[api]

I wonder: do these people really believe this stuff is going to work out well, or is working out badly for most people the point?

For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.

In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry.

Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact.

Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too.

The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.

[ljm]

What makes this such a viable conspiracy theory is just how unoriginal it is. Like feudalism never existed before, like the US never had company towns with people paid in an analog of crypto that could only be traded with that company…

Which is also what makes it scary because it’s difficult to imagine an elite cabal of multi-billionaires having nothing but complete indifference about the vast majority of people they’ve effectively isolated themselves from in their little echo chamber. And if you’re bored of being a CEO or VC where do you go from there?

I think you have to imagine just how out of touch with the people one has to be to genuinely believe that they can do better as a dictator, or the inner sanctum of a dictator, than the people can do as a democracy.

[xivzgrev]

You start helping humanity, as Christ did from the start or Gates did once he conquered the business world. Imagine the good someone as influential & rich as Thiel could do.

Instead his “good” is focused on transforming society for unclear societal benefit. How do the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed benefit from living in ocean communities or as city states?

[alienthrowaway]

> How do the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed benefit from living in ocean communities or as city states?

You mean the millstone around the neck of society? The thinking goes: getting rid of entitlements supporting these groups will lower taxes and improve the allocation of capital, an all-round win, except for the guy who got too sick or too old to work.

[RGamma]

"Politics is the means by which men without principles lead men without memory."

[dumbledoren]

> For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.

The catch is that today we are literally living what Karl Marx predicted to the letter.

[api]

I often compare Ayn Rand and Karl Marx in the following way: both of them were pretty good critics. They pointed out a lot of problems with the systems they were criticizing. I don't think either one of them had good solutions.

It's much easier to criticize than to build or fix.

[balamatom]

>reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed.

Nazis/fash were well known meth heads. Mescaline was also available across Wien and Weimar, my great grandma used to push a little on the side.

>contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate

Sure does! Bigger question is, where does all that self hate come from? Because I've never met a person who likes to hate themself.

Could it be, perhaps, that... it's something that has been internalized first? Sort of a "seeing others hate you turns you into a hateful person" type of situation?

[api]

Edit: there is a book called Blitzed about how a lot of people in the third reich we’re on drugs, especially meth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany

As for self hate: A ton of nerds were picked on mercilessly as children. I don’t mean just teasing either, but routine physical assault. I know from experience.

If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.

When I was older I learned that my personal tormentors were all victims of extreme domestic abuse.

[balamatom]

Mine weren't.

I see what you mean. But none of the people in question 'tried to inflict violence on others', they wrote books didn't they? Sort of extended lay takes on why they think this violence is so ubiquitous in their life, why they've been subjected to it, and what should "we all" do about it.

(The fools. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey comprehend, monkey turn into a giant finger pointing at giant complex problem over there, monkey gets covered in shit again by the other monkeys. Because that's not a problem, that's the feeder. "Silly book writing monkey! Pooh pooh, go suffer elsewhere!")

>If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.

How certain are you of the legitimacy of the testing authority? Because that "test" sounds more like a cruel human experiment. I am instead reminded of another test, conducted by a certain old man on a certain mountain...

[jordanb]

> But none of the people in question 'tried to inflict violence on others', they wrote books didn't they?

Some will rob you with a six gun. Some with a fountain pen.

[balamatom]

Some with nary but the common smartphone. Choose wisely!

[api]

An idiot inflicts violence directly. A smart sadist tells others to do it with a convincing rationale. Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot probably never killed anyone.

It’s sort of like the saying: if an idiot wants to rob a bank he gets a gun and a ski mask. If a smart person wants to rob a bank they get a banking license.

As for the test: there is no authority. It’s implied by reality and by game theory.

[balamatom]

"Reality"? That was the thing they teach at uni wasn't it? Or maybe that was "game theory", and "reality" was the one that's on the telly? I'm confused!

Point being, not too cash money of you to posit the self-evidence of certain conclusions that feel morally authoritative and ethically certain, while simultaneously moving the goalposts on the parallel thesis. I kinda thought we were talking about people who stayed writers after their first book?

I don't think Marx or Rand were sadists, and even if we assume ill intent on their part, the question of what causes the thing you call "sadism" remains open (although I kinda answered it, but I can't know for sure how true is my answer without the output of others, right?). If, of course, you believe in cause and effect and all that in the first place... You'd be surprised (I know I was) at how many people think they do, but their tracing of causes stops at the first though-terminating cliche.

In fact, here's one (Godwin style):

Hot take about that Schicklgruber kid you brought up and his ilk: monstrous characters, antropomorphic salient points for Pax Americana's culture in the best traditions of ancestor worship and all that, proper antonyms to "Santa Claus" really... I don't know if H****r ever killed anyone with his own hands (other than his own sorry ass in the end) yet I still find it's rather the people who created the circumstances for his emergence or exploited its effects (my first cell phone was named after one of them); the people who voted for him (very fine moral ethical prosocial people); his nominal opponents, who enabled him to take emergency powers (some of which went out to found Communist parties sporting concentration camps well into the Cold War); and, most importantly, the people who obeyed the dicta of the system of which he was figurehead ("don't look at me just doing my job"): those were the real culprits of that shameful page of world history.

And while individual military dictators have so far been limited by the normal human lifespan, those other mfs that empower them are still all over the place, being not identifiable individuals per se, but one might say cases of self-reproducing character types and life scripts. It is those that the radical ideologues — who are, unsurprisingly, pariahs in pleasant company (of Westerners) — are useful in identifying and counteracting. But the Westerner, being a memetically vulnerable humanimal, apparently can't read a book without suspending disbelief...

Which is how you get edgelords who personally identify with the problem statement. You know the character type. May you never know the associated life script :)