Aggregate demand is the gestalt of the terminal goals of the market participants, weighted by how badly they want to satisfy the terminal goals of others (usually instrumentally rather than terminally) and whether they're any good at it.
If you don't like what the market supplies, then you don't like humanity.
Admittedly terminal goals are typically defined by the local religion, and it would be hard to come up with a more suboptimal local religion.
The fundamental theorem of sociology is the prisoner's dilemma.
Though the classic version is missing the [no interaction] column. Showing the originators face by returning explicitly to the perps caught by the cops...what if they decided not to perpetrate in the first place? Left each other alone? You can't be tempted to betray your fellow if they are not your fellow at all. Also they wouldn't be caught by the cops in the first place.
Altruism is not cooperation. Altruism is not minding your own business. The only reason I don't say altruism is inherently defective is that sometimes it mimics a cooperative trade.
Altruism doesn't ask if you want the gift. Nobody asked the slaves if they wanted to be freed, they were just punted off the plantations. This worked so well they immediately had to come back as sharecroppers.
All altruism is callous altruism.
If it is not callous, then you ask first. "Hey man, do you want some X? Maybe some Y?"
Zeroth problem: this gives them a chance to refuse. What is the altruist supposed to do if they say no?
First problem: now it isn't altruism, it's negotiation. Any single X or Y is negligible. What they want is an ongoing supply of X or Y, and look, let's be real here, you're not doing that for free. Even in the extraordinarily unlikely case that the altruist will freely support another person unconditionally, the constant contact will form a relationship. It's now a social thing, not an altruism thing. Can't be stranger altruism if they're not a stranger.
If it's negotiation, it's a trade. If it's a trade, you're not doing it for free. If it's not for free, it's not altruistic.
It's just that, occasionally, had you asked, they would have said yes, so it mimics a cooperative trade. However, the fact you didn't ask displays the callous solipsism this "altruism" in fact comes from.
As per Last Psych, in theory the narcissist could pretend not to be a narcissist, and from the point of view of everyone else, they would be cured. Problem: solved. Great. However, the issue with lies is that, when push comes to shove, the truth comes out. Lies are unreliable. Untrustworthy, even. How counter-intuitive. Under stress, the exact time it's actually important, the narcissist - whether a standard narcissist or a treated narcissist - reverts to their true personality. The personality they hate so much they have to pretend it doesn't exist. Don't worry, you'll hate it just as much. Conquest #1: nobody knows a person like they themselves do. They spend exactly 100% of their time in the company of said person, after all.
If an altruist is doing you a favour, first, grab your wallet before they get their fingers into it. Second, come up with an exit plan. They do not have your best interests at heart, and this will reveal itself the instant the altruism is infinitesimally inconvenient to the altruist.
Of course if you've glanced briefly at psychological egoism you already knew. The altruist may not get classic materialist rewards like money or other goods, but they would only engage in altruism if they found it rewarding in one way or another. The begging-enabler gives money to the alcoholic head-case because they either value warm fuzzies more than a couple bucks, or because their guilt is holding them hostage. Pretty lame hostage situation that can be bought off for the price of a coffee, though. Guilt, that was cringe.
The altruist is getting paid. If they weren't, they would quit. That's simply how decision-making works. The mind chooses the most valuable of the available options. Basically by definition; what it chooses reveals what it finds most valuable, modulo some ignorance or oversights.
When the altruist claims to be altruistic, they are lying. Lies, as I've covered, are unreliable. The altruist says they're in it for you, and they are not. Plan accordingly.
When you genuinely want to help someone, get paid. Offer them something they want. Confirm they want it when they demonstrate they're willing to give up something to receive it; avoid wasteful offerings. Get paid explicitly, forthrightly, and honourably, instead of lying about your wages. Fund further offerings of value using the price you charge, so the person you want to help doesn't run out of the thing they need help with.
Sustainability isn't enviro-Nazis. Sustainability is getting paid market value for the providence of value. Charity actively weakens the victim, and is usually intended to. Trade is antifragile. Trade, as per the prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix, makes you both wealthier than you would be had you minded your own business, which it does by making the relationship into your business, which you can then mind anyway. Indeed literally a business.
Greed is not a sin. Altruism is a sin.
The reality is the problem doesn't have a particular solution. However, Fascists can't leave it alone. Something Must Be Done. Even if it makes the problem worse, it's fine as long as you can feel like you're helping.
(Also it shouldn't have a solution because you don't own the resource gestalt, you own some particular property.)
When we all drown, shall we be sitting in the pink chairs, or the blue?
Truly, let us contemplate the important questions
of our time.
The joke being that the cosmetic debates are exactly as shallow as they appear, but there is no alternative. Everything allegedly less shallow is pure futility.
I keep thinking about how the stereotypical woman wants to talk about fashion and face-paint and celebrity gossip, and how this is transcendentally superior to talking about the "deep" topics, especially given how the stereotypical man in fact talks of them, and especially politics.
Yes, let us contemplate cute cat pictures. They are unquestionably more profound than anything on e.g. Unz.com. There is no overlap, and the cat pictures go on top. You could in fact go buy a cat if you wanted, whereas you're quite unwilling to do anything effective with respect to politics. Journalism is inherently irresponsible and talking about politics is inherently not minding your own business.*
The way feminine Fascism is plain better than masculine Fascism can be seen again in the way women scold vs. the way men scold. Male political discussions are exactly like scolding, but more destructive. The female scold is deluded, whereas it very much behooves the men to know better, or to learn from their mistakes. If you're not a weak-minded pussy you can simply ignore the annoying woman. Men will genuinely get into fistfights over meaningless politics. Or fire each other, to be topical. Attempting to ruin each other's lives over a culture war they're both guaranteed to lose.
This is the moment where one of my critics could make themselves useful, if this wasn't Pontus.
N.B. it is likely that Rome was itself too Pontic, or it wouldn't have
fallen. It is likely that Athens herself was, with the exception of
Socrates and Aristotle, also Pontus. As a result, doubtless I will have to play the critic's role myself. Newton, also, found that company other than his own was superfluous. Do note this is explicitly a falsifiable statement. Also don't forget the opening line of this paragraph before the 30th's post.
Basically Moldbug would be satisfied with aesthetic intellectualism; a certain style
of sophistication, regardless of whether any actual production gets done.
Wants to attend the Vienna cafes - and I'm certainly sympathetic to this
desire - but not interested in whether the cafe attendees ever actually
change their behaviour as a result of allegedly changing their ideas.
When you change what you profess but don't change how you behave, it reveals you were, all along, merely discussing styles of plumage. Like the women swapping lipstick, except less honest. And with more fistfights.
Not that I'm against fistfights per se, but intellectuals generally can't throw a punch, which is a reflection of the fact the fight is dishonourable. It looks bad because it is bad. We can imagine two men challenging each other to a duel of the fist, with explicit stakes for winning and losing. "You shall never again claim to believe X or to have done Y." "I will assert leadership of this mannerbund." The point being they can negotiate their own stakes, as long as they are real.
When intellectuals fight, there are no stakes except that bruises hurt. The fact they can't throw a punch is also a reflection of the fact it's a childish squabble; they are intuitively mimicking their intended eight-year-old roughhousing. During political debates, both sides claim their rep "won" and likewise on Twitter. It's meaningless.
Even if you cornered them into wagering for stakes, they would pervert the process. I've personally tried it. It is meaningless on purpose.
Politics and religions are the canon impolite topics. Lately it is clear they are in fact the same topic. Religions are political and politics is religious. The problem is that religion claims to be apolitical; it is a way of smuggling a culture war topic in without having to declare it. The problem is that politics claims to be atheist; it is a way of smuggling heresy examination into a conversation without having to declare it.
The topic is inherently a dishonest dominance play. It is inherently impolite for two reasons. Perhaps surprisingly, an impolite thing was properly considered impolite.
*(And teaching, more properly called pedagogy, is inherently the [insane godless communism] kind of parasocial.)
If the government is going to meddle with who is speaking and who isn't, how about we get some subsidized peace and quiet around here...
"Has anyone in the NRx movement (or outside it) summarized the arguments against the Enlightenment? Or its failings?"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/AnonYmo33883364/status/1605614118957748224
Well, okay. Yes, this can be done.
The dumb, easy materialist summary is this: human happiness of no particular value; enlightenment "liberty" and constitutional government contravene property rights; "progress" is just atheist newspeak for Providence, and history is far more cyclical than progressive; tolerance is worse than intolerance; and fraternity is newspeak for blank-slate Egalitarianism.
The psychohistory summary is this: Enlightenment thinkers are Sophists. They're just lying. They're quite good at it, so it worked.
I grabbed the list of Enlightenment propositions from Wikipedia. Since they're Sophists they are regularly slippery about their alleged ideas. They don't want to be pinned down since a non-protean lie is much easier to debunk. However, turns out you can't buy good liars for $0 an hour. The list seems basically fine, although, as per the bad-liar archetype, La Wik's little digression about the start date of the Enlightenment is accidentally revealing. Fascism must always be ever newer, to disguise how old and stale it truly is.
The real story is that mortals regularly confuse the inside of Plato's cave for the outside and vice-versa. The underworld is the real world: the seeming lights are false, illusionary lights; the seeming darkness is true. The more abyssal, the more profound.
Enlightenment thinkers planned to turn up the alleged lights, and succeeded. They hate and fear Reality; they drag everyone else along with them into deep falsehood so that nobody accidentally reminds them of the intolerable Truth.
Anyway let's take the list point by point.
What makes human happiness valuable? The fact humans value it. Humans also value other things. Indeed humans often or even normally value other things more highly than happiness.
The "pursuit of happiness" line in the US constitution was originally something about defense of property. However, taxation is contrary to property rights, so a black government certainly can't have anything lionizing property rights.
And that's why Enlightenment thinkers want you to focus on happiness: so this nebulous, almost impossible-to-define concept can be used to distract you from vandalism, theft, battery, fraud. What you want is to satisfy profound values, not to be quieting the ephemeral impulses of your meat gundam.
Luckily for the Sophists, the meat is indeed distracting, and meanwhile you likely don't even know what your profound values are without hundreds of hours of contemplation.
Sophists looked at Plato's description of Democratic Man and was like, "Yes, let's order that one!"
In Reality, property rights give you control over your own life, and therefore constitute true liberty in any meaningful definition of the word. Enlightenment liberty is "voting" and including "a constitution" in the political formula. Enlightenment liberty is inherently anti-libertarian. They justify a black government which then meddles with your life; it both refuses to secure your property and regularly outlaws you securing your own property.
Enlightenment liberty does make the black government even more insecure. It is usurper-positive. The only thing worse than a black government is a paranoid, nervous black government. Allegedly it's okay for the black government to mess with your property if you're allowed to (symbolically, ultimately) mess with its property. Two wrongs make a right, according to Enlightenment thinkers.
In Reality, if you take two left turns you're heading directly backwards. Sinister.
If you have property you can dispose of that property so as to maximize your values. An Enlightenment government will only allow you to dispose of property in the (impossible) pursuit of "happiness."
In the state immediately preceding atheism, Providence was said to provide. Have faith in God. The Enlightenment was all like, "There's no evidence for spirituality! The divine is illogical!" So, now they have faith in Progress instead, which is the same thing except it manifests the anti-logic they accuse theologians of using. "The arc of history bends always toward more Progress!" "Why? Who causes this?" "Ummm...hey look a squirrel!"
First, it's about Fascism. Faith in something other than the black Sophist government can't be allowed. Their government is weak and can't handle the slightest competition for loyalty.
Second, it's about justifying the Enlightenment on materialist grounds. Technological discovery is claimed to follow from and only from Enlightenment philosophy. Technology makes you Happy, doesn't it? Obviously there is nothing valuable except Happiness, therefore you must support Enlightenment Sophists no matter how disgusting they may seem.
I would also like to note a disturbing faith in permanence. Those socialized under Enlightenment values believe progress is nearly irreversible, although if it is reversed - if Hortlor gets into power - the stagnant state could also be nigh-permanent. When they think of a thousand-year empire of a tyrant squelching the people, constantly silencing the endless cry for progress, they think this is even vaguely physically plausible.
In Reality, Progress is Regress.
If new technology is discovered or researched, it is despite the Enlightenment, not because of it.
Tolerance is particularly Sophisticated. What tolerance allegedly is changes based on whatever serves the Sophist at that particular moment. Kto kogo.
Tolerance is, again, contrary to property rights. Tolerance is about allowing
events or persons on your property that you don't want to allow. It is
about suppressing your own values in favour of the Sophist's values.
Most often it's about the fact that Sophists need gulls. If nobody listens to their specious arguments, they are powerless. However, gulls are rude, criminal, low class, clinically insane, and/or foreign. Hence, you must tolerate their voting blocs.
In theory tolerance is about the fact a sacred cow is a falsehood you're not supposed to question. If you gore a sacred cow everyone gets upset. However, a true truth-seeker must tolerate the goring of sacred cows. In Reality the Sophist is the first one to set up sacred cows and is only interested in goring the sacred cows of outsiders. They are radically intolerant. In Reality, stripped of all pretenses, Enlightenment "tolerance" is nothing but a base scam.
There is a valid form of tolerance in the vicinity, but without Catholic Universalism of the Enlightenment, nobody would think to be intolerant in that way in the first place.
(Namely, mores are local and thus morality is local. Absent Catholicism it won't occur to you to condemn the mores of distant strangers as inherently immoral. Indeed to someone socialized outside the Enlightenment, it would be stranger for distant peoples to have the same mores as you do. Freaky.)
Fraternity is even more nebulous than tolerance. We have to impute something to it because the Sophists won't stop to talk about it at all.
I go with [brotherhood of humanity].
Catholic Universalism and blank-slate Egalitarianism. Everyone is identical; if they don't look identical it's because of False Consciousness.
Since everyone is identical, we must all have the same interests and values. (I.e. Happiness.) Anyone who seems to have different values or interests must be malicious (traumatized in childhood or whatever) or insane. Confused, at best. We must bring the Gospel to the unEnlightened heathens! The Gospel of Voting and Tolerance and being Happy through not owning anything (because Communism is very Sophist and the black government wants to arrogate all property to itself)!
I don't even feel the need to debunk this. No wonder the Sophists refuse to talk about it explicitly. Nobody can spin that into anything even vaguely plausible.
Wikipedia also mentions the pursuit of knowledge through logical reason and experimental evidence. When Enlightenment thinkers say this, they're just lying.
It's mainly a sugar coating to make the bitter blue pill go down smooth. Secondarily it was happening anyway, they didn't yet know how to suppress it, so they confiscated credit and successfully twisted the process towards their own destructive ends.
"The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church."
They're just lying.
Sophists realized that gulls could be fooled by a thin veneer. They like the iron fist; they merely replace the velvet glove with an illusionary glove. Every American voter is a slave. However, you're allowed to choose your own job, meaning prima facie it doesn't feel like being a slave. And that is quite sufficient.
Sophists being Sophists, this veneer has become incredibly sophisticated. However, it remains nothing but a veneer. In the long run you realize something's wrong and become...unHappy. And then take fentanyl until you overdose and die.
Sophists tell their gulls they can reason through theology themselves. They can't. Gulls who attempt logic end up at materialism, because they're lazy and undisciplined. (But everyone is identical; if a gull can't disprove materialism, nobody can disprove materialism. At least, according to kto kogo.) Materialism is easy; Truth is more difficult. Sophists use this to discredit competing religions.
Pre-Enlightenment governments aspired to tyranny. Post-Enlightenment governments aspire to tyranny. Sophists found they could put up a layer of security over their tyrannies by pretending to oppose tyranny. The Enlightenment was an advancement in black government design, nothing more, nothing less.
Sophists are smart, so it worked right away. Indeed, in retrospect, it appears that dumb, gullible peasants like tyranny. Non-tyranny doesn't make them at all Happy.
"I've done everything you're supposed to."
Ah, yup. That would do it. No wonder your children are going fuckin' insane.
"She's been in therapy since age 12 also because of her depression"
Oh good, I was worried this ""mother"" wouldn't attest to all the symptoms of derangement that she's caused.
Note that she's isn't even competent enough at doing what "you're supposed to" to spell [a lot] correctly. She's desperately trying to conform and failing. She's not only following the recipe for total perversion, she's following it wrong.
This ""mother"" lets the Regime fill and overfill her buffers and doesn't save anything for the physical reality of her family members.
If you have any genuine empathy for your children, you can't do what you're "supposed to" do. You see how upset they are, and you can't bear to continue. It's not the envious resentment of the pilloried transgressor. They're crestfallen. Appalled. Betrayed. It's not entitled spite, it's hopeless despair. Or, as some call it, [depression].
"My child showed no warning signs"
"There's always a chance this is also a maladaptive coping mechanism for her to deal with something else that slid past me."
"With my eldest, I'm hoping her art can become her way of coping."
Remember, don't fix problems. That's not what you're supposed to do. You "cope" with them.
"In my own research I've seen countless screenshots of children making posts saying "My parents have a small age gap, ew, I can't trust them anymore" and I'm left here terrified, wondering how many of them have been groomed "
Don't worry, it won't be long until treating a 10-minute age difference as an atrocity is what you're "supposed to" do.
Unless he's hot, of course. Then kto kogo and his hot girlfriend outranks your dowdy mom voice.
https://archive.ph/20221026174438/https://old.reddit.com/r/Advice/comments/xaexrc/i_got_a_phone_call_from_my_daughters_school_and/
The curious part of Fascism is that it's even more childish than literal hunter-tribe savages. They have marriages and stuff, the local big man enforces the law, and neither phenomenon survives the transition to Fascism. Hunter tribes are in fact less egalitarian than Fascists are.
What happened? Is this ideological feedback? Is Sophism really that effective?
What happened is a breeding program. The outbreeding program.
In short outbreeding makes you treat strangers like family. The family-support instincts get hijacked and your inner circle expands to encompass "all humanity" as it is phrased. P.S. Altruism is not cooperation, and folk who lionize altruism are untrustworthy.
Certainly I'm no fan of collectivism, but by inspection Communist egalitarianism is worse. N.B. if you get rid of nepotism you don't get meritocracy, you get theocracy. Tests of purity of "friends" (allies) instead of tests of purity of blood.
Ideology matters, especially when it comes from the blood. What happens if you instinctively believe every stranger is part of your family?
If everyone is family, you're one step away from the daddy model of wealth. Food comes from the grocery store. If everyone is family, then all relationships are social, not parasocial. Why are we bringing money into it? If everyone is family, obviously nobody is malicious. Timmy broke into that shop, murdered the shopkeeper, and raped the keeper's sister because he was lonely and nobody pays attention to him.
Poor Timmy! Only a few depraved mutant monsters would attack their own family. The blood (allegedly) stops you from committing fratricide. It must be "societal" (==familial) factors that drove him to this.
If everyone is family and worthy of altruism, then clearly whatever obvious external differences we can see must not matter. Substantially everyone is identical. That and the cognitive load of keeping track of all the differences is way, way, way too high, so it gets savagely simplified. Childishly so, really. If everyone is substantially identical, why wouldn't you be egalitarian? Fanatically Egalitarian?
the age of enlightenment IS what core europeans are all about! hurray! (^_^) the Project and its effects are ongoing today.
Of course it is now flagrantly obvious that the "enlightenment" was anything but the bringing of light. It was the hyper-Christianization of Europe. Christianity is in fact Satanism. It converted Europe from a Hellenized region to a Hellinized region; hyper-Christianization was the final ascension of Satan over his favourite torture factory.
Intent matters. Folk with benevolent intent do not force indifferent strangers to do anything. The intent of the Catholics was not to help Europe, and thus their meddling was not a boon to Europe.
Ultimately the Catholic anticlan breeding program was itself a manifestation of inter-clan spite. You're not going to get rid of shame, corruption, impulsive violence, and suppression of individual egos via explicitly and intentionally upholding a clan structure. Thus, e.g. America is at least 50 times as violent as it needs to be, Twitter spends around 90% of its time shaming the outgroup for being outgroup, if you're not corrupt you literally can't do anything in the government, and narcissism prevents individuals from showing their actual personality, if any.
In short, the Catholic breeding program succeeded at certain superficial Goodhart targets, but mainly introduced bugs. Mortal attempts at eugenics are childish finger-painting as compared to Nature's ouvres, thus result in a childish phenotype. Further the affected genes are now working at cross-purposes to the genome as a whole, resulting in a phenotype which is inherently insane. If it wasn't contradictory and self-defeating we wouldn't call it crazy.
Look, unholy religions are bad for you. Allowing an unholy religion dominance for over two millennia, eighty generations or so, was fantastically unwise. However, Original Sin...
--
There was a very different offramp.
I like to think that [cooperate with cooperators, trade is good actually] is not Riemann tensors, not complex-valued quantum chromodynamics, not rocket surgery. It shouldn't take a transcendental genius to consider !feuding with the next clan over.
Then, because !feuding is in fact a good idea, it would make those clans stronger. Then the idea would spread, because everyone likes a strong horse.
This would not be trying to force cooperation, an inherently insane oxymoron. (Did you forget? Intent matters.) Rather, the conscious, mindful attempts to cooperate would feed back into the genome and cause a cooperative phenotype in, as they say, a healthy, natural way. It would minimize the change, rather than trying to maximize the change for ego-stroking reasons.
This is slower, since it requires folk to be persuaded rather than cattle-prodded. It requires letting the fool persist in his folly, that he may become wise. It requires patience on the part of the stewards.
Except, of course, the Christian-Satanists are correct about humanity being inherently evil. I rather suspect the god of that godforsaken book wasn't lying when he claimed to have created mortals. The joke when I call the species Caino hypocriens is that I'm perfectly serious, even though it is funny.
Is the species not exactly what you would expect of Satan's masterpiece? Aside from physics forcing cooperation on pain of death here and there, is there anything out of place? Perhaps the primate order was not literally created by Satan, but if not, it's more of a difference of no difference. You will find no inconsistencies.
An inherently evil species likes to feud. Feuding is the point. It's not some kind of mistake or oversight or foolish in any way, shape, or form. Feuding is the end; having clans is merely a means. If you get rid of the clans without getting rid of the evil, they will only find some other way to hold feuds. What a waste of everyone's time.
It's just that, if Caino hypocriens is indeed inherently evil, it is exceptionally futile to attempt to make it less evil. Who are you going to appoint to oversee the project, exactly, given that personnel is policy? Christians need angelic rulers, but are far too disgusting; any actual angel would be repulsed, refusing to accept the position. Every eugenic program is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. When we all drown, shall we be sitting in the pink chairs, or the blue?
