Astral Codex Ten

G.K. Chesterton

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G.K. Chesterton

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G.K. Chesterton is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between March 23, 2021 and July 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a cluster/strain/school of books including those by G.K. Chesterton”; “Or as G.K. Chesterton said, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.""; “A hundred years ago G.K. Chesterton observed that we picture cavemen as stupid thugs”. It most often appears alongside France, Italy, Chicago.

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  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: March 23, 2021
  • Last seen: July 04, 2025

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.

Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
I've previously written about a cluster/strain/school of books including those by G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Heinrich, and especially James Scott's Seeing Like A State. Taleb's Antifragile belongs in the same space.
Inline links: previously written about
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
In modern times, George would grant electromagnetic spectrum and orbital real estate for satellites the same status of "land" that already applies to farmland and terrestrial real estate. We don't even need to speculate about whether he'd attach this status to sunlight because he straight-up predicted solar power: Even the lack of rain which makes some parts of the globe useless to man, may, if invention ever succeeds in directly utilizing the power of the sun's rays, be found to be especially advantageous for certain parts of production. (That's from Protection or Free Trade, footnote 19) The important thing to grasp about land is that it comes before everything humans do or make, and is itself a thing no human can make. Okay, smarty-pants, what about the Netherlands? They've been making land for centuries! Well, land in the Georgist sense doesn't refer simply to "dry land", but also the sea bed, the oceans, and the skies above. The "new land" in the Netherlands counts as an improvement to land that already existed. The seabed was always there, but by filling it in so you can walk around on it, now it's more useful to us (George has a lot to say about improvements to land, which we'll get to later). Okay, what is land not? nothing that is freely supplied by nature can be properly classed as capital By George, land is not wealth. And since it's not wealth, it's not capital. Okay, we get it. Land is very special to Mr. George and we must never put it in the same category as wealth, labor, capital, wages, production, money, or anything else. Why exactly is this so damn important? Well, by George, if you treat land the same way you would a bar of pig iron, an hour of work, or a dollar bill, before you know it you'll get poverty paradoxically advancing alongside progress, inexplicable bouts of industrial depression, literal genocides and holocausts (he's dead serious about this), and The Rent Being Too Damn High. With terminology now firmly established, George moves on to the relationship between wages and capital. 3-for-1 special on Wages, Capital, and Labor I'm condensing three chapters here because they all deal with the same basic thing. The question George wants to answer is: Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living? The conventional wisdom of George's time is that wages are governed by a fixed ratio between the number of laborers and the amount of capital devoted to their employment, because "the increase in the number of laborers tends naturally to follow and overtake any increase in capital." So it doesn't matter how much capital you throw at employing workers, it'll just attract even more workers splitting it up, so although wages might temporarily wiggle a bit in the long term they'll always settle back to a "natural" minimum. (As we'll see in the next section, this argument stems from Malthusianism). George spends some time methodically poking holes in the theory (it's predictions don't line up with the facts he observes), and then sets out to prove his replacement theory (emphases mine): wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which they are paid. He pulls a G.K. Chesterton to make his point: During the time [the laborer] is earning the wages he is advancing capital to his employer, but at no time, unless wages are paid before work is done, is the employer advancing capital to him. He starts by identifying the source of confusion: Because wages are generally paid in money, and in many of the operations of production are paid before the product is fully completed, or can be utilized, it is inferred that wages are drawn from pre-existing capital I mean, the old theory seems sensible: the employer has capital and uses it to pay wages. But however you slice it, capital's investment gets paid back by production when it takes its cut, so does it even make a difference to talk about where wages are "drawn" from? Value goes out, value comes in, isn't it all a wash? By George, it isn't: in the old theory, because capital "must come first", it follows that "industry is limited by capital - that capital must be accumulated before labor is employed", which leads to a reductio ad absurdum – We are told that capital is stored-up or accumulated labor – "that part of wealth which is saved to assist future production." If we substitute for the word "capital" this definition of the word, the proposition carries its own refutation, for that labor cannot be employed until the results of labor are saved becomes too absurd for discussion. George anticipates the following rejoinder – Well, when we say 'labor is paid out of capital' we don't mean it as an absolute statement for all stages of human development (or else we have a chicken-and-the-egg problem and civilization could never have begun), we just mean it applies to, say, every civilization that's left the stone age. George will have none of it and spends three entire chapters relentlessly beating to death the idea that wages are drawn from capital instead of from production. He starts with the simple case where wages are paid in the form of direct, concrete wealth, then moves on to the more complex case where people are paid in money and other instruments. Laboring for wages: Imagine a fishing village where nobody cooperates – each person digs their own bait and catches their own fish. Then they discover labor specialization and realize they can catch more fish together if one specializes in digging and the other in catching. So the digger digs, the catcher catches, and they share the fish. The digger really contributes as much to the catch as the one who physically pulls the fish off the hook even though the digger never directly "caught" a fish, and the fish he gets for his work is directly paid out of his contribution to the total production. Later, our fisherfolk invent canoes, and one stays home making and repairing canoes. This increases the haul of the digger and catcher, and the canoe-er gets paid out of her contribution to the increased production. And so it goes as society continues to advance. The work the specialist puts in causes more fish to be caught, and that person's wages is drawn from the growing pile of fish. As George puts it: "Earning is making." George gives another example: If I take a piece of leather and work it up into a pair of shoes, the shoes are my wages – the reward of my exertion. Surely they are not drawn from capital – either my capital or any one else's capital – but are brought into existence by the labor of which they become the wages; and in obtaining this pair of shoes as the wages of my labor, capital is not even momentarily lessened one iota... As my labor goes on, value is steadily added, until, when my labor results in the finished shoes, I have my capital plus the difference in value between the material and the shoes. And another: If I hire a man to gather eggs, to pick berries, or to make shoes, paying him from the eggs, the berries, or the shoes that his labor secures, there can be no question that the source of the wages is the labor for which they are paid. George goes on to say it doesn't matter if you're paid in money or directly in wealth, because the money is a direct claim on the underlying wealth. It also doesn't matter if you get paid on commission. Imagine a whaling ship where each crewman gets paid a share out of whatever the ship catches. When the ship sails back into port with a hold full of whale oil and bone, the crew gets paid in money, the owner simultaneously adds to his capital oil and bone. The crew's money directly represents their share of the concrete wealth that is the oil and bone. The owner's capital hasn't decreased, and the workers drew their wages directly from the production. So let's get to the point, Mr. George – wages aren't drawn from capital but instead from production. Great, let's grant that – so what? George hammers away at this because thinking wages are drawn from capital leads to a false conclusion, namely that "labor cannot exert its productive power unless supplied by capital with maintenance." "Maintenance?" Well, workers need food and clothing and they get paid by their employers, so you could imagine capital as a limiting factor on labor. But by George, food and clothing isn't capital, it's just wealth, as we said before. And with regard to wages, the point is that the employer always gets "paid" first, because the second the laborer produces value, the employer's capital increases: As in the exchange of labor for wages the employer always gets the capital created by the labor before he pays out capital in the wages, at what point is his capital lessened even temporarily? Okay, but what if I'm just a terrible businessman and I pay somebody $500 an hour to smash Ming vases, then sell the fragments as aggregate to a construction crew for a few pennies a pound, all at a tremendous loss? Surely then the laborer's wages must be drawn from my capital, because there's not enough productive value generated by the labor to draw them from! George says okay, sure, but only because I'm an idiot and will soon be out of business: Yet, unless the new value created by the labor is less than the wages paid, which can be only an exceptional case, the capital which he had before in money he now has in goods – it has been changed in form, but not lessened. Fair enough, Mr. George, but what if I'm building some enormously expensive multi-decade project, like a dam or a nuclear power plant or a cathedral? The kind of thing we call a "capital-intensive" project? What do you have to say to that? George points out that as laborers labor, they progressively add value to whatever they're producing. Take the case of a shipwright building ships for an employer – even if the boss can't sell a half-finished ship, it still holds value (for one, it costs less to finish a half-finished ship then no ship at all). And with every stroke of the laborer's work, the employer who owns the shipyard gets an incremental increase in his stock of capital. It is not the last blow, any more than the first blow, that creates the value of the finished product – the creation of value is continuous, it immediately results from the exertion of labor. A pedant would point out that the "last hit" that finishes the product which makes it ready for market adds disproportionate value, but George's point is just to establish that value is continuously created, and doesn't magically come into being allat once right at the end. George further points out that if you look at things like agriculture you'll see the market directly acknowledging his theory: As a plowed field will bring more than an unplowed field, or a field that has been sown more than one merely plowed... It is tangible in the case of orchards and vineyards which, though not yet in bearing, bring prices proportionate to their age. George freely admits that capital can be required for certain kinds of work, but he disagrees with what its purpose is. It's not a pool that wages get paid out of. He goes on for another chapter on "The Maintenance of Laborers Not Drawn From Capital" but I think we can safely skip it and move on. TL:DR – George hammers to absolute death the idea that Laborers derive their own maintenance (food/shelter/clothing/etc) from their wages, with George insisting it is drawn from production and... you guessed it, not from capital. At least some of George's ideas will not seem so radical to modern readers (especially those already critical of capitalism or neoclassical economics), but it's important to understand that at the time almost everything he was saying was considered deeply radical and shocking. Capital was the fundamental driving force of the economy and labor was utterly dependent on it, and the Malthusian theory of overpopulation was the accepted explanation for why wages were low and workers were starving. Political Cartoon literally demonizing Henry George – Puck magazine Oct. 20, 1886 The Real Functions of Capital Okay, Mr. George. You've spent three whole chapters beating me over the head with what the functions of capital aren't. So what are the functions of capital? Capital "increases the power of labor to produce wealth." How? By enabling labor to apply itself more effectively (power tools go brrrr)
Inline links: Protection or Free Trade, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aeD5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F348d4d74-8c98-42e6-b5f7-7bd79b30a816_960x611.png
By making possible the division & specialization of labor (you dig bait, I'll catch fish) Capital is a force multiplier that supercharges the productive power of labor. It doesn't supply labor with raw materials (nature does), nor does it provide for the maintenance of workers (who eat bread by the sweat of their own brow). George says this is why capital isn't a limit on industry. ...okay, George grants that capital may limit the form of industry. You can't plow without a plow or milk without a cow. George also grants that the lack of specialized tools can greatly limit productivity because you don't get the benefit of the force-multiplying effect of capital. Um... aren't you contradicting yourself here, Mr. George? You spent all this time hammering home your doctrine of wages to prove that capital doesn't limit industry, but you just said its absence can limit both the form and the productivity of labor! Time to unpack what we mean by "limit" and be super clear about it from now on: But to say that capital may limit the form of industry or the productiveness of industry is a very different thing from saying that capital limits industry. Okay, what do you mean? For the dictum of the current political economy that "capital limits industry," means not that capital limits the form of labor or the productiveness of labor, but that it limits the exertion of labor. Okay, I think I see what he's saying. The existing school of thought says that because capital provides labor with both materials and maintenance, therefore if capital dries up, labor productivity must go down because workers will have nothing to work on, and nothing to eat or wear. Labor is thus "limited" by capital, for without it is literally and metaphorically starved for capital. But George says no – the only way capital actually "limits" productivity in real life is in the degrees by which it force-multiplies labor's productivity and unlocks certain forms of labor in the tech tree. The kind of "limit" George objects to is the idea that you need capital just to get any work done at all, or that without capital to sustain it, labor will shrivel up. Instead, capital is rocket fuel that labor supplies to itself by investing a portion of its wages. And yet, with all the awesome slots we've unlocked on the tech tree, and barrels and barrels of rocket fuel to fire up eager laborers, we still find our economy sinking into mysterious depressions. Something is gumming up the works, but it's not a simple scarcity of capital: the real limitation is not the want of capital, but the want of its proper distribution Or as G.K. Chesterton said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." This might seem like a pedantic distinction – misallocated capital could be said to be "scarce" capital – but they're not the same thing at all. As Francis Bacon said in 1625: Riches were like [Manure]: When it lay, upon an heape, it gave but a stench, and ill odour; but when it was spread upon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit. Because the prevailing theories of George's time are based on incorrect ideas about the relation between wages and capital, "all remedies, whether proposed by professors of political economy or workingmen, which look to the alleviation of poverty either by the increase of capital or the restriction of the number of laborers or the efficiency of their work, must be condemned." In short, more investment, more protectionism, and more efficiency programs can't, won't, and haven't fixed poverty and industrial depressions because they all proceed from false premises. Having finally beaten the nexus of wages, capital, and labor into a bloody pulp, George turns his eyes towards another leading theory for why everything is terrible: the specter of overpopulation. II. Population and Subsistence The entire second book might as well be titled "Why Malthus is Dumb and Wrong and Bad." It's dedicated to dunking on Malthusianism, a philosophy that ascribes economic crises to the exponential growth of the human population, which must necessarily end in catastrophe. according to Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. George attacks Malthusian ideas not just because they're wrong, but because they make it easier to accept the prevailing theory of wages (as more capital is allocated, laborers will keep popping up like weeds to gobble it up, so wages must eternally stagnate). George draws a straight line between these faulty ideas and holocausts and genocides – specifically citing how colonial oppression in China, India, and Ireland were explicitly justified on Malthusian grounds. One million people died in the English-engineered Irish potato famine alone, and when you add in those who fled the entire population declined by 25% percent. And this isn't a tenuous link either – George directly connects the completely avoidable famine to his favorite bugbear, private landownership and extortionate rent. Given that Malthusianism is now widely discredited I'm just going to skip this chapter, but if you want to hear George in all his righteous fury, check out Appendix A (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism III. The Laws of Distribution When society produces wealth, who gets different shares of it, and why? Let's start by beating some words to death. By George, we're told that there are three factors in production: Land, Labor, and Capital. For each of these terms there must be a "law of distribution" that explains how each gets compensated for its part in production. The reward you get from production by owning Land is called Rent. The reward you get from production by supplying Labor is called Wages. The reward you get from production by supplying Capital is called ... um, what? We're looking for a term that clearly expresses the return to capital alone and nothing else. The closest thing we have is Interest, and that's probably good enough. George gives the common definition of interest as "the return for the use of capital, exclusive of any labor in its use or management, and exclusive of any risk, except such as may be involved in the security." This is pretty close to what we want – something that expresses the sole return to capital without mixing in anything else. But ... what about Profits? Profits is "almost synonymous" with revenue, assuming you have some left after you deduct expenses. It means a gain in money or wealth, but the trouble is this gain is a mix of rent, wages, and "compensations for the risk peculiar to the various uses of capital." What we want is a term that means the return to capital alone, totally separate from the return to laborers and landowners. To talk about the distribution of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of the division of mankind into men, women, and human beings. George spends a few pages talking about how everyone from Adam Smith on down got confused about this (spoiler: it's tied up with thinking wages are drawn from capital), before presenting his model for how it all works. If you want to see him knock that stuff down, see Appendix B (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Here's George's model for how it all works: Land is"all natural opportunities or forces" and its return is rent Labor is "all human exertion" and its return is wages Capital is"all wealth used to produce more wealth" and its return is interest George says the false assumption at the root of the old theories is in thinking of "capital as the prime factor in production, land as its instrument, and labor as its agent or tool." George makes the following assertions: "Labor can be exerted only upon land"
Inline links: Francis Bacon said in 1625, Malthusianism, English-engineered Irish potato famine, Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism, Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
1% for today (not fighting world wars helps) But pre-historic man used things like tusks for weapons. This makes it hard to distinguish between 'violent death at the hands of the tribe down the road wielding tusks' and 'violent death at the hands of an elephant which didn't fancy being eaten for dinner'. Foraging tribes today are even less use - any tribe which has been followed around by sociologists with clipboards is hardly unsullied by contact with the modern world, and indeed quite a lot of the deaths turn out to have been caused by bullets from slave traders (presumably either these slave traders have developed zombification, or else they completely missed the aim of their job) or cattle ranchers. Unless Predator was actually a documentary, one presumes primitive man didn't have to contend with this. This is the issue with pre-history - it's pre … history. We really don't know that much about it. A hundred years ago G.K. Chesterton observed that we picture cavemen as stupid thugs dragging their clubs, but the one thing we actually know about them, was that they were artists. Having dispatched the notion that we can discern pre-history from primitive tribes today, Bregman then says we can tell primitive man was peaceful by observing his favourite primitive tribes today. He is even willing to infer the political views of our distant forebears based on the views held within those tribes. Sigh. Thankfully returning to history turns up some better evidence. In 1943 Colonel Samuel Marshall, the US Chief Combat Historian (you guys have the coolest titles) was with an American camp attacked by Japanese soldiers. The Japanese made 11 attempts in all, and were nearly successful despite being outnumbered. The next day Colonel Marshall tried to find out what went wrong. He interviewed the men in groups, asking them to speak freely and allowing them to disagree with their officers. What he discovered was that only 12% of the men fired their guns. Interviews in the Pacific and Europe broadly confirmed this picture: 15%-25% is typical. The majority of soldiers don't shoot at the enemy. They're not cowards, they don't run away. They just don't fire. Separate studies in the British and Soviet armies turned out the same conclusion. Muskets from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War (hey, you've been known to write 'Paris, France') found 90% were still loaded. Which is odd because loading a musket takes ages, 20 times as long as aiming and shooting it. Odder still is that half of them are double loaded. Not double shotted: double powder spaced out as well. This doesn't work. One of them has been loaded 23 times without firing. It's almost like most soldiers don't want to shoot the enemy, and loading your rifle is the perfect excuse for why you're not shooting. Far from being blood thirsty killers with a thin veneer of civilisation, humans have a deep aversion to killing in even the most desperate of situations. Part 2: Lies, damned lies and social psychology Why we ought to lock up the Stanford Prison Experiment The second most famous psychology experiment in history is the Stanford Prison experiment. Philip Zimbardo split a group of undergrads at random into prisoners and guards. The guards were left free to choose how they would manage the prisoners, and within days the whole thing had to be called off as it had descended into a sadistic torture camp. At least that's how Zimbardo has described it for the last 50 years. In fact, everything I just said is completely false. The undergrads were not split at random - the scheme had actually been dreamt up by an undergrad called David Jaffe who had run a previous experiment himself on abusing prisoners in a fake jail. He was carefully placed into the guards group. Nor were the guards left to choose their methods, instead they were briefed by Zimbardo and Jaffe that the purpose of the experiment (for which they were being well renumerated) was to see how people cracked under pressure. The experiment would be a failure unless they could put the prisoners under terrible stress. Even Douglas Korpi's prisoner breakdown on day two, which, captured on camera, became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn't be able to spend the time in jail revising, and being told he would only be allowed to quit if he suffered some sort of serious mental or physical breakdown. Despite the pressure from Zimbardo and Jaffe, two thirds of the guards refused to take part in sadistic games, and much to their frustration a third continued to treat the prisoners with kindness. Nonetheless when Zimbardo came to write up the experiment about the effects on the prisoners, he realised it would be a much more compelling story if he turned it on its head, and made it about the guards instead. The truth of guards carefully drilled to be sadistic was swept away with a lie of ordinary people spontaneously becoming cruel when dressed in a uniform and given a position of power. For years no one replicated the experiment - given the results first time round it was thought unethical, but in 2001 the BBC in search of new reality television commissioned a repeat (turns out reality television runs to different ethics than the average psychology department). Now unlike normal reality TV they didn't bother manipulating the participants to be at each other's throats - there was no need, in days it was going to be a bloodbath. The result is the four most boring hours of television ever recorded. Nothing happens. The guards sit around chatting. When tensions arise with the prisoners, they defuse them by talking to them nicely. On day 6 some prisoners escaped. They headed over to the guards' canteen and all had a smoke together. On day 7 they voted in favour of turning the whole thing into a commune. Why we ought to be shocked by Milgram's shock machine So much for the second most famous psychology experiment, what about the most famous - Milgram's shock machine? Milgram experiment took pairs of volunteers, and assigned one to take a memory test, while the other administered electric shocks for wrong answers. The shocks start at 15V, with the 'shocker' instructed to raise it by 15V for each subsequent wrong answer, even beyond the danger label the machine has. As the voltage got higher the man taking the test would scream in agony. If the 'shocker' continued, then at 350V he would thump on the wall, and then go silent. Of course this wasn't actually an experiment on memory. The man taking the test was a member of Milgram's team, and there were no shocks, only acting. The point of the experiment was to find out how many people would electrocute a stranger, just because a man in a white coat told them to. Two thirds of them it turned out (well, a bit under half if you discount the ones who claimed afterwards that they only went along with it because it was a psychology experiment in a prestigious university, pretty clearly no one was actually being dangerously electrocuted). Videos show some subjects were completely torn up about inflicting pain, but in the end they still did what the forceful man with the clipboard told them. Bregman is quite candid that his aim is to do a hatchet job on Milgram's experiment, in order to protect his thesis of humanity's innate goodness (just as it was for all the other things he's discredited - set your biasometers accordingly). Bregman spends a section trying to pick holes in the experiment, without much success. He then admits that he's not had any success, and that Milgram's experiment replicates. Where does all of this leave us? My conclusions are: It's possible to get ordinary people to do terrible things, but it's not that easy. Left to their own devices they don't spontaneously turn sadistic.
There's A Time For Everyone
January 12, 2022 · Original source
The wedding was very nice. Maybe a bit generic: so far there’s no standardized Rationalist liturgy. A friend read the poem G.K. Chesterton wrote about his own wedding, which ends:
Inline links: the poem
Your Book Review: Kora In Hell
August 26, 2022 · Original source
— G.K. Chesterton
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
Albion: In Twelve Books, reviewed by Hal Johnson (who says he might be the only person to have ever read it all the way through). Hal is the author of several books including the upcoming (please pre-order! pre-orders make or break a book!) Impossible Histories, a book of alternate histories that quotes G.K. Chesterton and the old SSC comments section at least once each.
Inline links: Albion: In Twelve Books, Impossible Histories
Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory
February 21, 2024 · Original source
The relationship length graph here at the bottom seems to slightly contradict the one above showing similar length; I think this is partly because there aren’t enough 45-55 year olds in the sample to make a difference in the aggregated data, and partly because I think the bottom graph combines “slightly poly” and “very poly” into a single “poly” category, and we already saw that slightly poly people do badly. To a first approximation, poly people are equally happy with and committed to their partner as monogamous people, regardless of relationship length (though remember that this selects for relationships that are still going on), and they get married at about the same frequency. However, they only have about half as many children. This broadly matches the results of the 2017 SSC survey (I’m using 2017 because it had the most questions on sex and relationships). Mono and poly people had equal self-rated life satisfaction, but poly people had higher romantic satisfaction (6 vs. 6.6). Poly people were slightly less likely to currently be in a primary relationship that had lasted more than five years (34% vs. 39%), but this might be because they were slightly younger (31 vs. 33). Respondents were mostly young and childless, but poly people were only half as likely to have children as mono people (15% vs. 27%). I think a fair summary of these results is “poly and mono relationships are about equally good, except that poly people have slightly higher romantic satisfaction and mono people are much more likely to have children; being wishy-washy in the middle is worse than either”. Hamish Todd (blog) writes: I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses. I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was *awful* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions. To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner). I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery. With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there. I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good. Sounds like a testable claim! I decided to operationalize this as "on the SSC survey, polyamorous men would have a higher correlation between self-rated social status and self-rated romantic satisfaction than monogamous men". Among monogamous men (n=5268), the correlation was 0.323 Among polyamorous men (n=555), the correlation was 0.311 I'm eyeballing this as not a significant difference, and in either case it's in favor of poly. drosophilist writes: On average, straight men and straight women differ in their sexual/romantic preferences. For obvious evolutionary reasons, men's sexuality is optimized for variety/novelty/as many partners as possible, while women's sexuality is optimized for emotional attachment/find the best man you can and get him to stick around and help care for your babies. (Obvious disclaimer: I'm talking about trends and averages, not every man/not every woman, blah blah blah.) For this reason, I'm worried that a widespread embrace of polyamory/open relationships would be a disaster for women. Sure, you'll say that polyamory is all consensual and based on negotiated agreements, so what's the problem? But it's not so simple, and people who are emotionally entangled find it hard to make logical choices, and people are good at lying to themselves. "I can totally accept polyamory as the price of holding onto the man I love! [six months later] I'm so jealous and miserable and I keep hiding in the bathroom so he won't see me crying, but all open-minded people do polyamory nowadays, I can't let this get to me, I'm with the man I love, this is totally the right choice... excuse me while I get another box of tissues..." If polyamory catches on in society at large, we'll see, at minimum a lot of tearful letters to advice columns from women saying things like, "Dear Abby, my husband wants to open our marriage, I really hate the idea of him being with another woman but I don't want to be an old-fashioned prude, plus I'm afraid he'll leave me unless I agree, but the thought makes me so unhappy, what should I do?" In the canonical poly survey, women were over-represented in polyamory; about 35% of poly people were men and 49% women (the remainder either didn’t answer or were nonbinary or something). Commenters agreed with this, and said their experience was that polyamory was mostly female-driven. This is my story too; I became poly because the woman I wanted to date at the time was. Why should this be, since men traditionally prefer sexual variety more than women do? I think one thing a lot of commenters are missing is that - despite people’s salacious dreams of what it must be like - polyamory usually focuses on the emotional aspect of relationships rather than the sexual. If someone wants to sleep with a bunch of people, they can just be a normal casual-sex-haver or swinger or something. Poly emphasizes the part where you have multiple relationships. This is more of a female fantasy than a male one, hence the female predominance. There were a lot of you who were pretty sure that polyamory had to be bad in some way under some conditions. I challenge you to operationalize this in a way that we can test on future (or existing) surveys, eg “Poly people in the bottom quintile of status will report lower relationship satisfaction” or “Poly marriages among people without a college degree are more likely to end in divorce than monogamous ones.” 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry Some Guy (blog) writes: I had one of those childhoods that was so terrible that people find it fascinating but this seems just awful for kids. Again, I’m probably bias because my parents have racked up close to ten marriages between them and I grew up knowing that their first and most heartfelt loyalty was never to me. There would be my brothers and sisters, whichever of my parents we were with, and just some random person they’d decided they loved more than us. And that person definitely made their resentment of us known and usually made whichever of my parents was there perform some sort of loyalty test. Most other people I know in this situation have some kind of similar experience even if the examples are less dramatic and more open to being interpreted as over-sensitivity. Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit. That might not matter as much when there are resources to go around for everyone, but when you’re poor it matters a lot because there isn’t that much to go around and one year your step-mom might want to ritually humiliate you and your siblings by giving you socks at Christmas while her children open elaborate gifts. Again, personal experience, blah blah blah. But you have to acknowledge that the pathways for this kind of thing open up just because you’ve expanded the numbers of players in the game and unaligned their motivations. I take the opposite lesson that Some Guy does from this. Quick digression: in medical studies, lots of people don’t take the experimental drug the way they’re supposed to. Maybe they get side effects and stop, or they screw up the dosing. There are two statistical ways of dealing with this, called “per-protocol” and “intention-to-treat”. In per-protocol analysis, only the people who took the drug correctly get counted. In intention-to-treat analysis, everyone who was assigned to the experimental group gets counted, even if they didn’t take the drug. So, suppose that you have some drug which always cures a disease when you take it correctly, but it’s incredibly complicated to get right, and has lots of side effects and almost nobody ever makes it to the end of a course. In per-protocol, the drug looks great; in intention-to-treat, it looks useless. Which is the better analysis strategy? It depends on what you’re using the number for. If you’re a patient, and you’re confident that you are smart and determined and can use it correctly, and you want to know your chances, use per-protocol. If you’re a social engineer, and you want to know how many cases of the disease you’ll cure by promoting the drug in the general population, use intention-to-treat. I find this a useful lens to apply to social problems. For example, G.K. Chesterton famously said that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.” Supposing he’s right, maybe Christianity, when followed per-protocol, has a strong success rate in curing sin. But it looks much worse under intention-to-treat. If you assign people to the “Christianity” group - maybe by raising them in a Christian society where you tell everyone to be Christian, and where everyone goes to church on Sundays - then most people don’t follow the protocol, and they don’t become any less sinful. Some Guy is talking about people assigned to the monogamy group. They were raised in a society that told them to be monogamous. They agreed to be monogamous. They probably had lovely weddings where they swore to be monogamous until death do them part. But it doesn’t sound like they were able to follow the protocol. Monogamy followed per protocol may have many good effects. But by intention-to-treat, monogamy looks pretty mediocre. (nobody in this story was assigned to the polyamory group, and nothing in it speaks at all to the success or failure thereof) Another way to think of this is as different failure modes: The question isn’t whether the success mode of mono is worse than the failure mode of mono. It’s whether moving the marginal couple from mono to poly or vice versa makes success more vs. less likely. I’m not sure what the answer is there. If you’re very optimistic, you could imagine that the people in the story above, instead of divorcing to be with another partner, could have stayed married, stayed with their children, and had another partner on the side. I’m not that optimistic. The people described don’t seem like they would be very good at any form of relationship. If you tell them to be monogamous, they will cheat. If you tell them they can have as many relationships as they want as long as they do so ethically and honestly, then they’ll do it unethically and dishonestly. But occasionally, I do meet some people who I feel would be better served by polyamory. Here’s a conversation I sometimes imagine having with certain friends and/or patients (this is partly stitched together from a few real conversations with different people, and partly imaginary): ME: So, you’re having a messy divorce. THEM: Yeah. ME: Because you cheated on your fourth husband. THEM: Yeah. ME: And now you’re dating a new guy. Are you worried that this might also end with you cheating on him? THEM: No. ME: Remember how we talked about the secret ancient rationalist technique of thinking about an answer for five seconds before you give it? I want you to try that now. Are you worried that this new relationship will end with you cheating on your partner? THEM: . . . . . yes. ME: Okay. Why do you think that is? THEM: I guess I’m just a bad person! ME: Can you be more specific? THEM: I guess I’m just really impulsive, and sometimes I see someone and can’t hold myself back! I’m too flighty and horny to ever be happy staying with the same guy for too long. ME: Okay. Can you think of ways that you could potentially address that in your next relationship? THEM: No, I’ve already tried therapy, and I’m too extraverted to be happy never going to any places where I could meet new men. I don’t know what else to try! I guess I’ll just never be able to be in a relationship without destroying it. ME: How would you feel about talking to this new guy you’re dating and telling him all this? Maybe he would be willing to agree to some kind of open relationship, so that if you felt something like this again, you could have a safe outlet that wouldn’t destroy the relationship. THEM: No that would be unethical. I’ve also met some people in the same situation as the “them” above who did switch to open relationships and it did seem to let them have a stable life / marriage / family in a way that they weren’t able to do before. I don’t think this is right for everyone, but the people who need it, need it. And here’s the kind of thing I see in relationship advice forums: I used to hate when my wife went out to parties or conferences because I always worried she was meeting other men. I told her she couldn’t leave the house unless she texted me exactly where she was going and explained why it was necessary, and it made her mad, but she eventually agreed. But she still talks on the phone to this one guy she’s been friends with since grade school. They’ve never had sex or anything, and he’s married to someone else, but they chat on the phone a couple of times a week and I always hear her laughing. I think it counts as an emotional affair and I told her that if she didn’t cut off all contact right away, I was going to end the marriage. Now she’s all mad at me. What should I do? This just seems like a fundamentally unhealthy outlook on relationships and life. People with better emotional skills can figure out some middle ground where they still agree not to have “emotional affairs” or whatever but don’t freak out every time their partner has contact with another human, but seeing the version where this goes bad has kind of radicalized me. I think there’s something really attractive about being poly even if you never get around to having any other relationships, just so you don’t have to constantly be getting angry at your partner for having normal human desires. TGGP writes: The real reason to prefer monogamy is that most cultures/societies have been polygynous, but the smaller number of monogamous ones were the winners in the contest of cultural group selection. I’m nervous about cultural selection arguments because they seem to justify anything, and to rapidly switch what they justify. Three thousand years ago, a cultural selectionist could have said that most societies in the world were polygynous, so we should avoid monogamy. A hundred years ago, they could have said that most societies in the world were monarchies, so we should avoid democracy. The problem is that nobody ever deploys cultural selection arguments against a failed trend that everyone hates. Nobody ever says “throughout history, most societies haven’t made people marry rocks, so we shouldn’t force people to marry rocks now”. Nobody wants to marry rocks now, so nobody needs to argue against it! Cultural selection arguments only get deployed against things that were once unpopular, but are in the process of becoming more popular - ie alleles that are currently being selected for! This isn’t necessarily hypocritical. You could say that certain institutions are spreading for good reasons, and others are spreading for bad ones (and TGGP links my Competing Selectors post which makes exactly this point). But now you’re not really making a cultural selection argument, you’re making an “I did some armchair reasoning and decided this was bad” argument. I think TGGP would answer that it doesn’t require any selective pressure to explain why people would want to have more romantic partners, since this is inherently fun for everyone. But first of all, no it isn’t - you can read the responses to this thread to see how viscerally unhappy some people are about this. And second of all, however fun it is now, it was probably equally fun a hundred years ago, so we still need an explanation for why it’s happening now and not earlier. Another possible argument is that polyamory isn’t spreading by monogamous cultures dying out and being replaced by polyamorous ones. It’s spreading by word of mouth. But this is also how almost every cultural trend spreads. Monogamy didn’t spread to Scandinavia because the Vikings died out and the Romans colonized their land, it spread because missionaries converted them to Christianity. If some memoir converts somebody to polyamory, that seems like the closest modern-day equivalent. I don’t really know how to rescue cultural selection arguments from these kinds of considerations. Ascend writes: Okay, I have two basic objections to polyamory. The first is a broader but weaker point, and the second is narrower and stronger. 1. If you actually love someone, that person should be enough for you. Especially, if most people who claim to love someone do, in fact, find that that person is enough for them. I struggle to see how it doesn't almost follow by definition that if Aaron wants to be in a monogamous relationship with Brenda, and Carl wants to be in a polyamorous relationship with Diana, then Carl loves Diana less than Aaron loves Brenda. Now maybe this assumption can be refuted somehow, by reference to irreducible personality types or something, but it certainly seems like the prima facie assumption, and requires an affirmative defence. Splitting this up into two paragraphs so I can answer one at a time. The traditional response is to ask: Do you think it’s bad for someone to have a second child? Surely if they really love their first child, one should be enough for them! More than one friend? In fact, why do they need to have a friend at all? Shouldn’t their partner be enough? I think you can think of this in one of two ways. One is to imagine the original objection in the mouth of a Dickens villain: “We can’t invite other people to our Christmas party! They would consume our limited supply of Christmas cheer, and then there wouldn’t be enough left for us!” Obviously at the end of the Dickens book, the character discovers that cheer isn’t a limited resource, and multiplies rather than divides when shared with others. Some people genuinely think this way. This isn’t really how things work for me. I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly. 2. There seem to be two types of polyamory: the "hippie" kind where a group of people are all in a single demarcated "relationship" with each other, all know each other as either friends or lovers, and having sex with anyone outside that group would be condemned as cheating. And the "open relationship" kind where two people are dating or married but are "free" to sleep with other people (but still have each other as a "primary partner" or some such). The first, while I'm not endorsing it, seems to have decent case for being a form of actual love. The second, unless I'm missing something, looks like despicable pure hedonism. First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else. Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating, and for all the talk of mutality what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship? (I've seen a number of online stories of this happening, though with beautiful poetic justice where the pressured partner ends up finding someone who actually values him or her and wants a true relationship, and the other partner ending up entirely alone and certainly not finding the harem they were expecting). And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners, and for fuck's sake a marriage is the ONE place such toxic sexual competition should not exist! Re: 2 - As I mentioned above, polyamory seems more about the romance angle than the sex angle. One interesting demonstration of this is how many asexual people are poly. In the 2017 SSC survey (the same one cited above), about 5% of polyamorous people described themselves as asexual (having no sex drive) compared to about 3% of monogamous people. These people are probably in relationships for the emotional benefits. I also checked sex drive among people who were in monogamous relationships, stable polycules, and open relationships (this is the 2019 SSC survey, which went into more depth on sex and romance). There were no significant differences in sex drive among these three categories. Piotr Pachota (blog) writes: Invectives about polyamory are inevitable now, in the current phase of polyamory Overton window shift. This is the only acceptable way polyamory can be currently portrayed and discussed. As Overton windows move for new social norms like LGBT and polyamory, the mainstream media narratives evolve along the axis of omission/taboo -> negative/critique -> ambiguity -> struggle/oppression ->positive -> new normal. We have seen LBGT cover almost all these steps during recent 40 years, currently I think we are between positive and new normal. With polyamory, we have just recently moved from omission/taboo to negative/critique. Portraying polyamory as positive or struggling/oppressed in mainstream media is still out of the Overton window, showing ambiguity is now at the edge, only negative critique is in the window. This is also why almost all movies and shows about polyamory are telling a story of a failure of a polyamorous relationship. Positive polyamory testimonials exist on social media, but usually the comments below are a shitstorm. This also proves how positive portrayal is unacceptable. At the same time, positive polyamory testimonial + shitstorm comments = negative meta-content bundle that itself fits well within the Overton window. Note that these negative portrayals still promote polyamory somehow, as they at least put it on the map. 10 years ago there were no polyamory movies, shows or social media content - it would have been unthinkable, as we were in the omission/taboo phase back then. Yeah, one pattern I see pretty often goes something like: Weird people, who maybe weren’t able to cope with normal institutions, find some weird new thing that works for them, okay, cool, whatever.
Inline links: blog, writes, writes, the canonical poly survey, Commenters agreed with this, blog, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G7xC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa47bcb0c-e3ef-4897-9ee5-f8404ea227c3_810x805.png, writes, Competing Selectors, writes, Some people genuinely think this way, blog, writes
Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
August 23, 2024 · Original source
Let us celebrate Gilbert Keith Chesterton All who heard him were deeply impressed at an Amply earnest debate Where his words carried weight And his own weight was, one would have guessed, a ton.
1936, however, was a bad year for poetry. Rudyard Kipling died, having at one point been the most widely-read contemporary poet in the English language. G.K. Chesterton died, still remembered today by the online limerick dictionary in limerick form:
Inline links: Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, online limerick dictionary in limerick form
On the flip side, Wood can write about free verse from the perspective of a poet who grew up, with, and at one time genuinely loved, the fixed forms. My sole opinion on free verse came from a pithy G.K. Chesterton quote (“Free verse? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’.”), but reading this book showed me how and why someone might hypothetically like it, and what someone might hypothetically get out of reading it. He didn’t convince me to like it. But I can’t quite sneer like I used to.
The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary:
G.K. Chesterton wrote lots of stuff about how if you were really holy and paying attention, then the thousandth sunset would be just as beautiful as the first. I used to interpret this as some kind of meaningless faux-profound slogan. Then I read his biography of William Blake - which made me ask myself, for the first time - what if William Blake was just describing his experience completely accurately? “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I know this sounds crazy, but there’s so much stuff like this, and he’s so consistent; Chesterton sort of suggests that maybe he is actually, literally, seeing the innumerable company of the heavenly host.
Inline links: biography of William Blake
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
May 15, 2025 · Original source
G.K. Chesterton wrote about the phrase “you can’t turn back the clock”:
Inline links: wrote about
Your Review: School
July 04, 2025 · Original source
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” - G.K. Chesterton