Introduction and Baudelaire

  • This series of posts is about 4 books
    • Seeing Like A State, by James C. Scott
    • The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi
    • The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer
    • The Culture of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch
  • All of these books reach similar conclusions without explicitly drawing on one another
  • These books show the political and ethical aspects of nihilism
  • Note that this series is using nihilism to mean something much more broad than the conventional meaning of the term
  • What’s interesting is that these books don’t have much to do with one another
    • Scott is a left-anarchist
    • Polanyi was a socialist
    • Hoffer was a conservative
    • Lasch was either a paleoconservative or a communist, depending on who you ask
  • Yet all of their books point at the same underlying idea, from different angles
  • What is the summary of this series? Baudelaire wrote a koan explaining it
    • Baudelaire, after doing a lot of reading on what makes nations happy, went out for a drink
    • At the entrance to the tavern, he found a piteous beggar
    • The beggar held out his hat and asked for alms
    • Instead of immediately giving the beggar money, Baudelaire hit him
    • Only when the beggar began to fight back, did Baudelaire say that he now considered the beggar his equal, and then gave him money

Man As A Rationalist Animal

  • Previously discussed on June 26, 2017
  • Most of us presuppose that failure is caused by malice
  • This is actually the optimistic view
  • The pessimistic view would be to acknowledge that failure is inevitable, regardless of our intent
  • Seeing Like A State seeks to examine why large state schemes fail even when they’re guided by the best of intentions
  • How does state power work?
    • State has a plan
    • In order to execute that plan, the state needs information
    • In order to gain information, the state needs to be able to query its population in a standardized way - the population must be made legible
  • The process of making a population legible to the state invariably involves a transfer of power from the periphery to the center
  • This transfer of power invariably provokes resentment and resistance, even if the end state would be better off for all involved
  • All too often, however, the legible system is less efficient than the illegible system, and so people are worse off
  • The key problem of requiring legibility is that the language of metis and the language of epistemic knowledge are mutually incomprehensible
  • Practictioners with metis will be able to say what they do, but will not have “rational” reasons for why
  • Authoritarian high-modernism
    • Results when a state disclaims metis entirely and sees the world through only epistemic knowledge
    • Fascism and communism are the extreme examples of this
    • Authoritarian high-modernism assigns anything it doesn’t understand a value of zero
  • So how does this apply to our community
    • Rationalists making fun of Christian fundamentalists closely parallels in form the way that high-modernist central planners spoke about the metis of tribespeople
    • The difference is that the power gradient isn’t as pronounced
    • Religious communities have a significant community-building metis that isn’t explicitly codified anywhere
    • When religion dies in these communities the communities fall apart
    • Moreover, attempting to replace the benefits of religion with state benefits fails because state benefits fail to capture the second and third order effects of having close-knit community
    • Legibility problems didn’t die with the end of the high modernist era - we will have problems with legibility as long as we assume that all variables necessary for human existence can be captured, quantified, and traded off
  • When the government persecutes an illegible group, it’s not perceived as persecution
  • When a group complains angrily about losing some institution, they’re often not complaining about losing the institution itself, but rather they’re complaining about losing the second and third order effects of that institution