I wanted to elaborate on my post from yesterday, about comfortable, powerful people who seem willing or even eager to blow up the system.
It’s a bit of a puzzle why they’re not happy with incremental gains, given that they already have so much and they’re well situated to keep getting more.
The best answer, I think, is that these activists think that the current system is (a) going in the wrong direction and (b) unreformable. That’s how left-wing activists in the 1960s thought about the military-industrial complex and it’s how right-wing activists today think about an unsustainable debt caused by mandated payments to special interests. (Of course I’m drastically simplifying in both cases, just trying to give the basic picture.)
A similar case could be made by comfortable environmental activists who say that our industrial society is unsustainable. The difference is that environmentalists today, unlike left-wingers in the 1960s and right-wingers today, are far from power: some environmentalists might like to shut down the current economic and political system but they’re in no position to come close to doing so.
In all cases, the let’s-blow-up-the-system people are just a subset of the concerned activists. Lots of left-wing activists in the 1960s wanted to end the war and change foreign policy while keeping a social-democratic system of government, lots of right-wing activists today would like to reform government while keeping a stable rule of law, and lots of environmental activists would like to just ratchet down consumption without any major break in the system
The blow-it-all-up people just have some mixture of extreme frustration about the ability of the system as it is to be reformed, plus I assume some personal attraction to the idea of tumult and revolution.
I still stand by the statement in my earlier post that part of the story is that if you already have it all, you feel invulnerable—vindicated by all the past gambles you’ve taken that have paid off—and you’re willing to throw the dice once again.
Another part of the story, I think, is that super-rich tech investors, who are key figures in the blow-up-the-system movement, have an economic ideology in which they got where they are by being the nimble “mammals” taking over from the lumbering “dinosaurs” of rust-belt industry, legacy media, and liberal politics. The point here is that the next logical step is for the current tech lords to themselves become dinosaurs; thus they don’t feel as secure as the rest of us might think they are. As I wrote a few months ago:
On one hand, the storyline is that you’re gonna get overtaken by hungry young newcomers; on the other hand, you’re supposed to stay on top forever. The result, at least for Facebook, seems to have been a kind of desperation, a sense that on one hand they are the kings of the world and that on the other hand they are destined to fail and so they have to try harder and harder to grow and grow and preserve a near-monopoly status. And that’s how you get these executives who control unimaginable fortunes and yet are willing to lie and cheat (I wanted to say “lie, cheat, and steal,” but I don’t know if there was any actual stealing reported in that book), indeed they seem to feel that they have to like and cheat and manipulate the rules and all of this to stay on top.
I suspect this is connected to their surprising (to me) willingness to overturn the political system. This is a system that’s made them unimaginably rich and powerful, but, in their ideology, that wouldn’t stop them from becoming the U.S. Steels, General Motorses, and CBS Newses of tomorrow. They’re willing to blow it all up, even though they’re benefiting so much from the system we have now.
Your discussion made me think of another dimension that may be relevant: People may differ in whether they believe “the system” is the result of the collective actions of many individuals or whether they believe “the system” is an entity distinct from the individuals involved.
For example, if you believe that “the system” is an emergent property of individual actions, you might be more likely to focus on policies that primarily affect individuals, for example education, freedom of speech, certain kinds of criminal laws. Of course, to say that someone focuses on those policy areas does not necessarily imply any specific positions that person would endorse: one person might support increased access to education while another might support restrictions on what can and cannot be taught. My point here is just that this perspective—that of “the system” as an emergent property—would seem to lead someone to support making more local and perhaps “incremental” changes. If you adopt the opposite perspective, that “the system” is a structure that exists apart from individuals, that would seem to be more likely to lead to a focus on policies that “blow up the system” because that would be the only way to achieve some objective.
I suspect, of course, that this dimension of beliefs in the nature of “the system” is continuous rather than discrete. And of course one might hold “hybrid” views, such that “the system” is an emergent property but only of the actions of an elite few. In that case, one’s goal might not be to “blow up” the system but instead to become one of the people who shapes it.
Having been a left-wing activist in the 60s (for example, office manager of the Vietnam Day Committee at Berkeley), I can speak to that half of this. I’m guessing that by left-wing activists who wanted to blow things up you mean people like those in the Weather Underground. I knew a bunch of them, and think they were driven more by despair and disillusionment than anything else — others feeling similarly turned to drugs instead of going off the political deep end.
There were others who just liked breaking windows and that kind of thing, and some who got off on being arrested; we called them “the crazies.”
The recent story in the New Yorker really gets at this. The WU is such a small part of the picture, but it was really despair.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-childhood-in-the-weather-underground Sorry, it’s probably paywalled.
I knew his mother. She recovered; others did not.
John:
I wasn’t just talking about the 1960s terrorists. I was also talking about left-wingers who weren’t themselves violent but spoke approvingly about the system falling apart–I don’t remember the exact words.
Well, a lot of us were romantic about the Cuban Revolution, but I don’t remember very many people thinking that something like that was going to happen here. A lot of people went through a phase of parroting Marx about capitalism containing the seeds of its own destruction and that kind of thing, but except for people who went off into groups like Progressive Labor, it didn’t last very long, and there weren’t that many of them.
What did happen, at least in Berkeley around 1967-68, is that you could substitute the work ‘defiant’ for the word ‘radical’ in the discourse of the time without changing the meaning, but again I think that came from despair and disillusionment along with a dash of late adolescence. About that time I got disgusted and decided to find something else to do.
I was a philosophy grad. in 66-67 at UC Irvine. Went with a leftish academic to see Marcuse in San Diego. A charming man, but he really had nothing to say, it was oddly flat and hollow. There were a couple of disciples there, but they were silent. Altogether very strange.
I think what characterizes the “blow it all up” people is not realizing what it would take to build the system up again. They might think there’s something waiting, hidden, to emerge again. They might think there’s a natural system that will just happen when people don’t have a bad, unnatural system, imposing on them. Some of them talk as if “families” will be able to serve all all purposes, and I don’t know whether they’re really ignorant of the other parts of the system families rely on, or whether they’re think those other things are independent and not part of “the system” and can’t be harmed by blowing up the other parts.
I think gec’s speculations are also possible, that the system isn’t a thing they understand as separate from individual choices, so “blowing it up” is a metaphor for “changing lots of people’s minds” or something like that. Lots more ways to be wrong than right, and even more ways to be “not even wrong.”
If your characterization is mostly correct, there is one notable difference between the cases of tech titans, environmentalists, and left wing activists. Only the first group can be portrayed as the beneficiaries of the system they seek to blow up. The latter two groups never had much power (they did have influence, but can’t be described as the dominant groups in power, while I think that could be said of the tech titans). I think of the latter two groups as feeling like they were fighting against the powerful interests, that they were the Davids and not the Goliaths. The tech titans are Goliath. I’m finding it difficult to treat all three as similar in the way you have portrayed it.
+1. Tech titans don’t want to blow up the system at all. They want to preserve it and remove any obstacles that stand in the way of their profits (like public accountability).
Anon:
It’s not quite that they want to blow up the system, more that they’re willing to blow up the system. For example, when they supporting anti-democratic measures for short-term gain, then, sure, they’re trying to remove obstacles in the way of their profits, but they’re also rolling the dice and risking losing the system that is supporting their wealth.
Andrew, why does that risk losing the system? There is no contradiction between being anti-democratic and supporting the existing economic system.
Let me give a historical example to show what I mean.
In the 1870s-1890s, before Jim Crow, many black people were elected to political office and attempted to improve their own economic condition.
The upper class was fundamentally opposed to this as black people were “supposed to be” the cheap labor force for them, and supported anti-democratic measures, including funding the KKK, and eventually instituting Jim Crow. They did this explicitly to preserve the existing economic system and thus their profits.
Historian Eric Foner observed that the Klan was “a military force” that served “the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy”, as it had a purpose of “affect[ing] power relations … throughout Southern society” by thoroughly destroying the “Republican party’s infrastructure”, breaking the “Reconstruction state”, reestablishing “control of the Black labor force” and “restoring racial subordination” in all aspects “of Southern life.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan#First_Klan:_1865%E2%80%931871
I assume this is a typo:
“like and cheat and manipulate the rules and all of this to stay on top.”
and should be
“lie and cheat and manipulate the rules and all of this to stay on top.”
Or, maybe the intent was to write
”
“like to cheat and manipulate the rules and all of this to stay on top.”
Upon reflection, the last-named version has more zing.
This is an interesting statement:
“It’s a bit of a puzzle why they’re not happy with incremental gains, given that they already have so much and they’re well situated to keep getting more.”
That is, it is difficult to understand why those who have so much (more than we do), are so motivated to have even much more. As in, “why take on (monumental) additional risk just to get some ‘bupkes’?” My favorite is the much acclaimed Cyril Burt who invented Miss Howard and Miss Conway so as keep promoting that nature beat nurture by four to one. He was already famous, but as always, life at the top is never permanently secure.
Paul:
Yes, I agree. These guys are so rich; why are they wiling to destabilize the political system just to get a few more bucks? Some of it is ideological–it’s a matter of principle for them to pay minimum taxes. But sometimes it seems like they think that disruption is cool in itself, which I guess is connected to their self-image as tech disrupters. It can’t all be entirely that they’ve invested in these expensive New Zealand hideouts and don’t want all this money to have been wasted.
It’s important to realize that the financial value of most of these large tech companies, and Tesla is like the poster child for this, is built on exponential discounting of exponential growth. In other words, it’s built on an assumption that in the future google will make 10, 20, 100x as much as it is now, that Tesla will be selling all the cars in the world, and that the rate of car sales will be increasing as well… that Facebook or maybe X will be the only place people advertise…
Google has a PE of 30, Pacific Gas and Electric has a PE of 12.5, so the owners of google stand to lose more than half of their wealth if it begins to be treated like a public “internet utility” for example.
But the bigger issue is that the ideology of big tech is Technocracy gone wild… They DESERVE to rule over everyone else, and they want to remove any barriers to doing that, they are dismantling govt to replace it with the whims of big tech people. They are fascists who want to be in charge, cement their position at the top, and use the guns of the state to keep themselves there. This is pretty obvious if you pay attention to things they say… Larry Ellison saying how ubiquitous cameras will keep all the little people “on their best behavior” https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-oracle-tiktok-deal-social-media/ is a good example of this.
Some people just want power for power’s sake. They’d rather live as the king among the ashes of civilization than as one of 1000 powerful people in a more thriving world. Epstein told Peter Thiel as much in some email, saying that there are more opportunities for control when things collapse or something like that.
Leftists in the 70’s wanted to burn it all down because they saw us heading here with fascists running the US govt, a completely different motive than the billionaires.
After years out of school, I started graduate school at UCSB in 1970, so I was there for the Bank of America burning and subsequent events. It was very different from Berkeley in the mid-60s. At UCSB, the students’ political consciousness seemed about an inch deep. At night, in the adjacent student ghetto of Isla Vista, students were doing things like using giant sling shots to shoot Molotov cocktails over buildings at cops in the street, but during the day on campus all was quiet. It seemed more like a variation on a frat party than anything political.
Daniel –
But the bigger issue is that the ideology of big tech is Technocracy gone wild… They DESERVE to rule over everyone else, and they want to remove any barriers to doing that, they are dismantling govt to replace it with the whims of big tech people.
It’s very disturbing how, despite being rather open about expressing exactly that opinion, they are nonetheless gaining power and influence at an exponentisl rate. I’m guessing you’re not a big lesser of two evils guy, and more of a “I hate the uniparty guy,” so I’m curious if you see the Dems as less complacent about this? I recognize that the question of whether they’re sufficiently less complacent is a critical question.
i think its a good enough model to think of the Dem, GOP as a ratchet and pawl system. The GOP drags the US towards fascism, and the Dems ensure nothing changes when theyre in power.
The election of Mamdani despite established Dem opposition suggests they are vulnerable though. I dont think the current Dem leadership are worth a damn.
Daniel:
You say that the tech investors think they “deserve” to rule over everyone else. I think it’s kind of the opposite, that they recognize they were in the right place at the right time, and they fear that they’re today’s dinosaurs. Which motivates them to do whatever they think is necessary to lock themselves into their current privileged positions.
I see the same obvious welfare-warfare state progression as has been happening my whole life. I think the news you consume is just controlled by a group of oligarchs that lost some power, so they are pointing it out to you.
Just look how both digital age verification and face-tracking cams in cars are being pushed simultaneously in the US and EU. No one asked for this.
In the end its the same overall boiling frog approach though. By the way, it turns out the original frogs didn’t have any brains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Anoneuoid –
“I see the same obvious welfare‑warfare state progression as has been happening my whole life…its the same overall boiling frog approach though.”
The boiling‑frog analogy works if the “frog’s” encounters with the state all feel like friction: higher taxes, restrictive regulations, surveillance mandates. Those are the vibes for someone who starts at birth with a lot of agency, say a relatively wealthy, presumably white man who experiences regulation mainly as something that limits what he can do as an individual against some libertarian counterfactual. From that vantage point, the vibe is always the same creeping pattern.
But for many people, unlike with the frog in the pot, the change over time isn’t monotonic. Someone who begins with a lot of built‑in agency tends to *feel* their encounters with the state as only moving in one direction. And this is where the libertarian counterfactual gets cherry‑picked: “less state” isn’t automatically “more freedom.” The imagined alternative is always a smaller, lighter state that simply interferes less. But the real-world space of “less state” also includes collapsed states, Somalia being the obvious case where the absence of a robust state doesn’t produce more liberty, it produces no enforceable rights, no reliable markets, and no baseline security. The counterfactual isn’t only “a better society but with fewer rules”; it can just as easily be a collapsed state.
For the wider population regulation is often double‑sided: the same rule that constrains a high‑agency person often expands the agency of someone who didn’t have much to begin with, say civil rights protections, labor laws, anti‑discrimination statutes, disability access, environmental rules, voting‑rights enforcement. Those are concrete expansions of freedom for people who weren’t already insulated by wealth, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., or by the simple fact of being born into a strong, stable state rather than a fragile one.
Independent of disagreements about which state polices work the best to enhance agency for the most people, the “frog” analogy only works on the level of vibes. Once you attach real‑world metrics and empirical analysis, the picture gets muddier.
Joshua, I’m curious if you’ve read Seeing Like a State, or James C Scott’s other books, like The Art of Not Being Governed. As well as Chomsky’s work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed
Here is a podcast episode discussion on Scott: https://munisquare.substack.com/p/the-stories-we-carry-on-james-c-scott
Now, regulations can be ‘good’ when they protect the people, yes, but they are essentially a solution to a problem that was created by the state in the first place. The purpose of the state is to preserve large concentrations of wealth (in the modern day this is the large corporations). If the state did not exist the large corporations would also cease to exist pretty quickly (who would bail them out and give them corporate welfare?).
People have existed and prospered without a state to protect them since the beginning of human history, many examples are in Scott’s book. Anarchist Catalonia 1936-1939 is a good example of anarchism in the modern day, as well as perhaps the Zapatistas in Mexico (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation)
There is no need to live within a strong state to have a good life. You don’t need a state.
Anonymous –
Thanks for the links. I’ll take a look (haven’t read Scott. Of course I’m familiar with some of Chomsky’s views).
I agree that a good life can exist without a formal state. For sure there are historical examples of small, low‑density groups that lived well without centralized authority. But the question is whether those examples would scale in todays’ world, where it’s a given that we have large, technologically interdependent societies. Conditions from those societies like population size, social structure, limited complexity, etc., for better or worse, are pretty hard to visualize arising in today’s world
Anyway, I don’t think it’s right that the state is mainly fixing problems that wouldn’t exist without it. The absence of a state can go in either direction. You can find non‑state societies that were egalitarian and non‑state societies that were violent and coercive, just as you can find states that were oppressive and states that expanded freedom. There isn’t a simple relationship between “state” and “good life.”
I wonder if you’ve read “The Dawn of Everything.” I think that book supports a conclusion that human societies have experimented with a wide range of institutional arrangements, and none of them map cleanly onto a simple formula like “state = bad” or “no state = freedom.” Just as it’s wrong to assume people are better off in a state, it’s wrong to assume it would be all peaches and cream if states never existed.
I should add “buffered by or operating with a larger state” to “small, low density.” Two of the examples you mentioned weren’t small or low‑density, but they were to some extent reliant on resources, infrastructure, or stability that were arguably the product of a larger state. So the point I’m making is just that these cases may not directly translate to scalable alternatives for a large, complex modern society that is a realistic option in today’s world.
I have not read the Dawn of Everything, but wasn’t Graeber an anarchist too? I suspect you are reading your own views into him.
“You can find non‑state societies that were egalitarian and non‑state societies that were violent and coercive, just as you can find states that were oppressive and states that expanded freedom.”
My point is that the amount of coercion is limited in a non-state society, not that it is zero. With a state, the amount of coercion has no limit (or I guess the limit is when you extract literally every single cent of productive value out of the citizens, which would probably be something like the entire state being Nazi-like concentration camps).
I think you would get a lot out of reading The Essential Chomsky, to see some of the ways our state props up large concentrations of wealth. Scott provides many historical examples of high-density societies that purposely structured themselves to be independent of the state. The podcast gives some hints about this, one of these being that if you refuse to live in a single place, it is very hard to count you in a census. If you refuse to use a written language, it is harder to record your presence at all. Etc. These people also stay far away from urban areas and cannot be said to be dependent on the state’s resources.
Joshua. How to get there from here is indeed the question. Failed state conditions arise when states monopolize the organization principles and then disappear suddenly.
Proudhon identified the state as the source of large scale property. You can’t live in California and own say 40 apartment buildings in Florida without a state to enforce that ownership in the form of cops and courts. If you can do this though your wealth will mechanically increase unavoidably, and eventually you can own 41 apartment buildings and then in an even shorter time 42… your wealth won’t just increase linearly but exponentially.
The exponential accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is predicated on the existence of a state that enforces the social construct of “assets” a tradeable socially acknowledged right to use state violence to exclude people from the use of physical capital without your permission (permission of course coming in exchange for rent)
Anoneuoid is right that states exist to create and preserve the oligarchy. concessions to the little people are about keeping the little people from physical my opposing this en mass.
Joshua, my previous comment seems to have been held in moderation, so I will post it again:
“The absence of a state can go in either direction. You can find non‑state societies that were egalitarian and non‑state societies that were violent and coercive, just as you can find states that were oppressive and states that expanded freedom. ”
If you lack a state, there is a strong limit on your ability to centralize wealth and power in your hands. If you do have a state, there is no limit, or you could say the limit is very much higher. That limit basically looks like every cent of excess wealth being squeezed out of people. Imagine a 1984-style situation, or a situation where everyone lives in Nazi-style concentration camps for their whole lives and is forced to work as slave labor.
As for your point about being “dependent on the state”, Scott gives many examples of high-density societies who constructed themselves specifically to avoid being dependent on it. They lived in near-inaccessible rural areas, they refused to even write down their language because writing makes it easier for the state to detect your presence and count you in a census or force you to pay taxes, etc.
Joshua is obviously copy-pasting bot responses (or has been totally replaced by a bot and is entirely out of the loop).
No human would focus on the frog thing like that, and he does not know how to use em-dashes and type greek characters. It is really obvious to me (who works with these every day).
Anonymous –
I think you would get a lot out of reading The Essential Chomsky, to see some of the ways our state props up large concentrations of wealth
I don’t argue that modern states don’t prop up large concentrations of wealth. Nor do I argue that is a desirable outcome. I’m arguing against an assumed counterfactual that we would be better off absent the modern state. It would be an interesting study to assess if there’s a positive correlation between modern states and concentration of wealth. Wealth was pretty concentrated during pre-modern states. I would guess it would mostly be a factor of whether we’re talking about hunter-gatherer states or states like ancient Rome of Feudal Europe. Again, I just don’t think it’s a clean relationship and even if it were. That Jeanie isn’t going back into the bottle.
Of course modern states are coercive. And I’m not arguing that’s not problematic. But I am arguing that coercion is not exclusive to modern states and that the coercion of modern states is not exclusively bad.
As for the Dawn of Everything – I’m not reading into Graeber’s views. While that book focuses a lot on misperceptions (and biases) about non modern state societies, I think it’s a fair reading that it’s account of history makes it clear that there’s not a clear delineation between the good and bad of societies by virtue of whether or not they’re modern states. I don’t think such a view is mutually exclusive with being an anarchist.
I will for sure listen to the pod, with interest. Most likely I’ll check back in after I have.
Daniel –
The exponential accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is predicated on the existence of a state that enforces the social construct of “assets” a tradeable socially acknowledged right to use state violence to exclude people from the use of physical capital without your permission (permission of course coming in exchange for rent)
As with anonymous, I feel like your argument there is parallel to my comments, and not exactly in response to them. I take a dim view of what see see by way of concentration of power and wealth in modern states. But I don’t haft to go all Pinker to recognize that it’s not all some mind of binary, or thst there aren’t any associated benefits. There’s variation in concentration of power and wealth in modern states (within a range) just as there was in pre-modern states.
…states exist to create and preserve the oligarchy. concessions to the little people are about keeping the little people from physical my opposing this en mass.
I’m not arguing that isn’t in a large measure true, but that doesn’t imply that the “little people” don’t benefit relative to the range of what would or even did happen absent “the state.”
I’m arguing against lazy shangri-la counterfactuals, like the classic libertarian mindset that unintended consequences only arise when the state acts.
Anoneuoid –
Joshua is obviously copy-pasting bot responses (or has been totally replaced by a bot and is entirely out of the loop).
No human would focus on the frog thing like that, and he does not know how to use em-dashes and type greek characters. It is really obvious to me (who works with these every day).
I love how, in your typical arrogant and inflated sense of your own genius, you are so often confident in things which are just wrong. It was entirely all me that focused on your silly frog thing.
You are right that I didn’t type the Greek characters. I copied them from a reference.
But I will note that this was yet another in the series of comments from you, of which your frog argument was one in the series, where you don’t engage in making arguments, really. I don’t really care if you want to write a comment wrongly stating that I copy and paste from “bots,” (or that, amusingly, I’m out of the loop completely) but it would be more interesting if you actually responded on point.
Or that genie… I find it so interesting that when I type I substitute homonyms like that. I think it’s some kind of learning disability.
Joshua, regarding The Dawn Of Everything
I think it is a terrible book and I don’t understand why it is so highly regarded. The whole setup of the book just doesn’t make sense. First off, they call it The Dawn of Everything, but when do they start? Most evidence, if I remember correctly, is maybe from 10.000BC or what ever, but humanity is 3million years old! The earliest evidence in TDOE is maybe from 30.000BC which means they do not say anything at all about 99% of humanity’s history. I think this matters because additionally, they have no theoretical structure, no mechanistic model of how to think about ancient human life. So they are unable to say anything at all about 99% of humanity’s history and are completely lost in inconclusive evidence scattered in some few thousands of years.
They don’t even say how long the peoples and civilizations they talk about lasted. Some may have lasted barely some hundreds years. So what does it tell us if a people tried untypical stuff like living in non-hierarchical cities of hierarchical hunter gatherer tribes and then ceased to exist? They claim this shows (basically) that always humans tried so many different ways to organize society but what they show is some who tried in the last 10 thousand years and failed.
So my point is, there are good structural reasons to assume that humans lived 99% of their history in small anarchic hunter gatherer groups. Since humanity started to live in cities and started agriculture they all live in more or less totalitarian regimes. Basically TDOE only deals with the fairly short period of transition.
huan –
I wouldn’t defend all aspects of the book’s thesis. My main criticism was that it was over‑argued and a little too eager to set up a straw “traditional narrative” to knock down.
But the part that stuck with me wasn’t so much the big picture story. It was the more granular material on Indigenous North American political life, especially the way some of those societies organized themselves around autonomy of thought and will, and the core idea that no one, not even leaders, has an inherent right to command or compel or coerce anyone else. It was educational to learn how many ideas that Europeans treat as their own invention were not, and were in fact principles more core to the societies of Indigenous North Americans.
The book’s use of the early, contemporary accounts of Indigenous philosophers and the recorded debates was eye‑opening for me. It revealed historical record of realities that I had only somewhat intuited.
I don’t think I came away persuaded by some big argument, à la anonymous or maybe Daniel, about the supposed inherent, or even relative, oppressiveness of the modern state. I didn’t find it confirming that we’re all on the “Road to Serfdom.” But I did come away with a clearer critique of the modern state, and a clearer understanding of how many stories about the modern state inventing positive societal characteristics are largely myths.
huan, several parts of your critique of TDOE miss the mark by a wide mile. Us modern Homo sapiens date back maybe 200-300K or so. The authors are clearly speculating on *pre-history*, not *all of hominid evolution*. What their arguments suffice to show is that the version of pre-history you adduce is unwarranted as some sort of “default null hypothesis”. I don’t understand at all what you mean about “some who tried and failed” undermining anything about their arguments – did the Roman Republic “try and fail”? Did the Roman Empire? How about the Byzantines or the Ottomans? What about the Ming Dynasty? How about, etc. None of these specific societies are with us today. Lastly, you write “TDOE only deals with the short period of transition”. This is a weird take. Let us suppose that crop and animal domestication as we would recognize it today begins ~ 12kya, it takes until the middle of the Bronze Age (say 4 kya) for the large settled city-states to emerge, so already that “transition period” is 2X longer than the subsequent period which we identify as ‘civilization’. Moreover, it then takes until maybe 1600 AD as James Scott has argued for most of the global human population to be living in recognizably settled “states”. So, the counter-examples and genre-bending case studies that Wengrow and Graeber discuss in TDOE are not at all “insignificant” compared to what they are trying to deal with, which, again, is not ‘all of hominid evolution’.
Anoneuoid –
Wait – the “boiling frog” experiment people cite is the one where a frog only stays in the pot after its brain is removed?
Once you know that, the whole metaphor flips. A normal frog senses the temperature rising and jumps out. The only frog that doesn’t is the one that’s been neurologically disabled. So the experiment isn’t showing that thinking beings fail to notice gradual danger; it’s showing that only a non‑thinking organism fails to act in its own best interest. Hard to see how that doesn’t support the exact opposite of the point you were trying to make by citing the experiment, and the point people typically use that reference to make.
@Joshua
Please keep this mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e
Anoneuoid –
Since you apparently want to go down the obscurantist‑and‑hand‑waving appeal to etymological mysticism as authority instead of making an actual argument route…
Please keep this in mind:
The Greek word ὀχλοκρατία (ochlocracy) refers to mob rule, the condition that arises when lawful civic authority collapses. Polybius described it as “the degeneration of democracy into the rule of the crowd, without law or justice.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
In the specific case of Facebook, as a software engineer who worked most of my career at hardware companies, I think not having a requirement to touch iron occasionally allows software-only companies to avoid being grounded in a way companies that make *things* have to be. There are no hard constraints on software, especially from management’s point of view. You can sell an infinite number of copies without making more work for yourself. (Of course that’s not true, but it feels true enough.) You can add an infinite number of features and who’s to say the result *has* to be unusable or impossible to maintain?
I look at Zuckerberg and I don’t see someone who thinks there are constraints on possibility other than physics and what a person can push through on sheer willpower, or has ever given a second’s thought to most of the issues raised in the post. I don’t think he’s an original thinker. I think he’s a “everyone says this is how it is and it’s normal to expect everything to turn out all right” kind of guy, who ended up in charge of a big organization in an economic system he doesn’t understand (beyond one sentence in Adam Smith).
The false equivalency between environmental terrorism and rolling back special interest payments is outrageous on its face. If you want a good example of current ‘blow it all up’ people, take a look at various attempted and successful assassinations.
There is a difference between ‘blow it all up’ in the existential sense and ‘dismantle the current deadlocked negotiations and restore some of the prior social contract.’
I’ll speak as someone who thinks we need to ‘blow up’ quite a bit of the regulatory state, dismantle quite a bit of the payments to special interests, and seriously revisit higher education. I also exist within the federal bloat, have apparently ‘won’ not only at higher education but at payments to special interests. So am I willing to cut off the limb I’m sitting on? Apparently.
I won at standardized tests. I don’t like standardized tests. I believe they were partially successful during a period in which they measured outcomes of certain aspects of education, but were later gamed by virtually all parties, and that the system which has evolved fails to produce education. I’d rather replace that whole system with something else, like apprenticeships. If this pattern leads to the conclusion that I am necessarily deluded and also evil, the analysis is fatally flawed.
Ben:
I guess my post wasn’t so clear. Nowhere in that post and in the subsequent discussion was I talking about environmental terrorism or rolling back special interest payments.
When I wrote about “environmental activists who say that our industrial society is unsustainable,” I was not referring to terrorism; I was referring to support for policies that would involve major changes in people’s standard of living, with the point being that, even if they are currently comfortable, they see big clouds on the horizon, so to speak. My phrase “blow up the system” didn’t literally refer to blowing things up.
And when I wrote about rich right-wingers who were willing to blow up the system, I wasn’t referring to a willingness to roll back special interest payments. I was referring to vaccine denial, election denial, and climate change denial–things that could risk their own quality of life.
“dismantle quite a bit of the payments to special interests”
If you’re not referring to Trump’s historcially unprecedented corruption and blatant plundering of the treasury for personal gain (that 1.7 billion dollar illegal slush fund and all the rest), what are you talking about? What an amazing display of dishonesty.
They believe if the system blows up they and their ideology will be left standing and more powerful.
They also believe their success is entirely due to their brilliance and that the system has been an obstacle.
Cryptocurrency promoters represent some of those most extreme version—bet on a total collapse where governments use their so called currency and record keeping systems and can no longer reliably collect taxes.
Many of these assholes are rich nepobabies outraged at the idea that they are supposed to treat blacks or women with respect, and they’ll rather blow up the system than accept the demands of basic decency.
Musk famously went off the deep end because his trans daughter … read for yourself:
‘In October 2022, Musk blamed his estranged relationship with Wilson on “neo-Marxist” influences due to the unspecified “elite university” she attended… Musk has said that Wilson’s gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to “destroy the woke mind virus”‘.
Of course, Musk was a closet Nazi all along. Nobody just turns Nazi if the sympathy hasn’t been there all along. I think what happened in the last few years is that it became socially and politically acceptable for rich, powerful assholes to act out their assholery without restraint. They are rich, they are nihilists, they believe there is nothing in the world but themselves, but there used to be certain social restraint mechanisms that have gone away in recent years.
An important point: these people have never faced any accountability for screwing up in their lives, they are convinced that they are geniuses and can’t go wrong. And since they know better than anybody else how to run a business, and running the government is no different from running a business (ask Musk’s DOGE teenagers shredding whole government departments because it’s fun), and have been confirmed all their lives by media sycophants that “move fast and break things” is the best way to run an institution, as soon as they get power, they use it to burn everything down.
See Timothy Snyder: https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-superpower-suicide
“Of course I’m drastically simplifying in both cases, just trying to give the basic picture.”
These simplifications imho are neither useful nor necessary to make your point. They don’t clarify anything but unnecessarily muddy the waters.