My review of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book.
PL fail to draw this distinction between academic originators, popularizers, and those who implement ideas. I think this leaves them open to the charge that they have misread the academics, regardless of how accurately they have portrayed Theory as it was articulated by those who have popularized and implemented it.
When up a dangerous faction starts,
With wrath and vengeance in their hearts;
By solemn League and Cov’nant bound,
To ruin, slaughter, and confound;
To turn religion to a fable,
And make the government a Babel;
Pervert the law, disgrace the gown,
Corrupt the senate, rob the crown;
To sacrifice old England’s glory,
And make her infamous in story:
When such a tempest shook the land,
How could unguarded Virtue stand?
-Jonathan Swift
Pluck rose and Lindsay advocate engagement and debate with practitioners of Theory so as to demonstrate the power of superior ideas.
Rod Dreher is having none of it: “Some conservatives think that SJWs should be countered with superior arguments and if conservatives stick with liberal proceduralism they will prevail. This is a fundamental error that blinds conservatives to the radical nature of the threat. You cannot know how to judge and act in the face of these challenges if you cannot see the social justice warriors for what they truly are—and where they do their work.” He advocates instead life apart, secession if you will.
F.H. Buckley points us in another direction: revolutionary violence:
“There are several reasons why American radicals feel drawn to violence. A sense that the country has failed to come to terms with its troubled racial history. A broken student loan program that has made debt slaves of too many of them, and a Congress that failed to deliver the national health plan Americans want. And perhaps also the infirmities of the American constitution, so ill-suited for a divided country where necessity meets impossibility and needed reforms cannot be enacted.
In the end, revolutionary violence is always an indictment of a political system’s democratic legitimacy.”
https://lawliberty.org/the-uses-of-revolutionary-violence/
I’d personally go with subversion but that avenue is being choked off by the multinational tech kritarchs, see James Freeman’s Best of the Web on tech suppression of dissident physicians.
Good luck with constructive engagement, but Dreher and Buckley seem more grounded in reality.
Edgar,
You have a true talent for literary allusions- they are always on target.
In his moral skepticism, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes anticipated today’s cultural relativists who argue that no civilization or system of morality is objectively superior to another. Unlike the postmodernists, however, Holmes didn’t couch his arguments in impenetrable prose; he got right to the point:
“Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions… Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about – you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer – and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man… When men differ in taste as to the kind of world they want, the only thing to do is to go to work killing.”
His solution for preventing endless war of all against all was pure majoritarian rule and hang the Constitution. Though – when good and evil don’t exist and there are only appetites and aversions, when everything is simply a matter of “taste,” and when one kind of world is not objectively better than another – he didn’t explain his basis for preferring peace to endless war. Nor did he explain why majoritarian rule was objectively superior to the rule of law, or, for that matter, why it was better than making legislative decisions by examining the entrails of a duck.
Holmes fought in a Civil War that had ended slavery – an institution that most Americans had supported, or at least not opposed, for several centuries. Presumably, he had an aversion to slavery, though his philosophy would not have allowed him to consider it evil or objectively wrong. And had a future majority decide that slavery would once again satisfy its appetites, Holmes’ beliefs would have required him to acquiesce however distasteful he thought it. As he was fond of saying, “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell, I will help them. It’s my job.”
Of course, neither Holmes nor the cultural relativists desire a return to slavery. By their moral relativism, both Holmes and the postmodernists sought to promote tolerance. As Holmes put it, “We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.” But their moral relativism leaves them no grounds for believing that tolerance is objectively superior to intolerance, or that freedom is better than slavery. Moral relativism informs us that all are matters of taste. Moral relativism, then, is based on nothing – nothing atop nothing all the way down.
Society cannot survive the world of moral relativism; it provides no guardrails requiring us to respect others’ rights, not least because it does not recognize such rights. But an isolated individual can’t survive in such a world either. Why take the trouble of hunting and gathering food when it’s objectively no better than starving to death?
At its best, philosophy helps us deal with life, others, and the world. Any philosophy that makes this harder – or, indeed, impossible – should be rejected out of hand.
I have no doubt that charge has been levied at them and that they’ve been mocked a great deal for ‘not understanding’ the theories they’re criticizing, but these theories, like the now infamous critical race theory, seem to be deliberately obscure. The terminology is opaque, references are esoteric, arguments are often winding and speculative. Such a theory has the advantage that one can always claim – and probably convince oneself – that the critic simply doesn’t understand the theory in all its sophistication. The more obscure an argument is, the harder it is to refute. In academia, bad ideas don’t really die, they just become more complex (e.g., accrue more and more epicycles).
To its credit, one school of Marxists – analytical Marxism – reacted against the obscurantism of popular continental Marxists by formalizing the Marxist theory of history, rendering it more falsifiable. But this probably won’t happen with the ‘cynical theories’ of today, since their proponents seem averse to formal logic and would likely reject on principle the idea of formally and clearly stating their models in a way that renders them at least hypothetically falsifiable.
What would it take to stop the Theory Arnold talks about?
The people currently propagating that Theory because they believe it to their advantage would have to believe it was no longer to their advantage.
What would do that?
Harsh penalties for propagating theory.
Trumps executive order is a start, but what else.
Anyone teaching, proselytizing, or basing public or private policy on critical theory should be punished. Financially and perhaps criminally.
Anyone engaging in affirmative action should have the full weight of the law fall on them the way it would if they were discriminating against one of the “oppressed classes”. Harvard should have its endowment confiscated and its operations shut down until it admits whites and asians at a rate commensurate with merit. Disparate impact can be the measuring stick, but a disparate impact based on common sense meritocratic measures rather than population %.
If the judges won’t do this, others should do it. If it takes mob violence, it takes mob violence. If we need to appropriate and confiscate media and technology firms in order to shape public opinion to accept this, so be it. If people don’t like all that, start enforcing the common sense reading of all these laws we supposedly have.
Can you imagine any other scenario where we defeat theory? Is another op-ed, blog post, or YouTube video stating the same old thing going to pursued elites that ditching Theory is more in their interests then embracing it?
Ignore “the theory”. Contain “the theorists” that want to impose it. And if they cross the red line, hit them hard.
That has been enough in the past 100 years because we are talking always about the same theory –a justification for absolute power– and the same constituency —young people that soon will become old. Unfortunately, in the past 5 years, the Democrats have supported “the theorists” to get the support of such constituency in the election. The support includes both many platforms and a lot of money. But they are still a minority and thus why they are ready to cross the red line.
Do you actually imagine mob violence or extrajudicial punishment for propagating a theory would lead to victory?
Violence works when it works and doesn’t when it doesn’t. For violence to work people need to believe it will be consistent and irresistible. It can’t be random and controllable.
I admit that effective coordinated violence of that type is unlikely.
But what is the likelihood of non-violent methods working? What incentive to people who are giving in to theory have to stop? None, as far as I can tell. If there is no real resistance, why should momentum ever stop.
Let’s take a simple example. You are an Asian upset about the University of San Fransisco Medical School cutting Asian enrollment from 60% to 20%. What should you do?
You’re a good law abiding non-violent liberal. So why not pass a law. But wait, California already has a law on the books for this. A popular referendum. Did it stop USFMS from doing this? Did the law punish USFMS? No. Maybe you can go to the supreme court at the federal level? But no, this has been litigated a lot of times already and affirmative action always wins. And the lower courts are rejecting the case before them right now. Good luck. Even if they did find in your favor, why should that matter anymore than the current law in California does.
No, if you want to change that you are going to need to protest. Big time. More than what I’ve seen fail in a lot of districts around the country. The people making these decision literally need to believe that it is in their best interest to no longer make these decisions, and it ain’t going to take a polite letter.
Violence generally only works when you can totally defeat your opponent (e.g., French and Russian revolutions). Otherwise it’s almost certainly just going to aggravate them. This is pretty well demonstrated by history. Sympathy for the civil rights movement was largely achieved by activists being *victims* of violence. Race riots and political terrorism, on the other hand, later got Nixon elected. September 11 was supposed to scare the US out of the middle east; instead it got the US angry and even more into the middle east. Riots today in Portland or Kenosha have worked to the advantage of the right, not the left. People don’t react to intimidation the way you think they do, the way everyone thinks they do when it’s cathartic to fantasize about vindictive violence. It rarely makes them give in. Usually it just gets them angry. A rash of right wing violence against left-leaning institutions would mostly just turn the remaining garden variety progressives that inhabit them into Leninists in short order.
Voting, boycotting, obtaining political power, or moving somewhere else are your hypothetical person’s only options. If none of those work, that doesn’t mean throwing molotov cocktails will.
“Violence generally only works when you can totally defeat your opponent”
I agree.
Though I’d say “make your opponent re-evaluate his incentive structure” is more accurate. Our country didn’t win its independence by conquering England and completely defeating them, it used violence to change King George’s incentive structure.
“Riots today in Portland or Kenosha have worked to the advantage of the right, not the left.”
Then why are Democrats about to sweep elected legislatures and all of their policy proposals are law of the land in public and private.
“It rarely makes them give in.”
We are literally watching leaders of all our major institutions give in to leftist violence every single day.
“Race riots and political terrorism, on the other hand, later got Nixon elected. ”
The Nixon Silent Majority is dead. The country that elected Richard Nixon was vastly whiter and full of Archie Bunker types. The country today is full of brown people and pajama boys indoctrinated from birth.
This isn’t going to go the same way it did in the 1970s because we aren’t the same country anymore.
The right obtains political power all the time, but it never gets to exercise it (its usually blocked by unelected bodies) and when it does its reversed in a later election. How could it not, given demographic and educational/cultural trends.
“moving somewhere else”
People have been doing this since the 60s. They abandoned the cities, now they are asked to abandon the suburbs. They moved to California, and now they are asked to abandon that. If they move to Texas, how long until Texas turns blue (demographers standing by to tell you). Where exactly are people supposed to go that isn’t going to be overrun by the same trends that destroy the place they ran away from?
“A rash of right wing violence against left-leaning institutions would mostly just turn the remaining garden variety progressives that inhabit them into Leninists in short order.”
If it was half assed, yes.
“If none of those work, that doesn’t mean throwing molotov cocktails will.”
It might not, but I’d say it has a better chance than what you listed.
asdf,
So now you are explicitly calling for right wing street violence complete with Molotov cocktails as long as it is not “half-assed.”
Meanwhile Trump has gone full Fascist demanding that the political opposition including
Biden and Obama simply be arrested now for Treason and making clear the only electoral outcome he will recognize is his own victory even as he trails in every poll by huge margins.
And, of course, in your world, the riots in Portland and Kenosha are the reason FOR the Biden lead in the polls while the grotesque incompetence of the Trump Administration has nothing to do with his unpopularity.
Democrats are winning plenty of ballots without Trump on it. And here’s a newsflash, Romney and McCain lost.
If we had the demographics of the 1970s we would have the election results of the 1970s. This is a mathematical fact.
Beyond demographics I think Biden leads in the polls because senior citizens were scared by the media to shut down their entire society because of an overblown flu. I find it sickening that we’ve shut down schools, thrown millions out of work, implemented a million daily tyrannies into peoples lives, and likely killed far life years then then we saved (this is easy enough to prove mathematically).
But hey, fear worked. Are you proud of yourself?
>—“But hey, fear worked. Are you proud of yourself?”
You have got to be kidding. Back in March you were telling us daily how much you personally need to be protected from the virus due to your own medical issues. Now that 200,000 more people are dead from it with only a small fraction of the population yet exposed to it, it’s just an “overblown flu.” Whatever. The other guy’s position is always evil even if it was yours not that long ago.
I have been much more agnostic all along about what the best policy is. I was first convinced of the importance masks right here by Arnold. I don’t think we will know for sure what the best public policy on the virus was until much later. There is still way too much we don’t understand about it.
I am most distrusting of the people like you who think we already know enough to be certain what the best public policy is.
@asdf @Greg G
Re: lockdowns
Here is a fun one to ponder:
Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public.
What experimental drug would ever be approved if there were so much conflicting evidence of its efficacy and so much solid evidence of its harmful side effects?
By the QALY measure, the lockdowns must be the most costly—and cost-ineffective—medical intervention in history because most of the beneficiaries are so near the end of life. Covid-19 disproportionately affects people over 65, who have accounted for nearly 80 percent of the deaths in the United States. The vast majority suffered from other ailments, and more than 40 percent of the victims were living in nursing homes, where the median life expectancy after admission is just five months.
https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-must-end
Yes, in March I was worried because the available evidence seemed a lot worse. The IFR in Northern Italy in march looked really bad. China had declared Marshall law. I’m not going to apologize for thinking a temporary freeze in March was a bad idea. If I was running the lockdown they would have been over fairly quickly. Maybe I wouldn’t have had them at all if I had the level of evidence our decision makers had at the time.
Bit its goddamn October. And you’re voting for the party of school shutdowns and welding playgrounds shut. What is wrong with you. Trump says “don’t live in fear, don’t let it dominate your life” and your party and your candidate freak out and tell everyone “LIVE IN FEAR, LET IT DOMINATE YOUR LIFE.”
People in Sweden are taking mass transit without masks and my mother in law is locked in her home unwilling to go outside because the news told her that it’s some kind of death sentence. This is monstrous, and you are supporting the monsters.
asdf,
I think you may be confusing me with someone else. Beyond thinking that we do need to keep the healthcare system from being overrun I have not advocated ANY particular lockdown policy. I DON’T KNOW what the right level of school openings would be. (This is a local matter anyway.) There are countless natural experiments going on now and someday we will have a much clearer picture of which policies were best. And the best policy in a place with one set of conditions will likely turn out to be different from the best policy in places with different conditions.
You have never suffered from any such uncertainty. When your position was 180 degrees different from what it is today you were just as certain you were right and your opposition was evil as you are today.
The President has much less power to determine lockdown policy in the states than the governors. That’s probably a good thing. The main thing that has changed since March is that despite Trump predicting it would be over by Easter, and despite vastly improved treatments, the death count has ballooned by 200,000 despite the fact that the vast majority of the population has not yet been exposed yet.
As much as possible, I think individuals should be free to choose their own level of risk. The problem is, you can’t increase your own level of risk a lot without also increasing someone else’s level of risk who may not consent to that. This is one of many cases where important values can conflict.
As for your mother-in-law’s choices, I’ll bet they have a lot more to do with her opinion of the reliability of your views than any effects of mine.
“I DON’T KNOW what the right level of school openings would be.”
The people you are voting for do and are implementing those beliefs right now. You aren’t a bystander. You are enabling their power to do this.
“You have never suffered from any such uncertainty. When your position was 180 degrees different from what it is today you were just as certain you were right and your opposition was evil as you are today.”
My position was never 180 degrees different. My position was that if ability of the disease to spread and its lethality were in line with some of the credible assertions at the time with limited evidence that was available in March that it would be impossible for society to function and that we would probably get a lockdown anyway within a month but at a much higher level of infection that was harder to control and might drag on longer.
I did think people who agreed with that assessment of the facts but disagreed with doing anything on the basis of a deontological commitment to either limiting government power of a devil may care attitude towards consequences generally were dogmatic, irresponsible, or both. On a personal level I had this argument with my father about going to choir practice in March. I still maintain that something as high risk as choir practice wouldn’t be a smart idea for him, because the facts still show that to be a risky activity.
If you actually believe this thing had a super high IFR , with 10x that in permanent lung damage, spread on surfaces, didn’t reach effective saturation at 2x% of the population, and you weren’t in favor of the lockdowns I don’t know what to tell you.
Because my opinion on those facts has changed, my opinion on the lockdown has changed, and it changed months ago.
I didn’t have a problem with people who disputed those facts, but I had a problem with people that felt facts weren’t important for determining courses of action.
“this is one of many cases where important values can conflict.”
Is it? We know how many people are dying from the disease, and we have a rough idea of the impacts of the lockdowns. We can actually do some math on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biC4nHPYtbA
If you don’t have the time, this interview from June basically summarizes that even when the death rate was higher than today the lockdowns were causing more loss of life years than the lockdown was saving.
“The main thing that has changed since March is that despite Trump predicting it would be over by Easter, and despite vastly improved treatments, the death count has ballooned by 200,000 despite the fact that the vast majority of the population has not yet been exposed yet.”
The main thing that has happened since then is all those models predicting millions of deaths didn’t happen. Those that have died have largely been older individuals that would have died soon anyway. And nearly every place that already got hit bad started to top out at 2X% of the population and the curve flattened pretty much regardless of human intervention and the hospitals never got overwhelmed after the initial surge.
Throughout the entire affair Trumps attitude ended up proving closer to the truth than his opponents. In fact I’d say that by Easter this was all becoming apparent. If we had ended the lockdown and moved on with our lives in Easter that would be a superior world to the one we inhabit.
My big mistake was not understanding that the messaging could so effectively control public opinion, and that even if the evidence started to line up against the lockdowns they would be impossible to remove if the powers that be wanted to maintain them.
P.S. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/systemic-racism-wells-fargo-microsoft/
Can you imagine a Biden administration doing this?
He Fights!
>—“The people you are voting for do and are implementing those beliefs right now. You aren’t a bystander. You are enabling their power to do this.”
If only I was as powerful as you imagine. These lockdowns are state and local issues, not national ones. I haven’t even had the chance to vote in a state or local election since the virus became an issue. In any event I live far from you and have no responsibility at all for the state and local decisions affecting you. There have been many Republican governors who have imposed lockdowns when the virus threatened to overwhelm their healthcare systems. Take it up with them if you like.
>—“The main thing that has happened since then is all those models predicting millions of deaths didn’t happen.”
Not only did I never endorse such a model. I never even saw such a model. This is a straw man argument of the most transparent type.
>—“Throughout the entire affair Trumps attitude ended up proving closer to the truth than his opponents. In fact I’d say that by Easter this was all becoming apparent. If we had ended the lockdown and moved on with our lives in Easter that would be a superior world to the one we inhabit.”
Simply delusional. Trump maintained the virus would never amount to anything in the first place. All along he has been a fountain of misinformation on the topic.
If he had simply come out in favor of masks and social distancing as the most cost effective way of avoiding further lockdowns and economic damage he could have made that part of his brand and enjoyed the bump in popularity that virtually every other world leader got from the crisis. What he did on that was not just medically dumb. It was politically dumb.
Instead he ridiculed the value of masking and social distancing and literally personally became a super spreader modeling the dumbest possible behavior.
It is the disease itself and the voluntary changes in behavior that the disease causes that are causing most of the economic damage that you attribute to the government lockdowns which have been mostly lifted. Perhaps the Swedish model will prove best. We’ll see. Either way the Swedes have still not avoided a severe recession.
Greg,
You support leftists, democrats, and the blue check opinion making class. That makes you complicit in what they come up with. You are voting for Biden who is pro lockdown. Don’t dodge the question with this “local issue” bullcrap. It’s the same policy everywhere supported by the same people everywhere.
“Not only did I never endorse such a model. I never even saw such a model. This is a straw man argument of the most transparent type.”
They were the given basis of the lockdown when it happened and the only real argument ever given. They were the narrative back in March.
When I was pro lockdown in March, it was because I felt a variant of such modeling (many millions dead) could come true given the information at the time. As new information made me doubt those predictions, I stopped favoring the lockdown.
“Trump maintained the virus would never amount to anything in the first place. ”
The average age of a Covid death is 82.4. Average life expectancy is 78.4. How many life years has this thing taken? Even if I was super generous and said five for each of the 200,000 deaths, that is 1 million life years. The USA has 330 million people with a median age of 38.4. If I give them 40 more years of life (less then my covid deaths) that’s over 13 billion life years. Meaning the death rate is something like 0.01% of life years.
That is literally “nothing”. Trump was right as a matter of fact! This is indisputable and you have absolutely nothing to stand on.
“If he had simply come out in favor of masks and social distancing as the most cost effective way of avoiding further lockdowns and economic damage ”
Masks and social distancing aren’t that important as Sweden shows. You people were even against masks for the entire early part of the lockdown. If we are in a lockdown with only a 0.01% death rate, masks weren’t going to make a difference. They aren’t offering it open schools if everyone wears a mask. Nor are they offering any concrete metrics by which to open schools. States far below the WHO infection threshold for school reopening still haven’t done it.
It’s about power and leftist dogma. If anything masks and hiding in ones home show blind compliance to lockdowns and make our elites less afraid to press them.
“Instead he ridiculed the value of masking and social distancing and literally personally became a super spreader modeling the dumbest possible behavior.”
Trump showed that 74 year old obese man barely even got sick from the virus. That the state of our current treatments is vastly superior to six months ago. That these supposedly “unproven” treatments and vaccines (that have decent early data on them and are safe enough) ought to be made more available to ordinary people. And that fear doesn’t have to be how you live your life.
The Governor of my state, a Trump hating Democrat that loves masks and lockdowns, also got COVID around the same time despite being “PRO SCIENCE!”. He didn’t learn a damn thing from it though or change his stance after being a senior citizen who didn’t even get symptoms from this supposed murder virus.
“It is the disease itself and the voluntary changes in behavior that the disease causes that are causing most of the economic damage”
In addition to actual government policy that greatly harmed out society and continues to (my neighbors kids still can’t go to school), I agree that the climate of fear created by leftists is a huge part of the problem. You are contributing to that climate of fear by supporting leftists and their narrative.
I’m sympathetic to original postmodernism and the idea we should be skeptical of anything proposed as an absolute truth.
It is therefore important that the pathologies of reified postmodernism don’t discredit the original. If society is to survive, then we need to reduce our reliance on sacred principles as a way of generating social cohesion. Because in a quickly changing world, sacralising values, laws, and institutions inhibits the ability of society to adapt, putting its survival into question. Arnold Toynbee already saw that as being the seed of decline for societies in the past. Given that the rate of societal change has multiplied, this risk has grown in importance.
So in contrast to what many think, original postmodernism has a role in helping society survive.
Thankfully, reified postmodernism is very exposed to the critique of the original. If “Theory” is to be stopped, then the best way forward is to propose another ideology robust to the critique of original postmodernism. This new ideology would then be able to apply that critique pretty mercilessly against the reified version.
That is what I try to do with Metasophism (outlined on my website), which tries to integrate the critique of original postmodernism by only holding one sacred principle: that the mission for humanity should be to acquire knowledge and survive, in the hope that one day we may discover some objective idea of good — if it actually exists.
That values knowledge and its production, without putting any set of values on a pedestal: an ideology that incubates sub-ideologies, while not allowing any individual one to dominate — thereby forcing them to be prestige hierarchies rather than dominance hierarchies.
Sorry, there is no way out of the history of our evolution. Either we attempt to understand how we have been evolving to survive AND flourish, or we rely on the old but erroneous view that there is some objective idea of good. BTW, we have dissected the idea of knowledge and we “know” that it cannot be our sacred cow because there have never been and will ever be two humans alike.
I see it this way.
Either there exists an objective concept of good, or not.
If not, then we are in a world of moral nihilism. Nothing can be criticised on moral grounds, for there are none.
But if there is an objective good, then the next logical step is to try to figure out what that is. I don’t know if it that is possible, but it could be.
So the idea that there might be an objective good, and that it might be discoverable, is really the motivating logic of this.
Knowledge is just a means to an end — it’s not really the sacred cow. The whole philosophy is really more of a quest to discover the sacred cow, fully conscious that it may not even exist.
So you want to use the sacred cow as a carrot for containing people’s dark side and promote their bright side. It’s a very old idea: you are not sure that God exists, but you behave well because God may exist. The priests’ role is to warn us about the rules God wants we follow. Your view relies on God as the source of rules.
To the extent that my understanding of human history is based on what our ancestors learned from their ancestors, I can claim that they learned the social norms needed to contain people’s dark side and promote their bright side. So my view relies on tradition as the source of rules.
What EB-Ch says, and more to the point – most people are not very intellectual and have little interest in acquiring knowledge. Therefore an ideology of knowledge production will not much appeal to them when good old-fashioned “blame the other ape tribe for all bad things and take their stuff” ideologies are on offer.
I agree with your first point.
To resume my previous reply, I would see this as a quest for humanity, not for every single individual.
And for humanity to follow this quest, it will need to survive for a very long time. There is a role in that for everyone who wants it. For example, long-term survival requires a high degree of societal cohesion. That is helped when we have tidy streets, well-kept parks, and beautiful buildings — all of these can create a sense of pride in the community, and perhaps also a willingness to bear the occasional sacrifice when necessary.
None of the people involved in that need to acquire knowledge as such (other than that needed to do their job). But they would have an individual role in greater narrative — and it could be explicitly recognised.
If properly developed, that could be something spectator politics can’t really match.
Some people will certainly seek truth. We’re doing it right now, to some extent. But how can they withstand the constant revolutions of those who follow different, ever-changing narratives? Just because you don’t care about the wars doesn’t mean the wars don’t care about you.
This is an important risk to guard against and I try to address it in the book in two ways.
First, let’s consider the reasons why people revolt. Among these could be inequality, boredom, a sense of anger at self-interested elites, or a lack of meaning. There are ways of preventing those conditions from arising – I have a chapter each on three of those factors, but not all of them are online yet.
Second, it’s true different generations and factions are going to want to do things differently. I think that should actually be facilitated, and I would do so as follows: give the young support to form their own projects, and give them the chance to define their own story for how they would contribute to the common mission. This non-hierarchial dimension might be able to co-opt those who want to change things, before they really turn against it.
I don’t think the above would get rid of all conflict and disaffection, but it could get rid of a chunk of it, and thus stop it from getting critical.