The Elite

Civilisations and societies throughout history have been governed by the ruling class system. The English parliamentary system and the American revolution were isolated attempts at displacing the system of ruling elites.

I'd guess the impetus for this reform of the ancient central elite system was the expansion of the free market. The decentralised, unplanned free market system had been delivering improvements to the ordinary people for some time, without the participation of the central power elite, who if anything fought against the free market to protect their system of patronage. When people see their wealth coming from each other, and not a central authority, that central authority is on thin ice, especially when it comes to extorting taxes.

So, the ruling class were tamed by a system of contrary powers. Power divided is power diminished.

But the left is against limitations on the power of the elite, because they consider themselves rightful members of a ruling elite and resent limitations on their own powers. The left is a counter-revolutionary movement trying to undo the limitations on central authority brought in by, for example, the American revolution.

The left are a part of the push-back from the old system. At least that would be part of it. The other attraction of the central authority system is that it's fairly simple to understand: Central authority says do 'A'. People do 'A' (or else). It's simple enough for the adolescent mind of the leftist to grasp.

It's even worse when the left are the elite, because at least in the old system the ruling elite were either the strongest and smartest of their society, or at least employed the strongest and smartest. The modern left, by contrast, are a bunch of dodo heads.

The Adolescent Left

The leftist program is tailor-made for the narcissist. It promises the narcissistic mind the dream of forcing other people to conform to its own vision. The leftist puts through a government regulation and other people are forced to dance to its tune. He is the puppet master and the great unwashed will be the puppets.

That’s the dream. The dream of the adolescent mind. All the rest – all the programs and entitlements – is a smoke-screen.

On the other hand it’s hard for someone involved in a market system (where the road to success is to better serve other people) to be a narcissist. A system where success involves focussing on other people’s wants will very quickly snap someone out of any reserve of narcissism they may have carried over from adolescence. Every customer is your boss. The narcissist who tries to play puppet master with his customers is going to find himself short of customers in no time.

That’s why leftists hate the market system: It has no use for narcissists; it forces them to grow up.

AI or IA?

Artificial Intelligence of Intelligence Amplified?

The idea of AI is quite spooky, perhaps dangerous. IA is, however, here and now.

I can't work out the area of a circle in my head, but I can work it out with a calculator. That's an example of intelligence amplified. A better one is the probabilistic programming tools that can generate more accurate diagnoses than human doctors; they can take into account signals in the output streams of monitoring machinery that doctors and nurses can't even detect.

Imagine better ideas

I was revisiting this earlier post paraphrasing Evan Sayet's dissection of the Modern Liberal's mind: "We look over history and see that cultures have established their own religions, philosophies and practices, and each culture in turn has believed their own religion, philosophies and practices to be true and right. 'Others' are barbarians. The Modern Left targets this 'bigotry of belief' as the cause of conflict with other cultures of different religions and practises. These conflicts become the wars and injustices that have always been evident in history, up to and including the present. It is therefore the attempt by people to be right, to find 'the one true way', which is the cause of conflict with others, and hence it is this attempt to be right which is the cause of humanity's problems."

OK, so the left's solution to this 'conflict caused by different ideas' is to give up on ideas: The John Lennon Imagine solution in action.

So what is the right's solution? Let ideas compete. We find truth - the 'one true way' - through the competition of ideas.

A clear example comes from the world of science. The essential feature behind the success of science is not 'the scientific method', it is rather that science is a veritable Thunder-dome for ideas. Science is a particular example of the debating forum invented by the Athenians of Ancient Greece. The debating techniques of science typically involve a lot of mathematics and experimental data, but in essence the idea is to convince the forum that one's idea conforms more closely to reality than do the competing ideas. (The debating technique called 'mathematical proof' is particularly powerful; a mathematical proof is unanswerable. Another good one is the repeatable experiment).

Cultural ideas/religions/practices are less susceptible to intellectual debate, but they do compete in less abstract ways, as anyone who has had fried chicken at "Dickos", the KFC knock-off in Mainland China, can attest.

Bugs

Sitting in a garden in an Australian summer, the old saw that the natural world is full of probing, investigating, exploiting and competing little creatures is brought to "life", so to speak. You don't have to be David Attenborough in an Amazonian rainforest to get a sense of the clamouring competition that rewards the pushy and destroys the weak.

The funny thing is that although the world of business is essentially the same as nature in this respect, 'greenies' express hatred of business and love for nature, while 'conservatives' express love for the former and sometimes want to concrete over the later. Greenies have a romantic ("Disney-fied") view of nature and conservatives have a romantic ("Rand-ified") view of business.

Conservatism

Conservatism is about looking to history for clues: Clues as to what works and clues as to what doesn't. Conservatism is pragmatic; it doesn't have an all-encompassing theoretical framework from which it derives policy positions. What accidental framework there may be in conservative thought comes from the current (perhaps temporary) consensus about what works.

A key feature of conservatism is that there is no 'ego identification' with an idea or set of ideas. Reality is allowed to be the ultimate arbiter.

"It" Which Shall Not be Named

Many people on the right say "we are Capitalists". Either they don't know that the word Capitalism is a pejorative invented by Karl Marx or else they know this but use the word anyway as an appropriate badge, whatever its source. In fact they may see it as a badge of honour: The epithet given by an enemy.

The problem is, "Capitalism" is not even an appropriate word for describing what we on the right support. In this, as in most things, Marx got it wrong.

What is the appropriate word, then? What word should we on the right use?

There isn't one.

And that's the way it should be.

There isn't a word, and we don't have a system to apply a word to, anyway.

The only theoretically appropriate word would be something uselessly generic, such as "reality". "We support reality"? meh

The left needs a word and a system because they are creating an alternate reality; an invented system with an invented type of people ("Soviet Man") populating it, and so it is meaningful and useful to give their system a label and a definition. We call their system Socialism and we can get a functioning definition of it from any good dictionary.

However, we on the right are not opposing "our" system to their system. It's not a "Battle of the Brands", or "Coke versus Pepsi". We don't have a system to oppose to the left's. The left are battling reality all by their selves. We are on the sidelines; we're dad watching junior trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. The main thing is to keep junior away from sharp objects, until he learns better.

PS. The titles of two of the most important books by the great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, illustrate the point: One is called Human Action and is descriptive of natural economic activity, the other is called Socialism and defines, describes and draws out the implications of that invented system.

Von Mises was the economist who, in the beginning of the 20th century, proved mathematically that socialism would not and could not work (because there is no way for a socialist system to determine efficient prices). Many prominent economists spent fruitless years trying to find a flaw in von Mises' argument, while at the same time ignoring the devastating reality in the new Soviet states that was playing out in front of their noses, and incidentally proving von Mises correct. But then, ignoring/replacing reality is the point of inventing a system.