[unmole]

Ponting out that communist regimes tried to implement planned economies with the help of computation is a statement of fact, not psycho-mysticism.

Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich trying to build a computer powerful enough to model the entire Soviet economy. It absolutely is something HN readers would find interesting, your uninformed, middle-brow dismissal notwithstanding.

[keybored]

This focus on the X Mind has a certain legitimacy in literature and biographies, where there is a focus on characters and persons/personas. Because they can certainly have an X Mind. I’ll grant it that. But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism, and this is the context where I was commenting on it.

This and that type having such and such mindset always needs to, in a serious treatment about real things and across more than a handful of people, play a very secondary role. Because it can only ever be speculative narrative that does not enter into any real argumentation. Seeing Like a State does it well. It discusses state projects and their outcomes. What people did given their positions and limitations (the limitations of what they could see). Any narrative about how The State Seer Mind works is just speculative narrative; the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

But this infantile treatment of Communism is treated as okay/normal, even celebrated. On that subject you can start with the supposed ideology and work backwards from that.

[unmole]

> But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism

The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime and explained what he meant. The psycho-mysticism is entirely in your head.

> the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?

Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.

[keybored]

> The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime

I’ll listen to the regime sufferers on the topic of breadlines. I don’t put any more weight to their opinions alone on topics like how the communist mind is drawn to the determinism of computers. Tsk tsk.

> and explained what he meant.

After I made my own comment.

> You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?

Huh? That you think that it is an own to point out that the “State Planning Committee” (according to Wikipedia) was a state-seer is not obvious to me.

Yes of course the book Seeing Like a State discusses, among other places, seeing-like-a-state in Communist states. What kind of a rejoinder is that?

The reason why I brought up the book is because it is a non-infantile treatment on “seeing like a state”/totalitarian thinking seems to work (precisely by not making it the focal point). Yes, of course it is relevant to Soviet state planning.

> Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.

Like you did with user vidarh you seem to be ascribing an ulterior motive where you have no evidence or reason to. Be careful about that.

[vidarh]

One of the most interesting little nuggets on this is Reagans notes on Able Archer 83, where he for the first time seems to have realised that the Soviet leaders weren't cartoon villains, but actually were just as scared of the US as the US was of them.

That doesn't make the authoritarian nature of the regime any better, nor does it excuse any of the brutality, but it demonstrated how reductive it had been to try to interpret how they were thinking based on an outsider view that generalised all of them into some archetype without understanding individual motivations.

The irony is that so much of Western thinking of this assumes a ridiculous level of collectivism that never existed because it's fundamentally at odds with human nature.

If anything a lot of people have adopted what they deem a "communist mind" in their own analysis of these regimes - and ideologies - and treat large groups of people as if they are carbon copies.