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You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq in

You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then.

zozbot234 4y ago
The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability. Would you work for a faux "anarcho-tyrannyist" firm where you have no idea who the CEO is and who the managers are that can fire you or cut your salary?
- coliveira 4y ago
  Who guarantees the "kings and aristocrats" are really the ones pulling the strings? They are frequently just puppets.
  - labster 4y ago
    Puppets of whom? The only (European) historical examples of puppet masters I can think of are the Church and other nobility — certainly no one from outside the class. If a merchant became powerful enough, they found a way to join the nobility, either directly or by marriage.
    - coryrc 4y ago
      Turks and janissaries.
      - watwut 4y ago
        Janissaries were not kings and aristocracy. They were kidnapped kids forcefully turned into soldiers. They were kind of slaves.
  - 6510 4y ago
    We are all just puppets enslaved by the processes we create and confused by our limited experience.
- natural_cruelty 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- woodruffw 4y ago
  In what meaningful sense are kings and aristocrats "formally transparent"? The history of aristocracy (historical and contemporary) is the history of hiding money and power. The arc of liberal democracy has consistently bent away the kinds of secrets and implicit power structures that aristocracies thrive on.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    ? The history of aristocracy is about amplifying perception of power. Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are. The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power. The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy. There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence would be to their detriment, and they were not 'aristocrats' though they would have probably desperately like to be that.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      > Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are. This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front. And note: that is the justification for power, which defines its perception. A king's true source of power has historically been his wealth (and therefore the size of his army and supporting court), or the support of extremely wealthy parties (churches, merchant classes, etc.). Every regent in history has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public from realizing that he is just a man, one whose wealth (and therefore power) can be taken.
      - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        And so the Declaration of Independence was a direct shot against that. "All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" is a direct attack against the divine right of kings (and nobles).
- majormajor 4y ago
  That, of course, is ultimately extremely defeatist compared to the ideals that the USA claims (the practice and history, on the other hand, would be another discussion). One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves. But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"? After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest. EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    In the internal logic of these claims, it's not "defeatist" so much as looking at things as they are. A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not. It's not about renouncing egalitarian ideals at all, it's being serious about pursuing them to the greatest feasible extent. > why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"? The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?) > Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      There's a neat little rhetorical trick you're doing here: > A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not. "Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter. In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help. And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?
- nostrademons 4y ago
  It's interesting: Thiel's "truth that few people agree with you" is that capitalism & competition are antonyms, not complements. And he's in favor of the "capitalism" side. His whole business career is about eliminating competition and enjoying monopoly rents. A return to "kings and aristocracy" is the ultimate culmination of this: a king has ultimate monopoly power over the kingdom, where they not only own all the land, but have ultimate say over everything that goes on in the kingdom. There's an opposing side to this dichotomy though: embrace competition. American democracy, with its separation of powers, is an example of this. The founding fathers explicitly set the government at odds with itself, because when "ambition is made to counteract ambition", the ambitious are so busy fighting each other that ordinary businessmen and citizens can go about their business relatively unmolested. To answer your question: I'd absolutely work for an anarcho-tyrannist firm where I have no idea who the CEO is and managers can fire me on a moments whim, as long as I can walk into another firm tomorrow and get a new job. Job loss is only traumatic if all your eggs are in that one basket; if there's always another job waiting for you, just go get fired and take it.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The separation of powers could be expanded to a far greater extent. In particular the modern bureaucratic state, with its long-term sinecure positions at the highest levels, is entirely antithetical to the whole idea of checks and balances, or "ambition being made to counteract ambition". This is where former aristocracies might provide a better model.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      I'd agree with that. There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter. My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability But this is of course palpable nonsense. The entire point of kings and aristocracy was to formalise the notion that the de facto elite was in fact a class of people so superior to everyone else as to render the notion that they should be held accountable for their actions by mere commoners as laughable. The difference between a king and a president isn't that the latter's status as an elite is more ambiguous, but that the president has some semblance of accountability to the public whereas with the king, it's a case of the public being accountable to the king.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    There are plenty of people in current government who are de facto not accountable to the public. Sometimes that lack of accountability is even intended by design. Are Supreme Court Justices accountable to the public for their interpretation of the law?
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      They can be impeached. So I think if their interpretation was wildly wildly wrong, they could be impeached.
      - seanp2k2 4y ago
        But impeach a majority of them? Impossible in reality.
        eqNotEq 4y ago
        I’d be shocked if even one is. A political mechanism defined on paper does not mean anyone will ever invoke it.
    - WBrentWilliams 4y ago
      On paper, SCotUS _can_ be held accountable by the public through their representatives. The process is called impeachment. The house _can_ impeach a sitting Justice, and the Senate _can_ vote to remove them from office. This currently is unlikely, but the it _is_ possible. The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible. The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.
pavlov 4y ago
It’s uncomfortable for the Thiel-funded new right movement that their dream state is essentially realized in present-day Russia, and they’re not able to explain how their ideas would lead to a different outcome. Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This describes both Putinism and the American right’s goals. It’s not a coincidence that they were increasingly cozy with Russia until Putin rolled into Ukraine. Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine… Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Good old territorial expansion is part of this value system.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  It's interesting because present-day Russia easily combines every disadvantage of the neo-Reactionary dream state, and none of its advantages. Vladimir Putin still has to fight for his legitimacy (in a way that plausibly distorts his policy choices) because he has not leveraged his mass public support by proclaiming himself an actual Tsar. (Of course he could also settle for a far more conventional role as legitimate President of a democratic nation state, but many observers would argue that he seems to be aiming at something different. Which is why this is a sensible question to begin with.)
  - pavlov 4y ago
    > “present-day Russia easily combines every disadvantage of the neo-Reactionary dream state, and none of its advantages” It’s because the advantages are either theoretical and illusionary, or only enjoyable by an extremely narrow oligarchy. It’s like asking why North Korea seems to have all the disadvantages of Stalinism but none of the advantages.
- mike4ty4 4y ago
  An important question that needs asking is what happens if we run into a situation where that "slowness" of democracy gets more people killed and only a well-paced solution with some cadence to it could do the job (not "super fast", but like say a major change with a 1 year debate period and 10 year implementation period sustained steady progress)? Not arguing for a dictatorship, but out-of-the-box innovative thinking to invent a much more novel/radical political system.
tablespoon 4y ago
> You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then. A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have. The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.
- donkeybeer 4y ago
  The best solution for people proposing autocratic solutions is to give them exactly what they want, good and hard. (Of course the collateral damage to innocent people is not worth it.)
  - sportanova 4y ago
    America + Europe have been getting Democracy! good and hard for quite a while, time to shake things up
    - donkeybeer 4y ago
      If anyone wants an autocratic system we should give in to their wish, and give them, and only them exactly what they want. If they don't want rights and want to be ruled by a dictator I am sure they would have no problem with it. Leave the rest of us alone please.
      - sportanova 4y ago
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  Do you have a source for the claim that Thiel supports a return to monarchy?
  - 4y ago
at_a_remove 4y ago
That's pretty much true of most people spouting off about a Big Regime Change. I know entirely too many Communists who think that they're going to spend their time designing uniforms, or just raising baby goats. Everyone thinks that they're gonna get their ideal world out of it.
- donkeybeer 4y ago
  The difference is that communism purports to be an egalitarian system (what actually happens in practice during a regime change is another matter of course), so there is nothing strange about it. But doing footwork for a deliberately anti-egalitarian system by design is funny given the chances most of these people have of ending up in the inner circle.
yourapostasy 4y ago
Agreed, but somewhere around the neighborhood of that discussion hovers an increasingly growing concern as our global economy gradually grows cognitively denser over time with no discernible change in the trend. Remunerative jobs increasingly demand the kind of analytical, problem solving, critical thinking skills approximated in an inexact but kinda-sorta correlative manner by IQ tests. Roughly a quarter of the world population is below 80 IQ. You can somewhat mitigate that by emphasizing perseverance, grit and commitment character traits, and reward those appropriately at the policy layers. Especially in employer roles, where those traits have been markedly lacking in the modern era. But that only takes you to around 15-20% say. At say 15% that still leaves about 1,185,000,000 people in the world steadily getting left behind in the burgeoning global economy. Even if you take the most aggressive estimates to filter that further, that's still a distributed population of around say 2-500 million. It doesn't make it any better that many of their jobs are prime candidates for replacement by increased automation unless they are in last-bastion niches (some of them quite large still, but with really bad compensation) that will only fall to Moravec-class robots. There are no easy solutions here, it is a thicket of third rail politics, and incredibly nasty, unpleasant historical echos. But we must walk this difficult and treacherous road ahead of us with eyes open, lest we lose our humanity by trying to sweep this trend under the rug with patches to existing policies like these "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" proposals. We need better patches (IMHO; I'm not a fan of trying out Second System Syndrome with wholesale changes at the societal level, I'm more in favor of trying out incremental patches that are auto-sunset after a pre-determined fixed period unless overridden by a future generation's vote).

zozbot234 4y ago

The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability. Would you work for a faux "anarcho-tyrannyist" firm where you have no idea who the CEO is and who the managers are that can fire you or cut your salary?

coliveira 4y ago
Who guarantees the "kings and aristocrats" are really the ones pulling the strings? They are frequently just puppets.
- labster 4y ago
  Puppets of whom? The only (European) historical examples of puppet masters I can think of are the Church and other nobility — certainly no one from outside the class. If a merchant became powerful enough, they found a way to join the nobility, either directly or by marriage.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    Turks and janissaries.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Janissaries were not kings and aristocracy. They were kidnapped kids forcefully turned into soldiers. They were kind of slaves.
- 6510 4y ago
  We are all just puppets enslaved by the processes we create and confused by our limited experience.
natural_cruelty 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
woodruffw 4y ago
In what meaningful sense are kings and aristocrats "formally transparent"? The history of aristocracy (historical and contemporary) is the history of hiding money and power. The arc of liberal democracy has consistently bent away the kinds of secrets and implicit power structures that aristocracies thrive on.
- jollybean 4y ago
  ? The history of aristocracy is about amplifying perception of power. Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are. The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power. The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy. There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence would be to their detriment, and they were not 'aristocrats' though they would have probably desperately like to be that.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    > Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are. This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front. And note: that is the justification for power, which defines its perception. A king's true source of power has historically been his wealth (and therefore the size of his army and supporting court), or the support of extremely wealthy parties (churches, merchant classes, etc.). Every regent in history has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public from realizing that he is just a man, one whose wealth (and therefore power) can be taken.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      And so the Declaration of Independence was a direct shot against that. "All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" is a direct attack against the divine right of kings (and nobles).
majormajor 4y ago
That, of course, is ultimately extremely defeatist compared to the ideals that the USA claims (the practice and history, on the other hand, would be another discussion). One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves. But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"? After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest. EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  In the internal logic of these claims, it's not "defeatist" so much as looking at things as they are. A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not. It's not about renouncing egalitarian ideals at all, it's being serious about pursuing them to the greatest feasible extent. > why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"? The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?) > Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    There's a neat little rhetorical trick you're doing here: > A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not. "Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter. In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help. And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?
nostrademons 4y ago
It's interesting: Thiel's "truth that few people agree with you" is that capitalism & competition are antonyms, not complements. And he's in favor of the "capitalism" side. His whole business career is about eliminating competition and enjoying monopoly rents. A return to "kings and aristocracy" is the ultimate culmination of this: a king has ultimate monopoly power over the kingdom, where they not only own all the land, but have ultimate say over everything that goes on in the kingdom. There's an opposing side to this dichotomy though: embrace competition. American democracy, with its separation of powers, is an example of this. The founding fathers explicitly set the government at odds with itself, because when "ambition is made to counteract ambition", the ambitious are so busy fighting each other that ordinary businessmen and citizens can go about their business relatively unmolested. To answer your question: I'd absolutely work for an anarcho-tyrannist firm where I have no idea who the CEO is and managers can fire me on a moments whim, as long as I can walk into another firm tomorrow and get a new job. Job loss is only traumatic if all your eggs are in that one basket; if there's always another job waiting for you, just go get fired and take it.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The separation of powers could be expanded to a far greater extent. In particular the modern bureaucratic state, with its long-term sinecure positions at the highest levels, is entirely antithetical to the whole idea of checks and balances, or "ambition being made to counteract ambition". This is where former aristocracies might provide a better model.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    I'd agree with that. There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter. My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.
notahacker 4y ago
> The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability But this is of course palpable nonsense. The entire point of kings and aristocracy was to formalise the notion that the de facto elite was in fact a class of people so superior to everyone else as to render the notion that they should be held accountable for their actions by mere commoners as laughable. The difference between a king and a president isn't that the latter's status as an elite is more ambiguous, but that the president has some semblance of accountability to the public whereas with the king, it's a case of the public being accountable to the king.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  There are plenty of people in current government who are de facto not accountable to the public. Sometimes that lack of accountability is even intended by design. Are Supreme Court Justices accountable to the public for their interpretation of the law?
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    They can be impeached. So I think if their interpretation was wildly wildly wrong, they could be impeached.
    - seanp2k2 4y ago
      But impeach a majority of them? Impossible in reality.
      - eqNotEq 4y ago
        I’d be shocked if even one is. A political mechanism defined on paper does not mean anyone will ever invoke it.
  - WBrentWilliams 4y ago
    On paper, SCotUS _can_ be held accountable by the public through their representatives. The process is called impeachment. The house _can_ impeach a sitting Justice, and the Senate _can_ vote to remove them from office. This currently is unlikely, but the it _is_ possible. The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible. The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.

pavlov 4y ago

It’s uncomfortable for the Thiel-funded new right movement that their dream state is essentially realized in present-day Russia, and they’re not able to explain how their ideas would lead to a different outcome. Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This describes both Putinism and the American right’s goals. It’s not a coincidence that they were increasingly cozy with Russia until Putin rolled into Ukraine. Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine… Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Good old territorial expansion is part of this value system.

zozbot234 4y ago
It's interesting because present-day Russia easily combines every disadvantage of the neo-Reactionary dream state, and none of its advantages. Vladimir Putin still has to fight for his legitimacy (in a way that plausibly distorts his policy choices) because he has not leveraged his mass public support by proclaiming himself an actual Tsar. (Of course he could also settle for a far more conventional role as legitimate President of a democratic nation state, but many observers would argue that he seems to be aiming at something different. Which is why this is a sensible question to begin with.)
- pavlov 4y ago
  > “present-day Russia easily combines every disadvantage of the neo-Reactionary dream state, and none of its advantages” It’s because the advantages are either theoretical and illusionary, or only enjoyable by an extremely narrow oligarchy. It’s like asking why North Korea seems to have all the disadvantages of Stalinism but none of the advantages.
mike4ty4 4y ago
An important question that needs asking is what happens if we run into a situation where that "slowness" of democracy gets more people killed and only a well-paced solution with some cadence to it could do the job (not "super fast", but like say a major change with a 1 year debate period and 10 year implementation period sustained steady progress)? Not arguing for a dictatorship, but out-of-the-box innovative thinking to invent a much more novel/radical political system.

tablespoon 4y ago

> You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then. A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have. The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.

donkeybeer 4y ago
The best solution for people proposing autocratic solutions is to give them exactly what they want, good and hard. (Of course the collateral damage to innocent people is not worth it.)
- sportanova 4y ago
  America + Europe have been getting Democracy! good and hard for quite a while, time to shake things up
  - donkeybeer 4y ago
    If anyone wants an autocratic system we should give in to their wish, and give them, and only them exactly what they want. If they don't want rights and want to be ruled by a dictator I am sure they would have no problem with it. Leave the rest of us alone please.
    - sportanova 4y ago
CryptoPunk 4y ago
Do you have a source for the claim that Thiel supports a return to monarchy?
- 4y ago

at_a_remove 4y ago

That's pretty much true of most people spouting off about a Big Regime Change. I know entirely too many Communists who think that they're going to spend their time designing uniforms, or just raising baby goats. Everyone thinks that they're gonna get their ideal world out of it.

donkeybeer 4y ago
The difference is that communism purports to be an egalitarian system (what actually happens in practice during a regime change is another matter of course), so there is nothing strange about it. But doing footwork for a deliberately anti-egalitarian system by design is funny given the chances most of these people have of ending up in the inner circle.

yourapostasy 4y ago

Agreed, but somewhere around the neighborhood of that discussion hovers an increasingly growing concern as our global economy gradually grows cognitively denser over time with no discernible change in the trend. Remunerative jobs increasingly demand the kind of analytical, problem solving, critical thinking skills approximated in an inexact but kinda-sorta correlative manner by IQ tests. Roughly a quarter of the world population is below 80 IQ. You can somewhat mitigate that by emphasizing perseverance, grit and commitment character traits, and reward those appropriately at the policy layers. Especially in employer roles, where those traits have been markedly lacking in the modern era. But that only takes you to around 15-20% say. At say 15% that still leaves about 1,185,000,000 people in the world steadily getting left behind in the burgeoning global economy. Even if you take the most aggressive estimates to filter that further, that's still a distributed population of around say 2-500 million. It doesn't make it any better that many of their jobs are prime candidates for replacement by increased automation unless they are in last-bastion niches (some of them quite large still, but with really bad compensation) that will only fall to Moravec-class robots. There are no easy solutions here, it is a thicket of third rail politics, and incredibly nasty, unpleasant historical echos. But we must walk this difficult and treacherous road ahead of us with eyes open, lest we lose our humanity by trying to sweep this trend under the rug with patches to existing policies like these "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" proposals. We need better patches (IMHO; I'm not a fan of trying out Second System Syndrome with wholesale changes at the societal level, I'm more in favor of trying out incremental patches that are auto-sunset after a pre-determined fixed period unless overridden by a future generation's vote).