Astral Codex Ten

socialism

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socialism

Article

socialism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between February 18, 2021 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “his vision of socialism is that it’s almost exclusively moralistic”; “he briefly flirted with socialism and Chavismo as a teenager”; “George’s arguments about land, labor, and capital present a fresh alternative to conventional ideas about “Capitalism” and “Socialism"". It most often appears alongside America, Germany, India.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: February 18, 2021
  • Last seen: December 04, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart
February 18, 2021 · Original source
Freddie is a mensch, but one concern I have with his vision of socialism is that it’s almost exclusively moralistic. The smart people who run society (unlike Scott, I don’t see him as contesting that they would do so) will graciously look after their dumber brethren, because it’s the tight thing to do.
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
Brimen comes from Venezuela, where he briefly flirted with socialism and Chavismo as a teenager before “reality…opened my eyes to just how wrong I was”. He emigrated to the United States, entered finance, rose through the ranks, founded an insurance company in Colombia, and eventually started a “social impact investing” corporation called NEWay Capital to promote growth in Latin America. Próspera started out as one of NEWay’s projects and quickly grew into a separate and more ambitious company.
Inline links: “reality…opened my eyes to just how wrong I was”
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
George's arguments about land, labor, and capital present a fresh alternative to conventional ideas about "Capitalism" and "Socialism" (and whatever we mean by those on any given day)
Government redistribution of wealth through high taxes (presumably income or wealth) have two well known problems. First, you massively increase the size and scope of government, inviting corruption, an invasive surveillance state, and power-hungry politicians. Second, by taxing income or wealth you're also taxing production, creating "Deadweight loss." Also, given labor and capital can move, if you try to tax them more than they like they will just go somewhere else (note that land alone cannot do this). George grants that this kind of brute-force redistributive policy may well be better than the status quo, but we can do a lot better. George further predicts that trying to implement Socialism will lead to demagoguery and dictatorship in actual practice. He admires the ideal, but says that such a society must "grow" rather than be "manufactured."
Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs. Another in academia thinks genetically engineering everyone to be smarter is the only way to make real progress on the thornier, hairier systemic problems. Half the people I know in the Bay Area are convinced that democratic socialism is the true path forward; the other half are pretty sure that AI will eventually, not-too-distantly-from-now destroy everything, so other kinds of long term systems tinkering probably aren’t even worth worrying about. (It’s interesting to me that the realm of AI research is populated by highly educated, technocratic Wizard types, but while its tenor may have started out very Wizardly, it is now extremely Prophetic.)
Inline links: while its tenor may have started out very Wizardly, it is now extremely Prophetic
To a greater or lesser degree, I believe in some of these things (except socialism… sorry, guys). But here’s what I also know, deep down in my bones: we have to keep trying to make things better, and we can’t let a little (or a lot of) complexity stop us. We engineered our way into this world of ours with Wizardry, by systematically analyzing it and testing it and improving it. It started with the simple trial and error of our prehistoric ancestors, and it continues today in labs and offices and think tanks they never could have imagined. Like our ancestors, we’ve made mistakes along the way – but now, our fish tank is bigger and the stakes are much, much higher: instead of poisoning a family by eating the wrong mushroom, we now have the ability to wipe out entire species, including ours. Or save them.
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
But overall I was wrong. Hip young people and conservatism remain as antithetical as ever. Instead, we got the rise of socialism, of the DSA, Bernie Sanders, and Chapo Trap House variety. By this point, you won’t be surprised when I propose the name New Socialism, as a direct analogy to New Atheism, etc. Like atheism, socialism is age-old. But like atheism, it had a moment where it became more online, more confrontational, more celebrity-based, and more popular among a fanbase of mostly well-educated young men.
New Socialism matches the predicted cyclical backlash. Its partisans are the youngest and hippest subsection of the Left. It explicitly defines itself in opposition to Woke Capitalism, Hillary Clinton, and all the cringiest aspects of early 2010s social justice culture, and it never misses a chance to "dunk" on them.
"Socialism" provided the rallying flag that people used to carve out a new tribe from what was previously liberal territory. In order to maintain its independence, it generates and amplifies as many differences from liberals as possible, then treats liberals as an outgroup and flames them at every opportunity. Conservatives become a fargroup who are less interesting.
Inline links: the rallying flag that people used to carve out a new tribe, fargroup
Bounded Distrust
January 26, 2022 · Original source
Here’s a Washington Post article saying that Abraham Lincoln was friends with Karl Marx and admired his socialist theories. It suggests that because of this, modern attacks on socialism are un-American.
Inline links: Here’s a Washington Post article
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
The short answer is that they absolutely do not. The longer answer is that it’s difficult to even answer the question, because Haidt’s theory doesn’t just fail to predict current political trends in terms of who scores where on his axes, but fails to even have axes that capture the majority of what’s going on these days. Fairness/Liberty may have been a bit of a mess as the time of writing, but it’s an absolute disaster now. There’s a whole major strand of political identification that just doesn’t fit anywhere in his foundations: Socialism.
Haidt’s revised six-foundation model isn’t quite that loopy, but socialism doesn’t find any more of a home in it. Where in his six foundations would fit the now very commonly expressed, and historically somewhat influential idea that it’s a good idea for everyone to roughly have the same level of wealth, or income, or welfare, or something, and that therefore it’s probably good for the government to redistribute wealth pretty aggressively along those lines, or stop anyone from getting too rich or powerful?
There’s one point in the book where he mentions contact with Marxism, and that’s when he was travelling to Brazil to get some data on the moral intuitions of people outside the US. He mentions that he went to a conference but people were all Marxist so he left and went somewhere else. This was in the sense of their approach to psychology, and to be honest I’ve heard what I think is the kind of “theory” he’s gesturing at hearing there and I’d leave as well, but it’s a real weakness that this is the only time that any sort of Marxism or socialism really turns up in a book that’s supposed to help liberals understand challenges to their ideology and empathise with other points of view, and supposed to provide a sort of “theory of everything” for political differences.
My California Ballot 2022
November 04, 2022 · Original source
Malia Cohen is a black person with the last name Cohen. How did this happen? Apparently not by marriage - her husband has a different name. I eventually found this article on black Cohens, which says that about 4,000 of the 87,000 Cohens in America are black. Some of them are descended from a Cohen in South Carolina who married a black woman in the 1800s, and others are descended from a Cohen who was a pirate in the Caribbean (really!) Most are not Jewish. I can’t tell if Malia is Jewish - I listened to the first few minutes of this talk she gave at a synagogue, and although she sounds extremely at home there and pronounces her Hebrew surprisingly well, she also mentions she’s the daughter of a pastor, so I’m guessing no. She was formerly a San Francisco Supervisor, but I will try not to hold that against her. Her opponent accuses her of literally going to Venezuela to study socialism, but I already assume every San Francisco Supervisor did that.
Inline links: this article on black Cohens, this talk she gave at a synagogue,, literally going to Venezuela to study socialism
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
Intellectuals started feting ideas like degrowth. Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?3 The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity. Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”. If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to this podcast, which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t. Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package. VI. Andrew Tate I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate. In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial. Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things. Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this. The obvious compromise goes something like: We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.
Inline links: degrowth, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Ttz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7589c5dc-2f84-4f82-a6b8-c132ce4a0fc8_697x628.png, this podcast
Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
October 04, 2024 · Original source
That is, suppose I were to advocate a return to 1890s norms of (let's say) liberalism and beautiful art. The Cultural Christian would tell me this is doomed, because the 1890s cultural package eventually fell apart and became the 20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism (and fascism, socialism, New Dealism, etc). Therefore, I should support Christianity.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
At the same time, Europe’s intelligentsia was falling in love with socialism. There was an inevitable wave of new socialist art compounds, each writing a manifesto explaining why their new artistic movement was the one that truly threw off the shackles of capitalism and represented the proletariat.
Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go. The architects were unfazed. The Romantic ideal of the artist said that real artists considered their clients Philistines and paid no heed to their preferences; the less you cared about your clients’ opinion, the realer and more romantic an artist you were. There was a slight hiccup in adjusting this philosophy to socialism, but only slight: by this time, classical Marxist philosophy had already ceded to the Bolshevik idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where communist-theory-educated elites needed to re-educate the workers into accepting their own class interests. Wolfe describes the overall effect in Stuttgart:
In fact, here was the great appeal of socialism to architects in the 1920s. Socialism was the political answer, the great yea-saying, to the seemingly outrageous and impossible claims of the compound architect, who insisted that the client keep his mouth shut. Under socialism, the client was the worker. Alas, the poor devil was only just now rising up out of the ooze. In the meantime, the architect, the artist, and the intellectual would arrange his life for him. To use Stalin’s phrase, they would be the engineers of his soul. In his apartment blocks in Berlin for employees of the Siemens factory, the soul engineer Gropius decided that the workers should be spared high ceilings and wide hallways, too, along with all of the various outmoded objects and decorations. High ceilings and wide hallways and "spaciousness" in all forms were merely more bourgeois grandiosity, expressed in voids rather than solids. Seven-foot ceilings and thirty-six-inch-wide hallways were about right for . . . re-creating the world.