Useful Idiot

A leaderless memeplex goes wherever its diffusion equations say it should go

Bucketize people into std deviations of IQ, imagine the ideology as it appears in each bucket, then average them together using the number of people in each bucket as a weight. Do a little “manual” smoothing to maintain coherence, but not too much since real ppl aren’t coherent.

I call this the “realman” of an ideology, and it is the technique that is implicitly employed by the new atheists, because they argued against Christianity as it was on average, not as it is idealized.

Thead by Zero HP Lovecraft (2018)

Let's model a memeplectic egregore as inhabiting four types of hosts: Nerds, Priests, Drones, and Soldiers. Most of the hosts are Drones, many of them are Soldiers, a small number are Priests, and an even smaller number are Nerds.

I will have to develop this taxonomy further in future, but for now, my intuitions are as follows. I’m identifying Drones as the mass of people who host the memeplex for not particularly interesting reasons: it was inherited from their upbringing, or their schooling, or unconsciously absorbed from their social environment. They host the memeplex because it is the local default; they are not remotely familiar with intellectual or sophisticated versions of their hosted memes, and they have no reason to be. That’s the domain of the Priests (in the example of Christianity, this would be Christian apologetics, aimed at external hostile memeplexes, but also theology, aimed at internal noospherical adventures).

The Priests are true believers in their sophisticated version of the memeplex, and they have no discomfort with deliberately searching for new ways to defend it against criticisms. The disposition underlying this, in the Priests, is something like loyalty to the core memes.

The Nerds, on the other hand, feel uncomfortable with notions like loyalty, or defending from criticisms without considering that the criticisms might turn out to be warranted. They host the memeplex because they feel they have evaluated it and found it to be correct/good so far, or more rarely because they just want to study it as accurately as possible.

Finally, the Soldiers are like an adaptable mix of Drone and Priest. Like the Priests, they are fully committed to their egregore — but not just to defending and refining it, but to somehow advancing it, enriching it, or taking actions in the world that they feel are demanded by it. However, like the Drones, they lack the sophisticated version of the memeplex beloved of the Priests. The Soldiers have a mission, and will often deploy Priestlike sophistication to aid their mission (e.g. to win rhetorically against their enemies, or to provide the psychological justification to do otherwise objectionable things). However, they lack the intellectual finesse and curiosity of the Priests/Nerds; instead of trying to discover things, the Soldiers generally have strong convictions and seek to change parts of the world in accordance with what they entail (that is, what those convictions entail in the mind of the Soldier; the entailment could be logical or totally illogical to an outside observer). It’s not really possible to have a conversation with a Soldier other than a strategic/tactical meeting about how best to strike at the Enemy, or to advance the Good, both terms being defined by the unsophisticated version of the memeplex that they host.

So, that’s Drones, Priests, Nerds, and Soldiers. (Guess which stratum I place myself in.) Why are they important? Well, I need the taxonomy to make the following point.

A leaderless egregore, one without a clear ground truth on membership and direction, will inevitably evolve in an entropically worse direction, led by its Soldiers. This is simply because there are many more ways to be destructive or unhealthy than there are to reach and maintain a healthy activity. We are not concerned with the dynamics of "led" egregores (Christianities, Islams, Leninism, etc), for all we know they work entirely differently, because they can actually be steered and membership can be policed.

If some rando were to blow himself up in the name of Catholicism, the Pope can officially disavow the act and excommunicate the guy (posthumously) and his accomplices or anyone who might have a similar idea. If, instead, he were to do so in the name of Christianity, then short of Jesus himself popping down to Earth to make a similar statement, the best that could happen is every single Christian leader condemns it — yet collectively they have no formal authority over who counts as a "Christian" in the same way the Pope can decide who is officially "Catholic".

That example was too easy; overt acts of violence are widely condemned by most people possessed by all sorts of memeplexes. However, there are reckless/destructive/antisocial/bad acts that are much less severe than violence, and which can be rather subtle; in these cases, it is much easier for this destructive entropy to increase, while being condemned but not effectively forestalled by Nerds and Priests.

The Soldiers' march will be aided by their egregore's sophisticated Priests / Nerds, who endorse a sophisticated and nuanced slice of the egregore. They will defend the egregore and distance themselves from the most unpalatable actions of the Soldiers, but they clearly do not control the egregore or steer its direction. The soldiers advance, the priests condemn and excuse, causing confusion to outsiders at what exactly they need to oppose. The nerds and priests are the useful idiots granting the egregore the freedom it needs to expand according to its diffusion equations.

On the Left (an enormous umbrella egregore which has no leader and no official membership criteria), the general pattern seems to be that the most sophisticated, most conscientious, most virtuous minds have zero say over the memeplex they serve. The nicest, smartest, most sensible, rational feminists (e.g. Camille Paglia) have had zero influence on where feminism went in all the places that matter. Same goes for the very best anti-racists, the best social justice enthusiasts (e.g. Ozy Brennan), autogynephiles (e.g. my “epistemic hero” Zack M Davis), Marxists (Jehu Eaves? Freddie deBoer) — all these people feel like potential friends to me (as opposed to enemies), because they seem to believe in having rational discussions about ideas, but they all have zero power over where their associated movements go. I don't think this is an accident.

Autsy types like me got into New Feminism or Social Justice because we innocently and naively agreed with the motte claims, without even guessing that it was a total scam. "The quokka is a creature marked by profound innocence". There are still plenty of people identifying with the egregore, who merely think it lost its way, who continue to argue for actual equality, actual fairness, actual kindness, actual science, etc.

I think that they might be wasting their time. They are trying to push water uphill with their hands. The simple empirical fact is that fair treatment, enforced against your friends and in favour of your enemies where appropriate for the sake of the principle, is unstable in our present era and wants to collapse into simple, satisfying outgroup hatred. For the mass of normie drones who act as the conformity-enforcing muscle of any egregore, anti-maleism and anti-whiteism were simply more psychologically compelling/tractable than any more abstract rule (e.g. consistent, principled anti-bad-ism). The Hansonian hyprocrisy module will do a good job at dressing this up in deceptive marketing, as it always does, but simple hatred of a designated enemy group seems to be the underlying stable goal.

Motte Leftism is a fun intellectual adventure. I am still fascinated by Steelman Marxian Economics and the nature of its conflict with mainstream economics. These are nerd topics for curious nerds like me. But as regards the direction the world moves in — they don't matter. It would appear that the thoughts of the best are utterly irrelevant — or at least in a certain thermodynamic, or evolutionary sense (which could perhaps be countervailed by deliberate coordinated action, I don't know.)

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passion." And even when the best have conviction, they are simply too few or too mysteriously impotent to control the team they identify with and steer it in a good direction. This is at least partly because nowadays, the teams are so nebulous. How could anyone possibly control something that’s an amorphous distributed clade of ideas mutating and multiplying in countless minds? There is no formal command structure! There is not even formal membership!

So, the Soldiers will continue to draw legitimacy from the best and kindest Nerds or Priests, and they will advance and make things worse, and the Nerds and Priests will condemn it; they may even make a statement that the Soldiers do not deserve to march under the same banner (“they do not represent us!”), but the Soldiers will continue to march under it all the same, and this will continue to form Bayesian evidence to laypeople that when people march under that banner, they are right to get nervous.

I was a useful idiot for social justice and I enormously regret the time I wasted defending its motte. I was also a useful idiot for Marxism, but I wasted less time and mental health on it, and one or two threads within it are still interesting to me even as I now veer reactionary.