A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

Highlights

The basic premise of UR is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. Ie: you are pwned.

▶ 0:04

Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.

▶ 0:31

I’m afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep — perhaps even Cthulhu himself. Certainly, the synchronization is not coordinated by any human hierarchical authority. (Yes, there are accreditation agencies, but a Harvard or a Stanford could easily fight them.) The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick. We of the Sith would certainly like to understand it.

▶ 0:54

Moreover, if we broaden our focus from the university system to the entire system of “education,” from grade schools to journalism, we see this effect again and again. What, exactly, is the “mainstream media?” If we accept the ecclesiastical metaphor, the newspaper is a perfect analogue of the church proper. It is simply the latest transmission technology for your worm’s daily or weekly security update. And here again, a coordinated message — without any central agency.

▶ 1:37

If you are still clinging to the Matrix, you might say the change happened because Prop. 14 was wrong, and the election of Obama was right. Suppose we agree with you. But why, exactly, should we have been so confident in expecting a change from wrong to right? If there is some mechanism large and powerful enough to drag the public opinion of California, in 45 years, from Prop. 14 to Obama — maybe not Cthulhu, but definitely not a bluegill — shouldn’t we expect to be just as easily dragged back from right to wrong? Will segregation make a comeback in San Francisco? If not, why not? Whatever our Cthulhu may be, it is interesting to note that there is an algorithm for predicting the movement of the bobber. On a number of subjects — not just segregation — I note that the public opinion of California in 2008 is quite similar to the public opinion of Stanford in 1963. This is easy to explain: in post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, “public opinion.” This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the 45-year lag. Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of “public opinion.” Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response, as in this case the Supreme Court did in 1967, and synchronize directly with the universities.

▶ 2:07

The triangle of professors, bureaucrats, and public opinion is stable, because the professors teach as well as advise. Of course, there is a time lag. The system experiences some strain. But it will stay together, so long as the polarity does not randomly reverse — ie, because Cthulhu decides to suddenly swim right rather than left. But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting? In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by. Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu swims left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history — the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift. Nor, most important for our hypothesis, did they come from the universities; in the 20th century, periods of reaction are always periods of anti-university activity. (McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that McCarthy didn’t exactly win.) The principle applies even in wars. In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field.

▶ 3:54

And we are starting to piece the puzzle together. The leftward direction is, itself, the principle of organization. In a two-party democratic system, with Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, etc, the intelligentsia is always Whig. Their party is simply the party of those who want to get ahead. It is the party of celebrities, the ultra-rich, the great and good, the flexible of conscience. Tories are always misfits, losers, or just plain stupid — sometimes all three. And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral — although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with.

▶ 5:50

First, we need to define left and right. In my opinion, obviously a controversial one, the explanation for this mysterious asymmetric dimension is easy: it is political entropy. Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime.

▶ 6:42

The progressive is always the underdog in his own mind. Yet, in objective reality, he always seems to win in the end.

▶ 7:01

If anyone is in an obvious position to manufacture consent, it is (as Walter Lippmann openly proposed) first the journalists themselves, and next the universities which they regard as authoritative. Yet, strangely, the leftist has no interest whatsoever in this security hole.

▶ 7:10

Thus we see the whole, awful picture merge together. It is Cthulhu. We don’t just live in something vaguely like a Puritan theocracy. We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy.

▶ 7:27

This is slightly daunting. But only slightly. We have not even gotten to the active ingredient in our red pill yet — certainly not that awful sodium core. We have presented an alternate picture of reality, in which you live not in the free, post-Orwellian world, but in an Orwellian mind-control state which is a nasty, nasty hangover from the old, weird past. To verify this conviction, however, we need to catch said mind-control state in the act of actually controlling our minds.

▶ 7:43

In other words: Loyalism gives us an extremely foreign perspective of the present world. There are no other Loyalists in 2009. So, when we think as Loyalists, we have no choice but to think for ourselves.

▶ 8:13

Follow those last two links above, if you dare. Or don’t bother. What we see quickly is that, at least as regards AGW, we live in what might be called a scientific theocracy. You cannot slip a sheet of paper between Science and State. They are one and the same. Especially with our new, improved, pro-science administration, the only legitimate source of public policy on AGW happens to be... the very scientists who research it.

▶ 8:26

My mother’s job was not to evaluate renewable-energy technologies. It was to pretend to evaluate renewable-energy technologies — creating the essential illusion of science-driven public policy. Since everyone involved in this process understood that it was a farce, you can imagine the quality of the data. Meanwhile, as usual in Washington, how much money you got depended on how many friends in the right places you had. This tends not to change from year to year, resulting in remarkably consistent budget allocations. In other words, my mother’s work was bullshit in the best Frankfurtian sense. Some might get a kick out of this, but she is just not the type. And at the time, AGW was not the big thing it is now. So the open sewer seemed picayune. A billion here, a billion there. It sounds big to the hoi-polloi, but of course it isn’t. What was not obvious in the late ’90s is that, if you can steal billions, you can steal trillions. And that is a big deal. But I am just describing the perspective from which I, personally, arrived at AGW. You don’t know me, my mother, or Joe Romm. So we’ll need to actually consider the science — or Science, as the case may be. But first, I want to praise Joe Romm. Because, unlike the paladins of light in this department (foremost, of course, the great Steve McIntyre — note the difference in tone), Joe Romm knows what’s at stake. Read this again: Such a statement is anti-scientific and anti-science in the most extreme sense. It accuses the scientific community broadly defined of deliberate fraud — and not just the community of climate scientists, but the leading National Academies of Science around the world (including ours) and the American Geophysical Union, an organization of geophysicists that consists of more than 45,000 members and the American Meteorological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Exactly. And it’s very interesting that we hear this from the AGW credulists, rather than the denialists. Your average AGW denialist does not want to go there. He wants the problem to be isolated. The last thing he wants is for the scientific community broadly defined, or even worse all the member governments of the IPCC, to appear in his crosshairs. (For example, McIntyre, probably quite wisely, snips all political discussion in his comments.)

▶ 8:55

Here, sadly, we must part from Joe Romm. His definition of Science is clear. Science is that which is done by scientists. Scientists are people employed, with the title of professor, by the universities. The universities are accredited by Washington. Therefore, Science, in Joe Romm’s mind, can be defined as official truth. Let’s stick with the capital letter for this one.

▶ 11:16

Note that if we replace Science with Scripture and scientists with ministers, we are back in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We’ve reduced the scientific method to the following statement: Washington is always right.

▶ 11:41

We also have (one) answer to the first question of the AGW credulists: how a scientific consensus can produce a fraudulent result. The answer is simple: the entire field is fraudulent. In a fraudulent pseudoscience, there is no incentive at all for uncovering error, because the only result of a successful dissent is to destroy your job and those of your peers.

▶ 11:54

Thus we answer the initial Hoofnagel question: the source of coordinated error is not, at all, a conspiracy. It is simply the funding source. Nearly every scientist in a field can be working together to promote a falsehood because they all get their money from Joe Romm and company. And if the falsehood is exposed rather than promoted, there is no field left. It is no more surprising that all USG-funded scientists are unanimous in promoting AGW as a global emergency, than that all Philip Morris-funded scientists are unanimous in promoting tobacco as a vitamin.

▶ 12:18

The key fact about money is that what matters to you is not how much money you have, but what fraction of the total money supply you have. It is the latter than determines your power to exchange money for other goods, in competition with present moneyholders. Eg: if, following Hume’s Archangel Gabriel, we turn every dollar into two dollars (being careful to adjust debts as well), we have changed nothing. Even simple inflation — printing money and spending it, Keynesian style — can be emulated with an ideal hard currency. To “print” new money in this currency, simply confiscate it pro rata from all present holders of the currency. Eg, if you want to print 1/100th the present money supply, find every dollar in the world, pay its owner 99 cents, and use the leftover pennies to fund your plan.

▶ 12:53

At a higher level, both monetary policy and Keynesian stimulus pretend to be cures for the banking cycle. Neither claims to understand it at all, but both have been promising to eliminate it for the last 75 years. This has not happened, of course. The remedies are palliatives for the destructive effects of the collapses, but this is like taking cocaine for your strep throat. What it really needs is a specific cure, ie, antibiotics.

▶ 13:42

First: shift the burden of proof to the converse of your unsupported hypothesis, defining it as the null hypothesis — true until proven false. Second: raise the standards for proving it false to an absurd and unsatisfiable level. (See this for a typical attempt to clear the ever-rising bar.) Third: declare victory.

▶ 14:09

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once put the formula as briefly as possible: “Right is right, and Left is wrong.” Which is perfectly accurate, if you define Right as right, and add the obvious caveat that Left puts its pants on one leg at a time. The first clause is thus a tautology, and we reduce to: “Left is sometimes wrong.” Anyone who doesn’t already agree is well past the reach of reason.

▶ 14:31

Option three: the Keynesian “stimulus.” The US can stimulate consumption by printing new money and spending it. For reasons that are essentially cosmetic, this is generally done by hiring people to do useless jobs — Keynes himself, for example, once suggested burying stacks of bills in abandoned mineshafts, then filling up the mines, to produce an equivalent of gold mining for fiat currency. Most of your “green jobs,” inasmuch as they produce nothing of any practical use to anyone, are of just this sort.

▶ 14:59

This is the miracle of capitalism, so familiar and yet still so strange. The capitalist restaurant is operated for the benefit of its owners. The Communist restaurant is operated for the benefit of its customers. But which has better food?

▶ 15:31

CEOs of private corporations today may be effective or ineffective. There is no escaping the bell curve. On the right end, you have Steve Jobs; on the left, Gil Amelio. However, one quality shared by almost all corporate CEOs is sanity. One generally does not hear of them going crazy and murdering the entire board of directors with a fire-exit axe, or the like. I realize that this is a low standard — but consider the record of heads of state in the democratic era.

▶ 15:46

Authority is the state’s ability to act decisively, cohesively, proactively and intelligently. From our experience in the private sector (not to mention the military sector), the formula for authority is clear: unity of command. A single extremely capable individual can manage an organization of any size, and our society has no shortage of such individuals. From this apex descends the familiar hierarchical pyramid. As an old Prussian Army saying went: who wishes to command, must first learn to obey.

▶ 16:15

For former libertarians, such as myself, this inverse relationship is critical. The paradox is that weakening government makes it larger. At least, to a libertarian, this seems like a paradox. Once it seems quite natural, you may no longer be a libertarian.

▶ 16:49

The great error of libertarians, as well as many liberals, progressives, etc, is to suppose that the weaker the State is, the freer its subjects are. The opposite is very nearly true. A weak government is a large government — and the smaller the State, the freer its subjects are. Every time you weaken your government, you give it another excuse to become larger.

▶ 17:06

This is especially the case because the logic behind the plan is not pseudoscience, but common sense. Common sense smacks of personal authority, and all bureaucracies have an intense jealousy of personal authority. One major goal of a bureaucracy is to distribute as much importance (ie, power, or at least apparent power) as possible to its employees, which argues for maximizing the number of individuals involved in every decision. Impact means power means status, and it’s not for the money that bright young people flock to Dupont Circle.

▶ 17:30

Since the mid-’50s, economists who study fisheries have basically understood the fate that has befallen these waters. They call it the tragedy of the commons. If a fish population is controlled by a single, perfectly rational agent — an idealized entity economists refer to as “the sole owner” he or she will manage it to maximize its total value over time. For almost every population, that means leaving a lot of fish in the water, where they can continue to make young fish. The sole owner, then, will cautiously withdraw the biological equivalent of interest, without reducing the capital — the healthy population that remains in the sea. But if the fish population is available to many independent parties, competition becomes a driving concern. If I don’t extract as much as I can today, there’s no guarantee you won’t take everything tomorrow. Sure, in a perfect world, you and I would trust each other, exercise restraint, and in the long run, grow wealthier for it, but I’d better just play it safe and get those fish before you do. The race for fish ensues, and soon, the tragedy of the commons has struck. Ie: if you are a fish, you want all fish to be owned by a King of Fishermen. So long as our fisher king is rational, this “single owner” will govern his fisheries with a strong and kindly hand, maximizing returns over an infinite time horizon, bringing peace, freedom and prosperity to cod, pollock, and sea-bass alike.

▶ 18:04

Indeed it is quite reasonable to describe coherent (or, in democratic parlance, “absolute”) authority as orderly, and divergent (or, in democratic parlance, “plural,” “open,” “inclusive,” etc) authority as disorderly. The trend from coherent to divergent is thus a case of entropy. Cancer, corrosion, infection, and putrefaction are all entropic processes. If the gradual decline, across the last two centuries, of coherent authority (in democratic parlance, “progress”) belongs on this list, I feel the Goya analogy is at least half sold. Note, for example, the predicted endpoint of fragmentation: universal suffrage. At the start of the entropic process, the State has one owner, guardian, and trustee: the Crown. At the end of the process, an equally microscopic sliver of authority is entrusted to every resident who, without too much comedy, can be portrayed as capable of using it responsibly. In a universal-suffrage democracy, the voter is quite literally a part-time government employee.

▶ 19:29

So the ritual self-congratulation of democracy, the entire theory of progress, is a fraudulent edifice constructed to rationalize what is in fact a decline. Thus we should see a decrease in the quality of government, and especially in the cohesion of authority, across what the official story describes as periods of great progress.

▶ 20:36

Lenin, like Hitler an evil man but a nonnegligible philosopher of government, put it neatly: Who? Whom? This loses a bit of its bite in 21st-century English. In a language with actual pronoun declensions, Lenin was asking: who rules whom? Ie: who is stroking himself hard; who is bending over and greasing up? Sadly, this is indeed the great question of our time.

▶ 20:56

But let us get back to peeking under the great goat-hog’s robes. Fortunately, the answer, though terrifying, is not complicated at all. A democracy is a government in which public policy is controlled by public opinion. Fine. Wonderful. We knew that. Who controls public opinion? Duh. Popular opinion is in general a reflection of public education. It is certainly true that there are certain statements that the public cannot be educated to believe. It may be impossible to convince a healthy human population, for example, that red and blue are the same color. But almost everything short of this has been tried, and it tends to work. And while there are always deviants, outliers in an election are irrelevant by definition.

▶ 21:23

But seriously, we should note who else took exactly the same line of thinking: Just as a man’s denominational orientation is the result of his upbringing, and only the religious needs as such slumbers in his soul, the political opinion of the masses represents nothing but the final result of an incredibly tenacious and thorough manipulation of their mind and soul. By far the greatest share in their political ‘education,’ which in this case is mostly designated by the word ‘propaganda,’ falls to the account of the press. It is foremost in performing this ‘work of enlightenment’ and thus represents a sort of school for grownups. That would be — yes — Adolf Hitler. So, as you can see, we are on dangerous ground here. We must be careful where we put our feet; there is no other answer. For what it’s worth, my feeling is that Herr Hitler is personally responsible for all the world’s problems today. Perhaps we’ll explore this delicate issue, Nazism, next week.

▶ 22:10

One does not have to be a Nazi, however, to believe that popular opinion tends to match public education. In other words, people believe what they are told to believe — sometimes minus a little stubborn deviation, electorally negligible. So, to combine Lenin’s question with Hitler’s answer, we ask: if the People control the State, who controls the People? The teachers. And who controls the teachers? Hm. What an interesting question. We’ll have to think about that one.

▶ 23:08

If we exclude the possibility of pure democracy, we see instantly that every democracy must be a psychological-warfare state. Most people get their opinions from others. If public opinion commands the power of the State, the power to inform is the power to command the State. Just as you will seldom find a stack of twenties on the sidewalk, this power will not just be waving around in the breeze. Someone will capture it, and hold it until it is torn from their hands.

▶ 23:38

The function of a propaganda agency is almost the exact opposite: it is not to inform, but to persuade. In order to persuade it must disseminate only such fact, such opinion, and such fiction masquerading as fact as will serve to make people act, or fail to act, in the desired way.

▶ 24:07

Indeed, the problem with Lenin’s question in recent American history is that the answer seems to trail off into nowhere. Who informs the public? Journalists, schoolteachers, professors. Who tells schoolteachers what to say? Professors. Who tells journalists and professors what to say? No one. Au contraire — they are specifically immune from even the hint of any such authority. The trail of power disappears. The river goes underground. And we see that we live in the “open society,” exactly as advertised. Ah, bliss was it in those days to be alive. And bliss is it still, I guess. The comfort of this realization disappears instantly, leaving only an icy, sinister chill (the same fascination, perhaps, felt by the well-dressed woman at the right of the painting) when we observe three facts. Fact #1: no one tells journalists and professors what to say. Also: no one tells them what to do. Also: if they come into conflict with any other institution of government, they appear to win — always in the long run, if not always in the short. Does this indicate that they are bystanders in the game of sovereignty? Or players? If, when journalists and politicians conflict, the politicians always go down in flames and the journalists always walk away without a scratch, who exactly is wearing the pants in this place? The sovereign power is the power that is above all other powers. We have just located it. You probably knew this anyway, of course. But in case you didn’t — hey, it’s never too late.

▶ 24:26

Fact #3: journalists and professors never go to war with each other. This is by far the strangest and most important of our facts. Surely, since a journalist is one thing and a professor is another, you would expect a natural factional conflict between them. At least. You would also expect various internal factions of journalists and professors to form. They don’t.

▶ 26:01

In other words, what we don’t see is any hierarchical coordinating authority. But what we do see is actual coordination. Even though the Modern Structure has no central authority to guide it — no Goebbels, no Beria, no sinister, imaginary cabal of Jews, Communists, or even bankers — it nonetheless seems to be able to maintain a remarkably tight party line. And thus, it can “change,” in the familiar pattern of “progress.”

▶ 26:24

A conservative is one who, rather than simply rejecting the revolutionary tradition of democracy, finds some effective way to contaminate it with reality, thus producing a weak but somewhat effective simulation of archism out of basically anarchist materials. Conservatism always appears, because it is easy. And it always fails, because it is weak and fraudulent. It is a case of tiling over the linoleum.

▶ 26:53

I should also say something briefly about the theory of slavery. As anyone who has read Aristotle knows, slavery is nanogovernment. If you scale down the relationship of authority between government and subject, you obtain the relationship between master and slave. This is, in a word, sovereignty. A can claim any percentage of B’s labor, and has the right and power to direct, restrict or punish B as A sees fit. Slavery is actually a toned-down imitation of sovereignty, because the master is responsible to a government, whereas a government by definition is responsible to no higher power. What was slavery like, for the slave? It depended on the quality of your master. What is government like, for the governed? It depends on the quality of your government.

▶ 27:19

Good primary sources are more essential than ever for anyone seeking an accurate impression of prewar Nazism. For a fair anti-Nazi source, try Stephen Roberts’ House that Hitler Built (1937). For a fair pro-Nazi source, try Francis Yeats-Brown’s European Jungle (1939). Both these books will leave you seeing the Third Reich in color. But if you are satisfied with black and white, a modern history (I like Michael Burleigh’s) of the Third Reich is perfectly acceptable. My

▶ 28:07

And while not all the crimes in this tragedy were committed by democrats, democracy is indeed its prime and ultimate cause. It is not a coincidence that the century of murder and the century of democracy were one and the same. Perhaps the only one to predict this was — no surprise — Carlyle, in Shooting Niagara (1867):

▶ 28:39

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

▶ 29:00

When fascism ascends to power, it creates a coherent central authority (good) which is not responsible in any way (bad), maintains itself in power by indocrinating its subjects (bad), and practices unnecessary and sadistic violence (bad). Thus we have one good and three bads, which makes bad. It is not surprising that fascism is generally considered bad.

▶ 29:21