way that is normal for cryptocurrency. But the FTX fraud is a function of the normal system working normally. Like ordinary financialized firms, FTX grew by making leveraged promises. Spotty regulatory attention to cryptocurrency gave it sufficient legal cover to make it easy for people to speculate on it, while effectively allowing participants puff up a speculative bubble by engaging in more aggressive leverage than is tolerated in other areas, often shading into overt fraud.

If you were to randomly audit the books of institutions run by people who look from the outside like Bankman-Fried did prior to the FTX blowup, the level of shenanigans he engaged in would not look like an outlier; his ability to do unusual things with a disproportionate amount of capital was approximately titrated to his willingness to take on liability, i.e. borrow more than he could pay.

I do not have a strong opinion on whether South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was too merciful, but I do not think anyone can legitimately think that it was not merciful enough; amnesty extended to those who have not yet confessed, and continue to occupy positions of power that can choke off their critics' access to resources and attention, is not part of a reconciliation, but license to continue to offend. If the investigation of the FTX fraud goes no farther than the individual at its nominal head, then it is extending such a license to those who created and endorsed the system in which Bankman-Fried was trying to do the right thing.

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Oppression and production are competing explanations for wealth inequality.

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You would like to go to the beach tomorrow if it's sunny, but aren't sure whether it will rain; if it rains, you'd rather go to the movies. So you resolve to put on a swimsuit and a raincoat, and thus attired, attend the beach in the morning and the movies in the afternoon, regardless of the weather. Something is wrong with that decision process,* and it's also wrong with the decisions made by many supposedly systemic approaches to philanthropy: it does not engage with real and potentially resolvable uncertainty about decision-relevant facts.

Different popular philanthropic programs correspond to very different hypotheses about why people are doing wealth inequality, much like swim trunks and a trip to the movies represent different hypotheses about the weather. Instead of working backwards from the proposals to the hypotheses, I will lay out what I think are the two main hypotheses worth considering, and reason about what someone might want to do if that hypothesis were true. This is not because I want to tell you what to do, but to clarify that any time you think that something in particular is a good idea to do, you are acting on a hypothesis about what's going on.

The ideas of charity and philanthropy depend on the recognition of inequality; otherwise it would just be called "being helpful." The persistence of wealth inequality, in turn, depends on many people working together to recognize and enforce individual claims on private property.

If the mechanism of private property tends to allocate capital to its most productive uses, then incentives are being aligned to put many people to work for common benefit. But if wealth does not correspond to productive capacity - i.e. the people with the most are not those best able to use it - then, assuming diminishing marginal returns to wealth, coordination towards persistent wealth inequality comes from a self-sustaining misalignment of incentives, i.e. conflict.

The economic ideology taught in introductory microeconomics courses, which is assumed by many formal analyses of how to do good at scale, including much of Effective Altruist discourse, tends to make assumptions consistent with the means of production hypothesis, so if we are considering making decisions on the basis of that analysis, we want to understand which observations would falsify that hypothesis, and which beliefs are incompatible with it.

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Approval Extraction Advertised as Production

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Paul Graham has a new essay out, The Lesson to Unlearn, on the desire to pass tests. It covers the basic points made in Hotel Concierge's The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment. But something must be missing from the theory, because what Paul Graham did with his life was start Y Combinator, the apex predator of the real-life Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment. Or it's just false advertising.  Continue reading →