Astral Codex Ten

The Ideology Is Not The Movement

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The Ideology Is Not The Movement

Article

The Ideology Is Not The Movement is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 11, 2024 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “In The Ideology Is Not The Movement , I talked about a second reason - as a social sorting device”; “including the ‘classic’ The Ideology is Not the Movement”; “median post was ‘merely’ as good as The Ideology is Not the Movement”. It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 11, 2024
  • Last seen: July 26, 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.

Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
July 11, 2024 · Original source
Probably they need to spend a bit of time helping orphans or at least appearing to do so, or they lose their fig leaf. In the end, they take over the world. This is obvious, right? If the lifeboat games sound like racism and nationalism, what do the backscratchers’ clubs sound like? The simpler versions sound sort of like the mutual aid societies and fraternities of the 19th and 20th century - Elks, Rotaries, Freemasons, etc. The more complicated versions sound like cults, religions, and ideologies. Obviously one reason movements exist is to achieve their stated goal. In The Ideology Is Not The Movement, I talked about a second reason - as a social sorting device. But a third reason - linked to the second - is as cover for a backscratchers club. III. Orphan Supporters After the Orphan Support Club take over the world, the remaining castaways are dispirited - maybe they’ve missed their chance to get ahead through weird social engineering schemes. Still, after a while they manage to make the best of their situations. Greg was a third-rate academic at a low-ranked school. His only advantage was that, through his friendship with Frank, he caught wind of the Orphan Support Club’s growing power a little faster than everyone else. He toned down his normal teaching and research and started aggressively advocating for orphans, accusing the administration and all his office-politics rivals of not taking their problems seriously enough. Bad-mouthing your bosses usually ends poorly. But the local newspaper had just been taken over by OSC members, and they wrote several articles on how the town’s college was infested with orphan-hating Scrooges, and Greg was the only professor bold enough to stand up to them. And the local City Council had also just turned OSC, and they called in the college administrators and said they wouldn’t get the city funding they wanted unless they changed their orphan-hating ways. And lots of students were OSC too now, and they threatened to switch colleges unless Greg was taken more seriously. Eventually the college administration folded, gave Greg a promotion, and added him to the Board of Trustees - after which everyone stopped bothering them and they became popular again. Greg remembered the debt he owed, so he spent the rest of his career writing bogus papers demonstrating that orphans were more likely to starve in counties that didn’t have OSC advocates in local government, or in cities that didn’t have OSC journalists in the local newspaper. Next time the OSC City Council members were in a close election, or the OSC newspaper bosses were involved in office politics, they could point to Greg’s studies to demonstrate their worthiness. It was a weird and indirect kind of backscratching - but backscratching it was. Heather worked at a local nonprofit. She also wished she could get ahead in office politics, but by this point everyone for miles around was an OSC supporter and she couldn’t succeed on that basis alone. One night she had dinner with her old friend Erica. “Daniel had this problem too,” Erica said. “He founded the original Backscratchers Club, way back when, but everyone joined it instantly and there was no way to use it to get ahead. My big innovation was adding some ridiculous bylaws that made it costly to get into. That way, only the people who were most committed would join, and we could outcompete everyone else. You should figure out some form of orphan advocacy that works like that.” The next day, Heather announced that she had figured out a new and important way to support orphans. You could no longer use the word “orphan” metaphorically, to talk about orphan drugs or orphaned ideas; this spiritually harmed real orphans. She engaged in publicity stunts against any writers who spoke this way. About half of people couldn’t pivot to the new way of using language, or thought it was beneath their honor to dignify this with a response. But the other half - aware that their status relied on being members in good standing of OSC, and aware that any slip in their perceived level of orphan support could ruin their careers - and equally aware that if they seemed to be better OSC members than others, it might give them a step up - enthusiastically joined Heather’s bandwagon. There was a brief internal struggle, which Heather won. She started a new nonprofit to remove anti-orphan terms from language, and remained powerful and respected to the end of her days. Iolanthe jealously watched Heather’s success, and wanted to do something similar. She announced that she was adopting an orphan, and she believed everyone else should adopt one too. If everyone adopted an orphan, the orphan crisis would be over in no time. Here’s another case where it’s not obvious to me what happens: Many other people adopt orphans too. Society enters a new golden age where no child is abandoned, and Iolanthe is celebrated as a hero.
Inline links: The Ideology Is Not The Movement
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
However, this pie chart only considers ACX vs SSC, not pre-2016 SSC vs post-2016-SSC. It is therefore still maybe consistent with Scott’s writing getting worse in April 2016 and never recovering. This could straightforwardly explain the drop in Commentariat quality in 2016 (but not 2021), but the evidence for a decline in writing quality centred on this period is anyway very mixed. April 2016 has some great posts (including the ‘classic’ The Ideology is Not the Movement), but there were a lot of good posts around that time - the very start of May 2016 includes another ‘classic’ in the form of Be Nice, At Least Until you can Coordinate Meanness. Nor can it be that readers somehow intuit that Scott has nothing more valuable to say on any topic going forward, because 2017 contains classics like Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons, or my personal favourite SSC-era post, Considerations on Cost Disease. Not to mention, of course, there are some cracking ACX-era posts which are nearly a decade away at this point. In my head, the cleanest story is that a bunch of people became regular readers of the blog because they read Meditations on Moloch or another of the universally-loved posts that were linked everywhere and then left when they realised the median post was ‘merely’ as good as The Ideology is Not the Movement, but this story doesn’t make sense – you could certainly argue the toss about when ‘peak’ SSC was, but if you believe it exists you’d surely have to put it centred somewhere around 2014. This would mean that the group of people who are disappointed by Scott’s output would have to get interested in the blog in 2014, stick around through the whole of 2015, and then leave en masse in April 2016 despite 2016 (in my subjective opinion) being better than 2015 for ‘important’ posts. Another point to consider is that the ‘Scott’s writing sucks now’ hypothesis needs not only to explain why engagement fell off in 2016, but also why multisyllabic words and type/token ratio also peaked around that time. I think you can maybe tell a story where Scott’s writing gets worse in 2016 so people engage less with the comments (producing less comment depth and more zero-length comment chains) but it is very difficult to imagine how Scott’s writing getting worse produces more multisyllabic words. If Scott’s writing drives the disengagement, you have to start loading up the ‘evaporative cooling’ hypothesis with a lot of weird epicycles in order for everything to all make sense at once. In summary, I’m agnostic on the question of whether Scott’s writing has got worse. I personally don’t think it has (although the frequency of ‘hits’ was remarkable in 2014) but perhaps it has changed a bit over time. However, I’m reasonably certain that nothing Scott writes is the reason for the dropoff in engagement around 2016, because there’s no coherent story you can tell that fits that hypothesis. I think this is an unproductive sidetrack to consider in a review of the Commentariat specifically. The user experience of the blog got worse
Inline links: The Ideology is Not the Movement, Be Nice, At Least Until you can Coordinate Meanness, Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons, Considerations on Cost Disease, Meditations on Moloch