It seems to me that we in the United States — and, from what I can tell, the Western world more broadly — never did come to terms with the reality of Jihadist ideology and its clear intentions for us. Media malpractice and a general decline in cultural courage and self-confidence seem substantially to blame for that — themselves downstream of a “long march through the institutions” of toxic ideology that’s quite deliberately designed to weaken us. I don’t know how not to feel disgust for those responsible for it. In any case, this far down the road from the 9/11/2001 Al Qaeda attacks on the USA, I expect we’re pretty firmly settled into our respective conclusions and not much seems likely to change that. With Al Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL largely rendered inoperative, there hasn’t been as much reason to worry about Jihadist violence in recent years, and we’ve moved on as a culture to fearing, doubting, distrusting, and punishing ourselves over other issues. My focus has shifted to understanding the deeper roots underlying the general weakness that afflicts us, and seeking ways to re-energize a culture and civilization that I see as well worth saving. I’ve grown weary of trying to warn people about things they don’t want to be warned about, so writing to try to spread awareness among the less aware has seemed less useful than trying to offer tools and insight to see our ailing state and want to do something to fix it. Time will tell where that goes. I hope I’ll be able to find ways to make a positive difference.
(Posted as a Twitter thread, and on GETTR, Parler, and Gab, and probably worth adding to my archive here. If Twitter changes for the better, maybe I’ll let go of the need to maintain and cross-post to so many accounts…!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tremendous value of salutary feedback systems: how vitally important they are to human flourishing and to getting us out of bad situations where we’d otherwise become stuck.
A feedback mechanism is anything that course-corrects when inputs indicate something’s not right. Much of the sad state we’re in seems to be the result of inadequate or severed feedback loops. Unaccountable systems end in persistent failure.
Our neurobiology is built on feedback loops. Motor control circuits work like servo controllers – targeting a desired outcome, checking results, and adjusting motor control impulses, iteratively, in real time. The immune systems that keep us healthy are similarly feedback-based.
The scientific method, when its feedback systems are allowed to operate as they should, is able to converge on truth more reliably than most other claims to knowledge precisely because it is accountable to open scrutiny and the necessity of solid methods and reproducible results.
When the scientific practice’s essential feedback mechanisms are suppressed, science becomes becomes crippled and devolves to a garden-variety appeal to authority.
Businesses have to be accountable to their customers. The only sustainable way for them to succeed is to make those customers happy. Businesses that take insufficient interest in satisfying customers’ wants and needs, or that cheat or deceive, must either course-correct or fold.
Laws and enforcement thereof deter harmful criminal activity in people whose internal moral compasses didn’t head off or avoid such impulses at an earlier stage. Feedback systems can operate in layers, or in concert, to apply beneficial course corrections.
Democracy is a feedback mechanism that seeks to apply public accountability to the state and to those who hold office within it. To avoid pure democracy’s failure mode of mob rule, we declare certain foundational rights inalienable and codify immutable constraints on state power in a constitution.
For career politicians and immortal government programs, the name of the game is avoiding accountability at all costs. For too often, and by design, new programs and departments are created without sufficient accountability to the results they promise. Slow-to-boil public outrage rarely provides a sufficient restoring force to stop the insanity.
Major social media sites, like the legacy journalistic and media outlets that preceded them, have sought to stem political accountability and suppress the course-corrections that could result, by seeking to shape what we are allowed to know and discuss. The deception we long suspected is now being laid bare. Will this produce sufficient public outcry to force a return to less filtered and manipulated public square?
The existence of alternatives – from places we can spend our time in cyberspace to physical places we can go to live and be governed more reasonably – provides some course-correcting pressure on legacy institutions.
The “Network Effect” makes the hold of large social media incumbents hard to break, so we’re lucky to have a rogue outsider like @elonmusk come clean house at Twitter. There was otherwise no sufficiently strong feedback loop in place that would disrupt the manipulation going on behind the scenes.
The opening of new frontiers that I’ve been focused on for years offers hope of alternatives to legacy governance, both for those who go and for those whose governments may feel pressured into more competitive practices. Whether the mechanics are spacefaring, seasteading, taming untapped wilderness, building “network states”, or other, we will find and develop new places that open up new possibilities, and – I hope – build better, more robust salutary feedback systems along the way.
Just a loose collection of thoughts so far, on ideas I expect I’ll ponder further. I’m under no illusion that our very substantial political divide is fixable by anything other than people w/different values going separate ways, but this does seem to get at something deeper that may help us understand things better and navigate to where we each need to be w/greater clarity.
Building robust salutary feedback systems into everything seems like a worthy endeavor.
Academy of Ideas brings us a timely and well-articulated warning. The ancient game of debasing currency and inflating the money supply should not be expected to produce different results in our own time.
Pretty horribly, it seems, if what their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed is any indication. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying get to the heart of it in this on-point Dark Horse clip:
And lest you retain an intact shred of hope that once-functioning and crucially important institutions haven’t been compromised, Bret and Heather assure us in episode 144 that “It’s even worse than that” (YouTube, Apple Podcasts). We’ve got some real work to do, if we’re to restore our knowledge-building capabilities to a semblance of sanity and trustworthiness.
That terrible day seems a lifetime ago now. Revisiting my post from last year, I’m both glad that the short-term resurgence of Jihadist attacks on Western targets I feared likely has not yet manifested, and troubled as much as before by long-term consequences of our colossal show of weakness that we can’t yet hope to see.
Grappling with the implications and fallout of our calamitous Afghanistan withdrawal seems likely to be of central importance to this next phase of our post-9/11 history. Vets Jocko Willink and Darryl Cooper recorded a sobering deep dive into the circumstances of the withdrawal in its immediate aftermath, that remains well worth reviewing and pondering. Tim Kennedy subsequently spoke about his volunteer team’s efforts to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies who the evacuation left behind, on Joe Rogan’s podcast and elsewhere, and I just finished watching “Send Me” — the short-documentary account of his team’s rescue efforts that just went live on Amazon Prime this past month. I highly recommend giving some time to all of these. This clip of Tim on Rogan gives the flavor of it and is a good place to start:
Another superb and timely short video from Academy of Ideas. The reference to Václav Havel’s ideas about building “parallel structures” takes me back to Bill Whittle’s 2012 “Where do we go now?” talk, and I wonder whether Bill was aware of an influenced by Havel’s writing on this subject.
One of many profound passages: (See here for the full transcript. It’s well worthwhile.)
Compliance is the food that feeds totalitarians. Compliance is not, and never will be, the path back to some form of normality. Rather non-compliance and civil disobedience are essential to counter the rise of totalitarian rule. But in addition to resistance, a forward escape into a reality absent the sickness of totalitarian rule requires the construction of a parallel society. A parallel society serves two main purposes: it offers pockets of freedom to those rejected by the totalitarian system, or who refuse to participate in it, and it forms the foundation for a new society that can grow out of the ashes of the destruction wrought by the totalitarians. Or as Václav Havel, a dissident under the communist rule of Czechoslovakia, explains in his book The Power of the Powerless:
“When those who have decided to live within the truth have been denied any direct influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the opportunity to participate in them, and when these people begin to create what I have called the independent life of society, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in a certain way.
“…[these] parallel structures do not grow . . .out of a theoretical vision of systemic change (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people.” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
There are innumerable ways to contribute to the construction of a parallel society. One can build technologies that promote freedom or agoristic economic institutions that further voluntary exchange. One can run a business that resists implementing unjust laws or mandates, or one can create media or educational institutions that counter the lies and propaganda of the state. Or one can create music, literature or artwork that counters the staleness of totalitarian culture. The parallel society is a decentralized and voluntary alternative to the centralized and coercive control of the totalitarian society and as Havel explains:
“One of the most important tasks the ‘dissident movements’ have set themselves is to support and develop [parallel social structures]. . . What else are those initial attempts at social self organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to . . . rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the [totalitarian] system?” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
