I'm trying something new where we I start a series on here where I interview my peers who are pursuing interesting lines of thinking or research, in the arts, sciences, philosphy, whatever it may be.
"Writing" is in an interesting place right now. The internet has a bad ecology at the moment; really it's had a bad ecology or a while. People asking big questions and thinking outside the box, or whatever have you, are having a hard time finding each other... leaving interesting people isolated and cynical. Facing a culture-war paradigm where everything must position themselves somewhere against "left" and "right" — two quasi-arbitrary categories continuously elevated to trans-historical absolutes — we have been bracketed into an oppositional discourse which has been impossible to escape from.
At some point, the blogosphere died, and then at some other point, it was singlehandedly revived by Substack. Why am I not writing on Substack? Maybe because everyone else is, and because it's so easy to make your own HTML website, and yet no one is doing that. It's a protest against slop, or trends, or even curation entirely, or something like that.
Where are we supposed to talk to each other? In group chats? In Discords? In the Substack comment section? Nothing feels exactly quite right. There is plausibly a way that with the right plumbing, a "Republic of Letters" could be created on the internet somehow, and a new renaissance could be birthed. Or maybe this is a fantasy. Writing this now, three days after the Trump victory in America, the future of culture and its ecology feels totally unpredictable, and like anything can shift.
As you'll see in the following conversation, Zoomer Schopenhauer, an online philosopher who describes himself as a "futurist internet nomad", has been asking the same questions, though from an askance angle. Where do the nomadic intellectuals of the future find each other? And when we find each other, where do we begin?
Hi, thanks for agreeing to do this. I was interested in this dialogue because we've been friendly online for a while, and I was always curious to see where your ideas would develop, and I saw recently that you've been making gestures that you're perhaps becoming more confident in a position you've found, making a tweet saying you're "entering the game" for instance.
Since I've known you, I've known you to have roughly two interests, one being philosophy of science, specifically I remember you wanting to find arguments to defend a metaphysics of scientific realism, and then secondarily being a form of politics on the right, I don't know if you would describe yourself as far right or endorse that label but I basically think of you as on the Twitter far right or dissident right. I was always wondering about you where the overlap is between these two interests, like why would the same person be interested in both, and lately on your Substack you seem to be making a kind of synthesis where Aristotelean and Nietzschean philosophies of life sciences are informing the politics, this is something I'm really interested in. And then I'll bring your account up sometimes to my friends who are more on the left, and they'll often say something like "oh that guy is clearly super smart, it's a shame about his politics, it's weird to me that someone that smart would have those views, I wonder what's up with him", so there's also that question, if you're perhaps unusual for being philosophical and also hard right.
It feels like on the online right, a lot of the arguments are getting quite stale, like we who have been following this for a while can all recognize certain perspectives that are propagating themselves, like there's the Yarvin thing, there's the BAP thing, there's the Fuentes thing, and then you just see the same clashes and arguments over and over, to the point where I'm beginning to find the right a lot less interesting to follow than I used to. But you're kind of an interesting figure because you're one of the people I still talk to on Twitter who reads, takes ideas seriously, and develops novel perspectives, so maybe you're getting to something new that isn't just the same old.
Anyway, that's where I'm coming from, I suppose you can feel free to introduce yourself and say more about your projects however you would describe them.
What I do is made possible by a reading group which has continually operated since 2019. We’ve more or less been uninterrupted and have read about topics from philosophy, mass psychology, cultural evolution, economics, and so forth. We as a group have developed a mature view of a strong philosophical naturalism, scientific realism, Darwinianism, and anti-egalitarianism. The main source of more normative and prescriptive views comes from Spinoza and Nietzsche.
The scientific realist and naturalist approach leads to a theoretical reductionism in which everything has to be explained according to the language of fundamental physics. Politics and history are of course not feasibly reducible to a language like Quantum Field theory, so the main anchors are Darwinism and dynamical systems theory. Political structures exist through time, have disparate elements and are complex systems, they are subject to the same conditions of natural selection that organisms are.
What we have researched in politics are various forms of determinisms which purport to explain how political systems work and how they evolve. They have all failed in being overly focused on one cause, whereas the different elements of the system react to each other in nonlinear ways. For example, geopolitical realism, whether it’s classical, offensive or defensive realism, all has to ignore the internal politics of a country in explaining state behaviour according to the security incentives in the dynamically interacting international state system.
You can’t do this because you in the end will actually fail to explain history, which is filled with irrational decisions mediated by internal politics. The fall of the Roman Empire for example can’t be explained by it. Another failed explanation is Marxism which reduces the state to being a mere arena of economic forces. Marxism thus fails to recognise the autonomous state interest in security competition outside economic competition, so it only focuses on dominant-economic-class, bottom-economic-class relations, and never state-elite conflicts, of which history is abundant with examples.
The final form of political determinism worth mentioning is Malthusianism, which sees the engine of history in demographic trends - population growth being compound and carrying agricultural capacity being linear. Thus eventually within a society surplus agricultural product approaches zero and collapse occurs. Within agrarian societies this model is incredibly impressive, however there are a couple of holes in the story.
For example after the plague in Europe you should have seen a recovery as population pressure was relieved and thus real wages gone up and a recovery set in. But this didn’t happen because aristocrats increased rents in order to maintain conspicuous consumption levels. The commonly cited hole of massive agrarian boosts due to technology in the 19th century isn’t really a hole however, as this kind of thing is perfectly compatible with the Malthusian thesis about the fundamental relation of population growth to pressure on resources. Africa right now is quite clearly headed towards a traditional Malthusian scenario, and in the West you have a different Malthusian scenario in which agriculture isn’t under threat due to mechanised production and global trade, but population pressure due largely to mass migration is radically increasing the costs of Housing, Energy, and so forth in ways which mirror older forms of Labour oversupply.
This is why, as Jack Goldstone argued, you need a structural-demographic theory, which takes into account the dynamic relation between elite behaviour and population trends. This as developed by Turchin and Nefodov is for my money the most sophisticated and advanced model of political evolution.
So the framework is cultural evolution, which takes into account elite theory (the iron law of oligarchy applies to all societies at or above medium sized agrarian), demographic analysis, the reality of conflicts in the international system and the autonomy of the state’s interests here, and class conflict. Of course there are far more factors such as technology, ecology and culture which affect how these processes play out.
The incompatibility with leftism is that leftism as an emancipatory egalitarian framework has to deny for its own coherence real inequality, particularly at a genetic level. Thus observable group differences in class and race have to be straight up denied or explained away in some conspiratorial framework such as critical race theory. It also affects criminology, as a commitment to blank statist egalitarianism necessarily results in rehabilitationism, whereas if predisposition to crime is largely genetic then mass incarceration and the death penalty are incredibly rational.
Elite theory and mass psychology also put the myths underpinning modern mass democracy under serious pressure as well. Our society believes in the myth of of a rational voter, whereas in reality people vote in partisan and tribal ways, with individual elections being determined by punitive voting that almost never has a clear relation to actual political causes of downturns, and tends to be in a short memory timespan of six months to the election.
Most of the right isn’t particularly coherent once you’ve strayed off the path of con inc, and has many stupid tendencies towards fads, superstition, whining complacency, edginess, historical revisionism (by which I mean not understandings of history which don’t fit the “standard story” of events, of which there almost always is, but a blatant falsification of the historical record to serve particular political ends), science denial, conspiracy theories and many other faults.
I don’t debate my being labeled “right” because I know I would never be accepted onto the left, so intersubjectively I accept that’s where I am put. Intersubjectively accepted labels are unfortunately more useful than historically accurate ones. Ultimately, despite all these faults, there are some realities which the left simply axiomatically must reject in ways that I don’t ever feel compelled to do myself.
Thanks for the in-depth response. It actually is important I think that you think of yourself as merely intersubjectively on the right rather than objectively, because there's this other tendency on the right, which Yarvin (on his old blog) or Zero HP Lovecraft for instance will do, of insisting on the transhistorical reality of right vs left and insist that right is always good and left is always evil, because right represents order and left usurpation or something like that, so it's informative for me to know that you reject this perspective and consider these labels to be one of convenience, that would be closer to my perspective as well.
I'm curious about this "theoretical reduction to the language of fundamental physics" you're seeking to perform, or to put it more bluntly I'm skeptical. What you're telling me is that the scientific theories you're interested in bringing into the political are Darwin, Malthus, an anti-egalitarian hereditarian hypothesis, and then I suppose something like Turchin's thesis that political revolutions can be modeled scientifically using systems theory. My problem with this is that I would argue there is an extrapolation from the subject-object relationship of natural sciences to the intersubjective quality of the social sciences that can't be simply crossed through in this "realist" way, because you as a social subject are part of the field you're studying. In the sciences, one has to do a great deal of work to eliminate the perspective of the experimenter to pure neutrality to not bias the results, but when you become interested in the social sciences in order to make sweeping changes in the social field itself, this becomes plainly impossible, I would think.
So personally while I think this pure "blank slate theory" which would deny real genetic difference is clearly wrong, I would myself reject any attempt to make a framework to describe genetic differences which would be wedded to the political, out of a kind of Foucaldian generalized skepticism of the social sciences as an instrument of power. What's interesting is that I kind of got to this skepticism of the social sciences in the first place by reading a lot of the same online right-wing thought you probably read. I came from the rationalist/post-rationalist subculture originally in terms of my online activity so I was always interested in meta-analysis, centrist liberal projects like Vox media which would purport to fix political debate by bringing in studies by experts, but then I realized the limitation of thinking this way through a lot of the satire the right directed towards Ted-talk culture, basically telling people to trust their instincts and tradition rather than these biased "experts" who actually are pretty untrustworthy when you break it down.
So one thing I think is an interesting divide on the right is that there are these people obsessed with scientifically classifying group differences with IQ and so on, but then there are also people like Bronze Age Pervert who are equally as racist but reject the use of science here as like, a mark of an insufficiently romantic soul. You should be using spiritual intuition to evaluate people, you shouldn't need studies, according to this mindset. Which is something I am almost more sympathetic to in a way. But I guess based on what you are saying, you are fed up with this kind of superstition and revisionism and rejection of science on the right, and would like to put it on firmer ground.
I guess this gets into the big question here invoking your scientific realism is that it seems like you're going to have some generalized theory of the social sciences (which I currently don't have myself, I'm still trying to work it out). My frustration with a lot of the right is complete lack of principle when it comes to how they ground their epistemology, simply wanting to grab at whatever suits their argument -- they'll often take the BAP line that studies and papers and reading is fake and gay or whatever and if you're manly you just solve problems by hitting things with rocks instead of reading about it, until they come across a paper that argues something they like, in which case liberals are science denialists if you don't accept the conclusions. You seem better than this, but you also make overtures towards the romantic worldview in your writing, so I'm wondering how you recognize these, scientific realism and romanticism.
On somewhat similar lines, it's obvious at least from your perspective I'm sure that so much of existing social science and social theory seems to just serve what is convenient for power to express, with entire departments at universities existing just to write endless "woke" narratives which put minorities in the victim role and white men as oppressors, etc., so we would need some kind of theory of what went wrong. It seems like a lot of dissident right types look at this as just a pure us vs. them thing, like the problem is that they got too many of their guys in there, we need to clear them all out and replace them with our guys, but I for one would totally reject that gesture as it would just be a recipe to create a different type of bastard science bolstering a different pseudo-orthodoxy, and I'm guessing you would as well.
This probably gets into the elite theory aspects of your project which is something I'm very eager to talk about because I think about this a lot too and it seems deeply important to me, but I suppose I'll let you answer a bit more about the philosophy of science before we get into that.
I do support an overall framework for the social sciences, nakedly rigorous scientific standards, a focus on quantitative research, and the best overall framework for making sense of social phenomena is cultural evolution, which evolved out of the Socio-Biology movement. I think for example viewing microeconomics not from the perspective of rational utility maxxers but as naturally evolved often irrational beings has been very useful. On this level and on equilibrium models evolutionary economics is almost breaking the neoclassical orthodoxy. I think resistance to Darwinism as an overall framework comes from people who have ideological reasons to resist it, not legitimate ones.
I think that the bad social sciences we see which use a lot of nebulous terminology and come up with a lot of low confidence studies emerged out of the corpse of positivism as a sort of gate keeping method within academia. Nonetheless I’m not actually anti academia as what is almost always the case is that many things considered politically controversial are in fact not controversial within academia, for example practically all the psychometric studies on intelligence aren’t controversial, if you’re a historian of Africa you’re going to largely blame the post independence African leadership more than neocolonialism and so forth. It’s just that this isn’t what’s communicated to the public, so rent control, no economists endorse it, they have the numbers and the studies, but it’s actively politically debated anyway.
The problem with academia is that it has created entire “Mickey Mouse” degree fields which are entirely focused on left wing bio politics, this many people have discussed so I won’t go further. The second problem with academia is that it’s simply far too big, universities are ranked based on research, but the administrators care about maximum students for maximum accommodation and tuition loans. This doesn’t benefit society in any way, other than creating another class of rent seekers, since it just becomes a mass processing of people through a system with less and less ability to tailor a good experience for individual students.
Because there’s only a limited number of hyper intelligent people who can create new knowledge society doesn’t get a return on investment, it just sees a depreciation of the value of credentials. This all costs an extraordinary amount of money, increasing state and personal debt, whilst also dangerously destabilising society, since a disproportionate amount of elite aspirants relative to elite positions leads to a widespread malaise due to the painfully obvious lack of opportunity.
So I see academia as more of a victim of a culture which doesn’t have clear foundations and another facet of a society in a stagflationary phase. Anti-intellectualism is not just a product of this elite overproduction problem but of the stagflation itself, since the only area in western societies which sees consistent growth is the knowledge economy, people on the outside of that with no future come to despise it and regard it as “fake”. The solution again isn’t to ban the knowledge economy it’s to actually provide solutions to people’s lack of economic opportunities.
To get to the more philosophical side of what you were asking about scientific realism, I think all arguments which try to put up some sort of conservative limit and box in scientific realism rest on what Sellars called the myth of the given. You have to have this kind of organic relationship with the categorial structure of a lifeworld that you’re stuck in which science can’t reach beyond, phenomenology is the most famous brand of this but there’s many others. My problem is that epistemologically, I don’t think there is any intrinsically intelligible structure of the world which we just receive, all knowledge is socially constructed.
Within the manifest image we simply have certain questions with which we do not have the resources to answer only using life-world language, for example we all experience magnets, but you more or less can’t explain them without immediately going to quantum physics. Natural Science is able to make extraordinarily precise predictions about the target systems studied and it would be miraculous for there not to be an isomorphism between the model and what is modelled.
Science tracks what Sellars called real connections, it creates models which map onto the real structures and relations in the world. The two real limits that science faces are that it has to be a revisable language, but I’ve already advanced a view in which the conceptual scaffolding of the theory is less important than the functionality of the structure. Secondly I don’t think science knows about the underlying things-in-themselves, it won’t get to the “fundamental stuffs” of the world but that’s because in my opinion there are no such things. And this is a metaphysical position which goes back to Heraclitus with the unity of opposites, The Buddhists with Sunyata and dependent origination, Nietzsche’s version of actualism, debatably in Poincaré, and in Eddington.
It’s the relationist picture of the world. It’s like as Deleuze said in difference and repetition, behind everything there is difference, and behind difference there is nothing. I ultimately think this metaphysical stance actually is both more scientifically plausible but also more parsimonious even than a Kantian positing of a necessary world of things in themselves of which we can’t know, which we have known is deeply paradoxical all the way back to Jacobi.
To summarise I don’t think that you can make sense of the success of science without saying that it tracks something real, the ontological scaffolding which it posits is revisable, and it doesn’t yield knowledge of the thing in itself because reality bottoms out in structure with nothing behind it. Of course this can be challenged from multiple angles but it’s what I regard as the strongest view and it’s what I’d endorse.
Thanks, that’s all quite interesting. So you’re saying you’d essentially endorse positivism and quantifiable methods within the social sciences as a way of keeping it relatively objective and free from political bias, and you’d claim we have a system today that in certain areas is able to ground itself in these rigorous frameworks (eg the psychometric studies and the historians of Africa you cite as authoritative), yet in other areas has created these “Mickey Mouse” fields nearly entirely for political reasons.
So to you then, there isn’t any kind of generalized problem in finding unbiased knowledge in the social sciences, this epistemological problem is already largely solved, but the accuracy of the sciences translates insufficiently into policy because these “Mickey Mouse” fields on the one hand, and popular unpalatability on the other.
I have a few questions but I’ll try to avoid asking anything multi-pronged as it’s probably cleaner if I just do one at a time. My question, since you don’t seem adverse to engaging with popular politics yourself, is do you see any hope for reform of academia through these means? I know you’re British but being American I’m biased towards looking at what’s happening here — many conservatives seem to see Christopher Rufo as the most effective activist the right has had in a while putting pressure on publicly-funded schools to change the curricula, although I’m not sure exactly what he’s accomplished. Is this the type of thing you find interesting, or no, or is there any kind of viable agenda for reform that comes to mind?
Yes, I think you need frameworks in academia and in particular the social sciences which filter frauds out, competency in statistics and a generally empiricist framework are a good start. It just means you have a culture where certain kinds of bad practices can’t get off the ground. As for a reform of academia I think it would have to be from the top down so I don’t think what people like Rufo are doing will change a great amount in the grand scheme of things.
Academia plain and simple has to be pruned, it’s too big, it’s too expensive, it’s credentials are losing meaning. But that’s the economic side, on the political side I think there has to be a cultural revolution. What this entails is basically a repeal of all civil rights law, firing of professors in Mickey Mouse fields, and closing down of many courses, as well as firing all administrators of the DEI variety.
This is bound to alarm some as authoritarian but I think that there’s simply an undeniable Schmittian logic to it, they want to censor us, we have to censor them. Playing a game where one side is a resolute defender of the free marketplace of ideas and the other doesn’t is unilateral surrender. I basically subscribe to the historical belief that since the 1960s elite culture has become homogenous and inflexible, and that they’re in no position to solve the problems facing western society.
As such, their culture has to be replaced with a new one, with different norms, habits and practices, and this only happens if a disaffected counter-elite decides not to work within their framework but to destroy it. I do believe in free speech but in Spinoza’s sense: that free speech has practical benefits. Free scientific enquiry where no one’s hypothesis is actively shut down and people can pursue research unimpeded is great. Having a free press which is able to impartially investigate corruption is great, having an independent judiciary is fantastic.
Basically, I think 18th century European civil society was an astonishing achievement which lead to the great divergence from China and the takeover of the world. However there are circumstances around the edges where liberal proceduralism becomes an untenable proposition. El Salvador is the obvious example where prosecuting gang members in individual trials rather than seeing they have the tattoo and throwing them in the slammer is the only means of stopping the country from being controlled by a satanic ultraviolent racket.
Finally I don’t want to leave you with the impression that everything goes to academia, it’s the broader policy elite, think tanks, pressure groups, the great foundations, foreign and domestic lobbies, NGOs, law firms, the media, intelligence and the civil service. These are the people who influence and scare politicians into working within their system. I don’t think we’re there yet but I think we’re approaching Eastern Europe in the late 80s, England before the civil war, France before the revolution or late Poland-Lithuania; just an elite culture which is absolutely not up to the task of what’s in front of them, and unfortunately there’s no real half measure in terms of replacing them.
I’m not advocating violence but the replacement of one culture with another, the only means to genuinely offset and solve the underlying structural issues would be something like building new cities as Trump suggested, something like Diefenbaker’s warming up the north of Canada with nuclear. For example Augustus solved the problem of elite overproduction in Rome by civilising Gaul and Asia Minor, providing huge numbers of jobs and new revenue, relieving pressure on overcrowded and hyper competitive Roman elite competition. You have to replace a culture and then find some means of genuine expansion, which doesn’t necessitate imperialism but it does necessitate futurism.
I guess I would be curious to ask if you have any thoughts on where possible right-revolutionary leaders could be who would be positioned to push through such sweeping changes. I’ve been pretty invested in the kind of Yarvinite discourse around the creation of a new technocratic elite since around 2014 when he first began writing, and have been involved with many of these spaces on the ground, been in these rooms where the new elite is supposedly being cultivated, and it’s not much to write home about. The people you meet there are often smart and usually more eccentric in an entertaining way than those fully integrated in polite society, but they’re still there because they’re the misfits.
(Nota bene: This dialogue was conducted before the 2024 American election, though is being published after.)
The awkward dynamic as far as I can tell is that just as it becomes more and more seemingly viable that there could be these sweeping right wing reforms of institutions, the more the prophets of this movement are feeling like they might be watching the monkey’s paw curl in regards to their wishes. Peter Thiel disavowed the right recently, Curtis Yarvin endorsed the Democrats, it doesn’t seem like they’re especially excited about what they’ve built. An initiative like Project 2025 is the disappointing outcome of what a new right-wing bureaucratic elite could look like — it’s a new bureaucracy not based on sounder more objective principles, but just on waving a different ideological stick, this new Christian Nationalism. Which if you want Darwinism to be taken seriously on a deeper level, this is certainly the last thing you want influencing the sciences. You’re saying that the sciences work because they are more objective and can actually match an underlying truth of the world, but are also endorsing a “Schmittian” takeover — is it not likely that if you endorse this Schmittianism, you have to allow for intelligent design advocates and the like to enter the institutions as your “friends”, thus betraying the very culture of intellectual clarity you were attempting to create?
I’m sympathetic to your sense that an entirely new culture of excellence is necessary to revive the humanities, but it seems to me lately that these loud and popular right-wing figures are worse than what we already have in this regard — ok maybe they aren’t woke, maybe they lack this unhelpful political correctness on Darwinism and race, but they are completely vulgar — it doesn’t seem like they have any love for beauty, higher purpose, literature Western traditions that stretch back centuries, rather they seem like they are just positioning themselves to sell off government services to the highest bidder and deepen the kind of postmodern malaise we are living in where everything is a self-interested grift. Or would you disagree? Amidst this dynamic I’ve found Richard Hanania to be a valuable contrarian within the right, basically arguing that all the neoreactionary principles people have theorized should simply push one to endorse center-left liberalism and the Democrats, given that Democrats are just smarter and more virtuous people than Republicans (he would argue), and that while diversity initiatives slow down efficiency, this is a “tax” that is worth paying to allow the smarter faction of elites to operate in power, because the smarter elites have xenophilic tastes and just sort of want to be around diversity. At the very least it seems non-obvious that a culture which primarily values merit and scientific objectivity rather than its inverse is likely to emerge from the populist right at this point in time. Wondering how you would respond to these arguments.
I think that what you need is a coherent counter-elite. You already have counter-elites, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, even Trump himself are examples of this. Thinkers like Yarvin and Hanania are auditioners who want to take part in forming a counter-elite, with the latter wanting to shift the direction by nudging existing elites worth a few concessions to realism. Counter-elites are a natural product of the fact that the system is failing across many different metrics, but just because you oppose the system doesn’t by default make you better or more competent than it.
I think we’re slowly seeing an increase in people with deep issues with the system who aren’t misfits or weirdos, but what I don’t think you’ve seen is an uptick in any form of coherence. Revolutions arrive naturally, with an inflexible system facing issues and division in elite circles being produced by competition and genuine dissatisfaction, but the rise of an actually well thought out and practically implementable alternative isn’t organic, it has to be built by very determined and intelligent people.
I don’t think counter-elites will disappear just because people are sick of online RW culture or the GOP, as I don’t see the underlying trends changing and continuing to drive people towards resistance, but I agree with your assessment that as of right now that there’s not much worth writing home about. As much as I personally dislike Hanania, I do think seeing significantly heterogeneous forms of opposition to the mainstream with different strategies is ultimately a good thing, because competition along these kinds of lines is necessarily what produces the necessary coherence that any movement for a cultural revolution will need.
Yeah that makes sense. I feel like this counter-elite you talk about feels somewhat inevitable in the medium run, but the danger I see that complicates the whole project right now is that with Vance and Project 2025 and so on you might see a “bad” or premature attempt from a right-wing counter-elite which lacks the Mandate of Heaven, which would poison the whole initiative — there could be in the next four years some kind of concerted effort between Elon and Thiel and Vance and Trump to reshape the government to hire loyalists which could be inorganic and poorly thought out. Somewhat like how Spengler said that Hitler was premature because the true Caesar wasn’t supposed to appear until the year 2000, or like how you could argue almost that Marx poisoned the supposedly inevitable development of communism by actively agitating for it and thus having his work used as a playbook to force revolution in the East prior to industrialization rather than a prophecy for the West.
Kind of thinking out loud, I feel like this counter-elite revolution won’t be possible until you have some kind of alliance between the tech new money and dynastic / oligarchic old money, who could unite against the bloated and decadent administrative classes to form a more efficient administrative system out of software. The problem is that the tech new money, especially given the way the cryptocurrency markets have developed, is shifting right and is now extremely mobile compared to left-leaning capital which is locked up in fixed institutions, giving it a shock-troop quality to push for cultural and political shifts. But this extreme mobility of capital is also its weakness — it’s hard for it to make long term, multi-generational plans, the type which would be needed to found new humanist institutions, build new cities… or at least that’s how I have come to see it, although of course my own ability to grasp the networked totality of what is going on or how capital is being deployed is limited.
Anyway, that’s me rambling a bit, but I guess this all leads up to the question — what can be done now in your view? The point of inspiration for this interview was you saying you’re “entering the game”, so it seems like you plan to start active work on public intellectual or political activity to influence people. What does this look like to you?
I think that there’s two elements necessary to whip a counter-elite into shape. And this goes back to the Social Matter days of NRx with the idea of “becoming worthy”, which is to create a genuinely very good programme, one which inspires people, elite and normie alike, and which will resolve ordinary concerns about crime, offshoring, energy and housing inflation, ecology, foreign policy security and so on. It critically has to be able to be financed, so there’s actual hard maths involved to find genuine savings.
The programme isn’t enough, the second element is effective propaganda such that people with lower IQs than the (counter) elite inner party can spread and canvass the message. I think in terms of premature counter-elite formation we already saw that with Trump, who won with little to no mainstream media support, and who was a sitting duck president who achieved little, this lack of achievement was precisely due to a lack of a programme and a lack of middle management personell who would be able to implement it. I don’t see 24, should he win it, as different. What it is, is an indicator that elite formulae aren’t working, a point which has been analysed to death at this point.
You can see similar destabilisation in Britain and other western countries, leaders don’t have staying power, and people’s habituation to punishing them in the prescribed two party patterns are breaking down. We’re not close to a cultural revolution because as we both know there’s nothing especially impressive as an alternative, but I think this breakdown is a decades long process we’re in the middle of.
Makes total sense as you just framed it, but still, what do you think you and I could do today? Do we just continue reading and thinking about what these programs and propaganda might look like? Do we look for other people who feel the same way? What is the step we could take tomorrow?
Networking and producing accurate evidence based diagnostics about the problems of the system. My inspiration comes from Lenin in one positive and one negative sense in a way I am currently writing about for a long Substack series. The positive sense is derived from the classic of organisation theory: The Organizational Weapon by Selznick. Which details the strategies of the combat party which I think any movement would have to adopt from a tactical point of view.
The negative sense is that Lenin’s strategy was something called revolutionary defeatism, which is to say that he wanted to turn world war into civil war, encourage mass mutinee and promote demoralisation in order to ferment a coup with a core of radicalised soldiers. I don’t advocate this both because it doesn’t suit our circumstances whatsoever but also because I’m not an internationalist but a nationalist. So instead I flip it onto its head and advocate revolutionary realism.
This is derived from geopolitical realism, in that I think whatever policies make the country most competitive in a Darwinian sense within the international system forms the basis of the programme, and is something which I think is the glue which would hold the speculative coalition you were alluding to together, it aligns their interests.
So I do intend to outline both a strategy for a programme which is intended as populist and also counter elite aligning. Thus dissolving the elitist/populist divide that has been a roadblock. I tend to be a relatively creative/spontaneous type but I have disciplined reading, so large writing projects are difficult for me to actually follow through on even though I have many ideas. But this series would essentially be a digital CV for me to connect with other people in Britain at multiple levels.
The digital CV part makes sense, I agree, that’s sort of how I’m thinking as well, that really seems like most of what can be done at this point to bring thoughtful people out of isolation and into dialogue.
Wondering about the nationalism question. I was thinking, usually in a dialogue like this especially if it’s a philosophical dialogue in which someone is being challenged, it’s interesting to try to get to the core point of divergence, like if you and I think about similar questions and are reading a lot of the same authors, why is it that you would come to different conclusions than me in worldview, often it feels like it comes to one or two existential decisions, and I wonder if between me and you a lot of it comes down to this question of nationalism. I just kind of personally have this intense visceral distaste for nationalism and sentiment around national identity. I could justify it as Deleuze & Guattari did within a Nietzschean framing where nobler perspectives tends towards more xenophilia, and again this is why I like Hanania I guess because he beats this drum today.
I remember you before arguing for something like Hume’s sentimentalist theory of morality, which I guess would be a way to ground this endorsement of a national community, because if I recall correctly Hume argued that we naturally experience altruistic sentiments towards our community and family members, but then we require morality and law to scale this into larger structures. Ultimately it could be debated if the sentiments one feels towards one’s family should extend or be scaled towards the entire globe or just the national community. But under this model, why could one’s circle of sentiments not instead begin more naturally in some kind of class, some international group such as “the creative class”, or fans of a certain type of pop music, or a Discord server, or something like that? This is why nationalist sentiment often feels feigned or engineered to me as a sentiment when it comes from an elite or creative type rather than someone who lives a naturally rooted and circumscribed existence.
I’m a nationalist because I live in the real world. There is no internationalist organisation that’s worth supporting, the UN? The EU? These organisations doubtless have major impact in some ways but are utterly toothless in other ways. It’s national level institutions which can be captured and which are the vehicles through which great men can exercise the will to power.
Aside from this merely practical consideration I’d say two things. One is that first and foremost I believe in greatness for its own sake. Nietzsche called nationalism the limitation of Napoleon because he thought that what justified the whole enterprise of the French empire was the effectiveness and excellence of Napoleon as an individual. I find Stalin more interesting than Stalinism, Lenin more than Leninism, Napoleon more than Bonapartism, Caesar more than Caesarism and so forth. Great men, of whom Napoleon, Goethe and Beethoven were the prime three in Nietzsche’s mind were one of the things which restored our positive affective disposition to the world challenged by nihilism.
Nationalism is a limit on meritocracy. I believe in meritocracy as far as possible, but you do at the end of the day need a functioning system. By this I mean a society in which people feel invested in its continuation. Rome faced the struggle of the orders, wherein the plebs would simply allow Rome to be sacked in the earlier years of the republic until a compromise was reached in 367 bc and the patricians relaxed their privileges. Hypothetically speaking polygyny (that is, polygamy where it’s one man with several women) would be more meritocratic, because you could argue only the best men would get most of the women.
But in reality it created an unstable society where most men couldn’t care less about defending it. Monogamous societies consistently outperform ones where polygyny occurs. So I think you need a broader notion of a culturally evolved society which is more competitive in a Darwinian sense than meritocracy in the abstract.
I think this is my problem with IQ nationalism, which is that it simply ignores sociology. Nepotism, clannishness, in the Chinese case industrial and political espionage with the CCP and so forth. Ultimately the force which drives history forwards is war, going back to the breaking down of the primate pecking order with the invention of projectile weapons to the horse saddle to the musket to the aircraft carrier. War is where technology comes from, expanding the mobilisation for war to overcome nomadic incursions for example lead to massively expanded cooperation.
If you want to imagine a genuine future it’s very hard to imagine it being produced by anything other than traditional geopolitical competition. I think the postwar globalised order, whilst being more robust than Russia or China shills would have you believe, is breaking down, and we’re headed back to the historical normalcy of a world with pockets of instability from many directions in which one country, the United States, can’t police all of it. The Middle East is already there, Africa is already there, south east Asia is practically there, even Europe definitely seems to be heading in this direction.
So for example in America I think deporting all illegal immigrants, ending mass migration, relaxing planning laws for energy and housing, restricting future immigration to high caste Asians for contribution to the knowledge economy, banning foreign lobbies, increased protectionism in a targeted way to enable the revitalisation of industries such as shipbuilding vital to the national interest, are all good policies.
So my nationalism comes more from realism than anything else. On a sentimental side I do love the British people and I think we’re among the greatest nations in history with great achievements and culture, I think it would be an objective disaster if it were to disappear.
Do you think there's something of a contradiction when it comes to on the one hand wanting to establish for a population these shared myths, collective identities, great leaders, etc., which would spur people to unify collectively as a nation, and on the other hand wanting to integrate into politics brutal or uncomfortable biological narratives around Darwinism, Malthusianism, & hereditary differences? If life is at bottom a struggle for survival of the fittest then wouldn't this imply a kind of amoral individualism?
There's sort of a larger paradox inherent to applied Darwinism I think in that people & groups are best equipped to survive if they believe in something beyond mere survival — if they think their continued existence means something and has purpose beyond themselves. Do you have thoughts about how shared purpose develops in a nation?
I think there is a tension, but I think cultural evolution is ultimately about group cooperation. Groups which effectively cooperate have by and large won out. The closest trend in history to a genuinely secular trend is greater cooperation. The biggest exception being the Bronze Age collapse, and I think we are undergoing a deglobalisation which might also reverse this to an extent. But having an imaginary community which people can narratively fit in is much more competitive than any kind of amoral individualism.
The most effective forward driving force in history has been national competition, and I view the two subsequent periods, namely the weird bipolar order established after 1945 between America and Russia which ended in 1994 with the withdrawal of Russian forces from Eastern Europe, and the post 1994 unipolarity, as being queer interludes. National competition is on its way back, even if the enemies of the United States are still miles behind as of now.
I don’t have a partisan socialist or libertarian view of forward driving historical processes. Society isn’t top down or bottom up but fractal. Institutions at the top level, like the federal government are mirrored by smaller state level and smaller county level and smaller familial level institutions. They are all facing similar kinds of problems and they tend to fail or succeed as a whole. Societal issues have to be approach at multiple levels, but if you had to pick one variable which operates at all of them and is easiest to assign causality it’s demographics. All institutions are comprised of people, so problems relating to their numbers, sociological relations and quality are of the utmost importance.
So something like the pursuit of excellence which deals with the reality of the importance of the complex of fractal institutions falling in nation states, is the guiding ethos.
So many thoughts arise. This could go on for quite some time, but I say we bracket this now for the blog post and let the dialogue continue both between us as friends and maybe in chats, convos, if other people find these ideas important as well.
I’ll end this with a few lighthearted questions if you don’t mind. First, why Zoomer “Schopenhauer”? Is Schopenhauer more important to you than other philosophers, and if so why?
No, it was a gimmick temporary name, but it stuck, I lose engagement and no one recognised me without it, so I’m philosophically resigned to it. I do regularly get engagement where someone is outraged that I say something not in keeping with Schopenhauer’s philosophy which is kind of amusing to me. I have read him and I do consider him to be a great writer who got a lot of things right, but also a lot of things wrong. The Schopenhauer of pessimism, of snappy aphorisms and maxims, who denies free will and talks about how we’re hopelessly controlled by basic impulses which shape our conscious decisions, that’s the Schopenhauer I admire, not the mystic with claims to knowledge of the in itself or of ascetic saintly redemption.
What music do you listen to? All time favorite album?
I mostly listen to classical music, but I also sometimes listen to black metal and jazz. Sitting down and simply listening to music and not doing anything else is one of the things that helps me avoid brainrot. My favourite composers are Sibelius and Shostakovich. If I had to pick one piece by each it would be Sibelius’ 6th symphony because it captures for me the experience of beauty in solitude, there’s an emotional centre but there’s never an imposed climax or fanfare for no reason. For Shostakovich it would be the first violin concerto because it has a raw honest emotional intensity whilst being much more neurotic and agitated, you could say they appeal to me contrasting urban and rural feelings but that would be oversimplifying.
Is Zoomer Schopenhauer single or taken? Where do you stand on the question Nietzsche posed when he suggested that the philosopher must be unmarried? Are women a distraction from philosophy, or a complement?
I’m currently single but things aren’t going to badly on that front at the moment. There are great philosophers who were married (Deleuze, Hegel) and those who were unmarried (Kant, Spinoza). I think that when writing you need to do all your research before beginning, and that this whole process requires frugality and dedication. I think it depends on the woman, the sexist stereotype of the gold digger is true but it’s true because of men not the nature of women. That’s simply the kind of woman a rich man needs, someone who’s emotionally demanding and loving in return isn’t right if you’re focused on work and money the entire time. But to cut a long story short I don’t see myself dedicating myself to philosophy to such an extreme degree that I’d consign myself to being a bachelor.
Thanks! Hope you and the readers enjoyed this as much as I did.