The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 31
At the heart of communist and communistic thought is faith in a kind of historical trajectory toward utopia that’s driven by social alchemy. There are many reasons why this fails in practice, but the simplest thing to say is that communism fails because communism doesn’t know how communism will succeed. The fundamental belief driving communists is that once enough people become true believers that the communist utopia lies on the other side of certain social changes, a perfect society will manifest. How? Because they will. The details aren’t meant to be known or told; they’re meant to be figured out. This is in exact alignment with the historicism in Marx’s dialectical materialism: once we get capitalism out of the way, we’ll enter a worker-managed system (socialism) that can start figuring out how to make the state redundant to its purposes, at which point a stateless improvement of the same will emerge and the communist utopia (and end of History) will emerge. On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay gives an example of how a contemporary police abolitionist activist has made almost exactly this same argument perfectly explicitly and walks you through how you can spot it for what it is. Join Lindsay for one of his more important discussions.
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12 comments
Well this is an angle of attack that I can use and be impervious to any woke pushback as it’s based on my very own lived experience. As as student (of arms control and intl security) I spent a GREAT deal of time living and studying in the USSR. The shithole that it was, the things I saw and saw my Russians friends endure are NOT something the uber-fragile sjws simply do not understand and hod help them if they bring it about. I’ve used this as armor quite successfully in dealing with them.
This is another of the most important New Discourses articles and podcasts. New Discourses has been a gold mine for learning (1) Woke attacks, (2) practical defense against those attacks, and (3) how to counterattack. I am looking forward to reading Wokecraft.
I have even inflicted these lessons on my teen-aged children. I want them to easily recognize dialectical reasoning, “the ratchet,” and “the motte and bailey.” In fact, I want them to be better at all of those than the Woke. But I also want them to be grounded in the liberal or post-woke values discussed elsewhere on New Discourses. I want them to avoid becoming utopians or even ideologues. This podcast and related articles and podcasts emphasize the necessity of successfully interacting with reality, not living in a fantasy world.
Pure democracy may not be the best government; the framers of the US Constitution were wise to hinder mob rule. Beware a pure free market; social safety nets and anti-trust rules protect us. Our society has gradually built more and more equity into K-12 education; be open to more equity in community and technical college education (like Tennessee for example). Our society has great equity in emergency medical care (in contrast with Mexico for example); seriously consider and don’t automatically reject greater equity in healthcare. Double-check your values and goals, and then ask the bottom-line question: “What works? Will it work?”
With that in mind, I share this somewhat related quote from Marks, Dembski, and Ewert’s monograph “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics” (2017) [Section 1.1, Page 2]: “There are fundamental philosophical differences between engineers and scientists. Scientists are generally more interested in simply understanding nature. They formulate models, often beautiful and powerful models, and scrutinize them. Once vetted by the acceptance of most, the models are placed on a throne like a queen where they are worshipped. It often takes a major coup to overthrow a scientist’s ensconced dogma. Engineers, on the other hand, make the queen come down from the throne and scrub the floor. If she works, we use her talents. And if she doesn’t work, we fire her.”
My interpretation of Mises and Hayek are a bit different than the way James presented them. They are interrelated or overlap (Hayek was a student of Mises) but they start from different premises.
For Mises (Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth) the problem with Socialism (of which Communism is an extreme form) centers on the impossibility of price formation for producer goods. Without a market in producer goods (intermediate goods on their way to becoming consumer goods) their can be no rational allocation of resources. The arbitrary dictates of central planners would be frustrated in their attempts to choose which industries get access to raw and intermediate inputs and there would be (and always has been in centralized economies) massive coordination problems. With private ownership of capital (in the purely economic sense of that word) bidding by producers is based on imputed demand of consumers.
Hayek’s saw the economic flaws of command economies as more of a pure knowledge problem: the economic system is a massively parallel processor taking gazillions of inputs from consumers and translating them in to prices that direct producers. Knowledge is only truly useful in its local application, so prices form around real economic factors when decision making based on that knowledge is decentralized. By contrast, centralized economic systems are like single-threaded computer systems with serial ports and miniscule RAM (to take the analogy farther.) Central planners, even if the had information, wouldn’t know where to apply it effectively because of the distributed nature of knowledge’s usefulness.
Hope I didn’t butcher that interpretation; maybe someone with more book learnin’ on the Austrian school could correct me.
This reminds me of Fantasy I read.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time
Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere
Spoilers people.
Discworld had the flow of belief, from people to the mountain of the Gods, where each god had strength matched to their respective total belief from people.
In The Wheel of Time there is the world of dreams where ones focus and acuity can make the world change.
In the Cosmere there is the complex cognitive realm which bridges the spiritual realm to the physical realm.
I wonder if these artists were influenced by this same literature.
The cognitive realm does seem real to a degree, but it’s just like the saying, “there’s a good wolf and a bad wolf who fights for territory over your thoughts, and the one you feed is the one who is allowed dominance. ”
Good/Bad is probably unfair. As each moment deserves it’s own assessment, but I think you get the idea. It’s probably something like the Default Mode Network where you supposedly play out scenarios in advance. Anyway.
Has anyone read these books and the literature James sights? It’s a very consistent through line I can’t ignore…
James,
You mentioned Social Alchemy in this talk. So I looked it up and found myself in a maze of search results in Duck Duck Go.
One of many websites is this one, https://regeneratechange.com/about/ which appears to be one of many tax exempt orgs that is dedicated to complete overhaul of ‘society’. I read this about page and while it seems cryptic at worst, I’ve become familiar with enough of the ‘left’s’ cloak and dagger nomenclature to see in between the lines so-to-speak. This org and it’s website is one of many many that stand poised to facilitate the communist revolution taking place in America.
Additionally, I found this telling article by Ray DiLorenzo. I know you and supporters of New Discourses will find it immensely educational. Titled “The Communist Revolution in America: America in Freefall” the article can be found here, https://canadafreepress.com/article/communist-revolution-in-america
Heard your interview with Josh Buice on the G3 podcast episode 42 talking about “The Dangers of Social Justice” another excellent un-packing of this weapon of mentacide.
Keep up the good fight.
Terrific lecture, James. I love your work!
Another voice here supporting New Discourses. I’m loving this exposure of communism. Knowledge comes first before we can fight those who attack us.
I’m just gonna say it before anyone else does.
1) seize the means of production
2) ….
3) Profit
Southpark
Underpants gnomes
Laughter
Wait a minute…. the underpants gnomes tried a version of this.
How did that go for them again?
Janes, is there a written version of this topic anywhere? Doesn’t have to be a transcript per se, but an essay of article where you flesh out your argument in similar detail?
Excellent and chilling podcast.