It is somewhat widely understood at this point that dichotomized thinking is poor thinking. We in the West are called to confront this fact to remain relevant despite the successes we’ve had using discriminatory thought. Many in power today are extremely-dichotomized thinkers obsessed with searching out, experimenting with, and gaining control of “levers”: i.e. oversimplified concepts or social mechanisms that cause ripple effects—including so-called “disruption”—and sometimes resultant economic profits. Notably, negative downstream effects of playing with levers are under-characterized due to lack of skill with nuance—an inability to perceive effects which are not lazily discoverable in dichotomy—whether at the theory level or practical level.
Dichotomous thinkers in power both backstage, such as Thiel, and those center stage, such as Trump and Vance, betray an intensified form of dichotomous thinking which, combined with their positions in society, has already brought forth regressions akin to pre-civilization. The two drivers of regression are these current faddish levers which, in actuality, are fallacious and lend themselves to controlled discourse:
The democracy-elitism lever has been pulled carefully due to the obviously-fatal risk of making the rollback of democracy apparent to the public. Pulling this lever requires a vexing redefinition of terms: democracy is dismantled structurally while anti-democratic forces valorize “democratization” which actually belies the fact that they, as elitists, see democracy as “mob rule” rather than as a meaningfully-structured system of organization. “Democratization” is a rebranding of mass commodification via the disintermediation of labor and outright theft. Take, for example, the recent controversy around AI transforming photos in Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli style against his wishes: Miyazaki’s work is simultaneously being devalued economically and, more importantly, meaningfully as his visual language becomes utterly divorced from his storytelling. As Whitehead states: “The laws of nature are large average effects which reign impersonally. Whereas, there is nothing average about expression. It is essentially individual. In so far as an average dominates, expression fades.”2
“Democratization” is a rebranding of mass commodification via the disintermediation of labor and outright theft.
“[O]ur cultural inheritance,” to repurpose a phrase from Hayek,3 is being obliterated; GMU econ professor Bryan Caplan, for example, recently used an AI-generated Ghibli image to post his unbridled contempt for human artists. No better example could be had than the White House Twitter account recently tweeting a Ghibli-styled version of a real image of a woman crying in handcuffs: regardless of the legality of that particular arrest, the larger suite of autarkic actions cartoonified by OpenAI shows how meaningless our cultural entities are becoming, not least because Miyazaki has made both explicitly anti-fascist media and explicitly anti-AI statements.
A “democratized”—commodified—market offering, in actuality, is a dessicated form of some more substantial original, and perhaps this is more easily discernible when applied to creative fields in such coarse ways as opposed to other fields where dessication may be acceptable. However, this fool’s gold tactic de-legitimizes labor and skill generally, which left unchecked will result in a final disintermediation of the public in the very market that has been elevated to the basis of our entire system of organization. OpenAI’s Sam Altman—who himself does not seem to possess any particular technical or artistic skill, focusing instead on setting up an explicit favor system in contradiction to the expectations of a fair market—profits both from the cause and the cure, with one hand orchestrating the theft of all intellectual property and promising total automation and with the other pushing a cryptocurrency which, not at all suspiciously, requires biometric data for any remaining market participation that has not been automated away.
The abundance-scarcity dipole is more readily evident in popular discourse and concrete policy. As a buzzword, “abundance” is a rebranding of deregulation that now favors a new generation of alternative private power structures. Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance begins with a twee appeal to tech accelerationism/American Dynamism/techno-optimism best read in vocal fry, “[t]his book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.”4 Except that it isn’t. The rest of the thesis involves “recognizing that scarcities are chosen.” To Klein, Americans chose scarcity, including any effects from climate change, by blocking the act of “building” through effective regulation.
In market design circles, abundance and scarcity represent an exploitable cycle. Of course, people would never willingly agree to live within a system of controlled scarcity and abundance that is the dream of some designers, but the door was opened by stagnating minimum wage for a stupid length of time which divorced labor from its true economic value. And so too has a great deal of effort and infrastructure has been put in place over a course of decades to convince the public of the impossibility of the other side of the dichotomy: services on par with those already found in similar nations—like national healthcare or strong public transit systems—that most would say fall under the term abundant. In fact, discussions of so-called “abundance” have serious backing only now that climate change is here and has put actually-difficult constraints upon our society that make abundance for all more comfortably out of reach.
Spencer Macdonald, a charter city “innovator” who advises the Foundation for American Innovation and who has made implicitly pronatalist statements, has made it clear what the true relationship between abundance and scarcity is meant to be after the technocrats recolonize America:
Maybe the- the tech tribe isn’t as familiar with the security model when we transition, uh, from the cloud to land, right? Because it’s cloud first, but not land never. So, it’s a different mentality here, uh, once we- we go to land, after we’ve- we’ve crowdfunded a- a physical territory, um, the model shifts from one of abundance to one of protecting scarcity.
One purpose of civilization was, is, and always shall be to reduce the distress caused by the scarcity that can occur due to material existence, such as illness and hunger; indeed, much of the optimism held by intellectual leaders of the early-to-mid twentieth century has a basis in the remarkable improvements to human life facilitated by advances to science and technology that, they presumed, were to be the foundations for still-greater achievements to come: even intangible achievements with—gasp—no dollar value attached. Which scarcity, in reality, should we see as a threat: something like illness, or lack of artistic ability? Illness is malfunction, whereas lack of artistic ability is not. The artistic process provides a fulfilling opportunity to develop skill at any time. And yet in exchange for participation in civilization, it seems labor has been stolen and invested into a tool which impoverishes themselves and their dignity and which disintermediates the vast constituency of civilization. It seems that the clever monkeys with levers we left in charge cannot see the difference between illness and lack of artistic ability. Can you?
As a buzzword, “abundance” is a rebranding of deregulation that now favors a new generation of alternative private power structures.
Indeed, the astroturfing “abundists,” and the Parfitians behind them, are simply exploiting, as Arendt observes, “liberal thought[’s] ... unswerving loyalty to Progress”5 which has produced an “irrational faith of liberals in growth[] so characteristic of all our present political and economic theories.”6 The commonality could not be clearer across “abundance,” “effective altruism,” and “longtermism”: each provides “a comfortable, speculative, or pseudo-scientific refuge from reality.”7 In exchange for these delusions, the very real infrastructure of the state itself is handed over to technocrats for a song, the ultimate “comfortable” “refuge from reality” being the “speculative” and “pseudo-scientific” “ASI” where even the government itself is automated. This, perhaps, is the truest meaning behind the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman’s recent declaration of himself as a “Waymo Democrat” and his demand—echoing Trump’s recent moves—that the state interfere with—nationalize—law firms by forcing them “to offer a certain number of pro bono hours to any startup building AI or other components for our robotaxi industry.” This, of course, is maximally compatible with charter city plans where the state bends over backwards to facilitate special economic zones; and in the light of such state coercion, the related “little tech” “movement” becomes grossly, absurdly misleading.
“Abundance,” at best, is a mix of concentration of private power facilitated by the “democratization”—appropriation—of things belonging to others; that is, it is an oligarchic, kleptocratic system of organization whose strategy for its seizure of power includes a deliberately-confusing conflation of democracy with collectivism. In fact, it is the same replay we have seen throughout the twentieth century by the very authoritarian regimes we had defeated: a central authority states that what once belonged to once person now belongs to everybody, but in reality it at best becomes accessible to others and in actuality is controlled by a brood of elites.
Ominously, scarcity and “abundance” have been embraced as stick and carrot by overconfident market designers. We already have a somewhat functional democracy, but anti-democratic elements in our society have been disrupting it for decades, opening the door for them to offer alternative solutions: any combination of trickle-down “abundance,” “democratization,” and outright authoritarianism. Similarly, we already had the means for something closer to a post-scarcity society, but critically no one is pitching post-scarcity which would have guarantees in place to maximize general availability, most obviously via public controls to preempt privately-induced artificial scarcity—the very topic the “abundists” assiduously avoid.
Indeed, scarcity could be seen as the most fundamental “rule of order,” and the promise of “abundance” is the promise of status to savvy individuals as well as the promise that the Hayekian model is a perpetual motion machine: that there will always be a way to disrupt equilibrated markets, that there will always be “opportunities” for the go-getter entrepreneur, its main requirement being a “post-truth” society where all manner of facts can be distorted and left unresolved so as to generate new economic activity in perpetuity.
Ominously, scarcity and “abundance” have been embraced as stick and carrot by overconfident market designers.
In any case, the monkeys have got hold of levers of all kinds and have clear plans to jerk them for all they are worth. How quickly we have declined: from science to superstition, we are a once-healthy society felled by hype and hyperstition. Bertrand Russell’s concept of an artificial society, explored below, provides a useful framework to characterize the qualities of an “artificial” society constructed under the lights of a perverted science.
“As we approach modern times,” Russell predicted, “the changes deliberately brought about in social structure become greater”8 due to the cascading effects of science, technology, and systematized method.
He continues:
This is especially the case when revolutions are concerned. The American Revolution and the French Revolution deliberately created certain societies with certain characteristics, but in the main these characteristics were political, and their effects in other directions formed no part of the primary intentions of the revolutionaries. But scientific technique has so enormously increased the power of governments that it has now become possible to produce much more profound and intimate changes in social structure than any that were contemplated by Jefferson or Robespierre .... [B]y means of psychological and economic technique it is becoming possible to create societies as artificial as the steam engine.9
He, in other words, predicted the fully-artificial society where even “psychological and economic technique[s]” are used to provide not only general organizing principles but also specificities of particular functions toward particular outcomes: “political” “characteristics” are de-emphasized in favor of broad application of “scientific technique” which are “psychological and economic” to areas of society and human life.
It is plain to see Russell’s predictions coming to fruition in the power-hungry and manic slogans coming from Silicon Valley.
Compare this prediction with the possible manifestation exhibited in the Hayekian lineage. Hayek’s “battle of ideas”10 mandate for the Mont Pèlerin Society, an organization whose members desperately insist that it be seen “more accurately as a special kind of academy,”11 calls for an active reshaping of intellectual discourse as a means of broad influence over society:
the Mont Pelerin Society [does not] set out to influence government; rather, it sets out to educate the intellectuals, to correct la trahison des clercs,12 and to lay the intellectual foundation of a liberal society and economy. This is not to say that it has not influenced governments, only that it has not tried to do so directly, and that any influence it has had has been through the ideas it generated, not through political action.13
This mission—”to correct [the treason of the intellectuals]” and to “lay” a new “intellectual foundation of a liberal society and economy” while also avoiding “political action”—combined with the group’s emphasis on “economic technique” closely matches what Russell warned against: the creation of an artificial society run and controlled by what we nowadays would term technocrats. His concern was very concrete: whoever would be running things would probably be too stupid and, in any case, would have inadequate tools at their disposal.
He writes:
Such artificial societies will, of course, until social science is much more perfected than it is at present, have many unintended characteristics, even if their creators succeed in giving them all the characteristics that were intended. The unintended characteristics may easily prove more important than those that were foreseen, and may cause the artificially constructed societies to break down in one way or another. But I do not think it is open to doubt that the artificial creation of societies will continue and increase so long as scientific technique persists.14
We’ve written previously15 about a growing predominance to select for a superficial tinkerer’s mindset over a grounding in critical thought among the technically trained. Russell predicted that: “[s]o long as the technique for creating a new type of society exists there will be men seeking to employ this technique.”16 We see echoes of this in the Silicon Valley ethos now applied onto our government, especially in the second Trump administration: of “moving fast and breaking things.” Perhaps even more illustratively, the fusion of “psychological and economic technique[s]” has already occurred long ago:
Actual experience with computers has provided all manner of heuristic suggestions as to how to meld cognitive science with neoclassical economics, perhaps taken to an extreme at certain locations. Indeed, as one Clark Medal recipient has admitted, “if you try and do psychology at MIT, you study computers, not humans.” [.... Market designers have] ambitions to be engineers of the human soul, arguing that their purpose-built machines can force people to tell the truth even when their every intention is to be mendacious, or provide them with information that they would find inaccessible through any conventional recourse to research channels.17
Russell also points out that many of these tinkerers might
suppose themselves actuated by some idealistic motive, and it is possible that such motives may play a part in determining what sort of society they shall aim at creating. But the desire to create is not itself idealistic, since it is a form of the love of power, and while the power create exists there will be men desirous of using this power even if unaided nature would produce a better result than any that can be brought about by deliberate intention.18
It is plain to see Russell’s predictions coming to fruition in the power-hungry and manic slogans coming from Silicon Valley, such as “It’s Time to Build,” “American Dynamism,” “techno-optimism,” “accelerationism,” and even the usefully-vague appeals to “abundance,” all of which are broad appeals to some kind of blind “creativity” in the service of private power.
The Hayekian “knowledge problem” purposefully miscasts the process of oversight as requiring a conveniently-impossible omniscience.
The problem inherent to technocracy—and to the philosopher king—is that any scientifically-, technically-, and/or philosophically-trained person is necessarily an embodiment of outsize private power which by no means guarantees the fruition of a scientific, technical, or philosophical society or, more crucially, a fair, just, and free society. On the contrary, Sallust, when examining the Catiline conspiracy, suggests an insurmountable contradiction: “kings suspect good men more than bad and always dread excellence in another man”; only in an environment of liberty afforded by democracy may “each man [begin] to distinguish himself more and to display his talent more.”19 In a free society, our best rise to the top democratically; in a society run by kings and kingmakers of even the most excellent training, those who serve their personal interests are positioned into power. After all, as Socrates shows us, virtue is “neither teachable nor knowledge,”20 whereas the contents of science, technical ability, and even philosophy are both; the subtler aspects of reality elide the ready conceptualization of discriminatory thought.21
Popular controls, therefore, must exist, especially when “unaided nature [may] produce a better result”;22 even more, for the “ecumenically” minded, an extraordinary burden of proof rests upon their shoulders if they are to insist upon the superiority of their artificial solution, especially if there is also a belief, as Hayek writes, in “[o]ur necessary ignorance of so much,”23 which obviously raises the question of whether or not interference, such as condescendingly presuming to “educate the intellectuals,” is beneficial to society in actuality.
Another of the Hayekians’ foundational strategies—that there is a “knowledge problem” and therefore any form of centralization is foolhardy—may appear to be compatible with Russell’s warning against an artificial society, but it is actually a means for just such an experiment to take root and run amok. The elimination of basic governance and of centralization like the US federal government is also the elimination of oversight, regulation, and broad human rights protections. Indeed, any consensus around an issue greater than some petty difference of opinion is lost under a Hayekian model, as the Hayekian “knowledge problem” purposefully miscasts the process of oversight as requiring a conveniently-impossible omniscience.
To make matters worse, Hayekian thought does not preclude the creation or utilization of the “steam engine” social order, which is to say more specifically that it is hardly incompatible with technocratic thinking: their philosophy still assumes that a “supreme authority”24 provides “the assignment of particular functions and the general aim,” i.e. rather than beginning by defining the specification for a steam engine, the final effects are demanded instead and their creation assumed to be the product of a resulting “automatic motion.” Via “spontaneous activity,” a broad edict is fulfilled by the serfs laboring beneath the ruler, and it is the serfs who end up devising the actual mechanisms by which an end product satisfying the mandate operates. In other words, the rulers, thanks to a self-serving framing of the arrangement, get to take credit for their volitional setting of the mandate which is vital to success, while the detailed work of the serfs is cast as just happening spontaneously, the workers subsequently portrayed as possessing little-to-no volition of their own. No doubt the dreaded phrase “I’m an idea man” will soon be replaced with “I’m a desire man.” Following the example of music “producer” Rick Rubin, who by his own admission possesses no actual technical skill or musical background, the current “vibecoding” paradigm opens the way, for example, to Andreessen’s recent comment that “you end up being a psychologist half the time [as a venture capitalist] .... [I]t’s possible that [these roles and responsibilities of VCs are] quite literally timeless. Um, and when, you know, when the AIs are doing everything else, like that may be one of the last remaining fields that- that people are still doing.”
The Hayekian model simply prefers mini-tyrants in a feudal system over democracy and a more sophisticated competitive economy. Total social artificiality as defined by Russell is fully compatible with Hayekian thought since a fully-mechanical solution still results: the difference is in the means rather than the ends since, in both cases, a steam engine and its underlying structure still results; perhaps who is more elevated in society differs, the economist or “visionary” versus the scientist or technologist, though even those lines have substantially blurred over the years with the market takeover of academia.
We will now examine how the “psychological and economic” techniques mentioned by Russell have manifested in reality: highly diffuse but effective disinformation campaigns that are economically rewarded. The obvious implements of “psychological and economic technique” are already well known: e.g. game theory, mechanism design, and all manner of related technical devices. Here, we will explore lesser-identified devices and how they may aid in the construction of an artificial society.
The modern economy—the “information economy”—is based on information distribution, i.e. market devices such as those from mechanism design exist to facilitate effective information availability. The priority placed upon this can all be rooted back to Hayek’s so-called “knowledge problem.” As Mirowski writes:
The knowledge held by any individual is (in this construction) of a weak and deceptive sort; no human being can ever comprehend the amount of information embodied in a market price; therefore, experts (and scientists) should not be accorded much respect, since the market ultimate reduces them to the same epistemic plane as rank amateurs. This is glossed in some quarters as the “wisdom of crowds.”25
However, this does not imply a philosophy that all information should always be maximally available: specifically, the current doctrine is about maximizing efficiency first, usually with regards to profit maximization instead of public awareness and understanding; the overall “health” of a given market, from this lens, is useful only insofar as it continues to provide a “healthy” return, i.e. the market need not be healthy with respect to the fulfillment of social objectives but rather serves first and foremost those with “rent-seeking” motives who extract wealth from its existence regardless of its function in—or dysfunctional relationship to—society.
The existence of differentials implies the potential for information arbitrage: if there exist two or more groups or markets and if only one of the groups or markets has the privileged information “priced in,” then there is an opportunity for the privileged-information holders to profit.
The “knowledge problem” implies the existence of necessary information asymmetries among agents, i.e. at any moment in time there exist information differentials among agents where, for example, a person with a given locality will usually have more local information compared to others who are in different locales; this person will then conduct “rational” actions within the market which “encodes” “information” via price adjustments, and in this way “information” is “naturally” propagated throughout the entire network of market participants. That is, there exist everywhere and at all times varying degrees of information differentials among all actors and, over time, for each given differential, there will be a natural convergence toward equilibrium—broader information availability—as the “natural” course of events transpire; before that equilibrium is reached, however, there is the opportunity for profit maximization, i.e. a person who has “special” knowledge can capitalize upon it by taking profit-maximizing actions based on their possession of privileged information.
Crucially, the existence of differentials implies the potential for arbitrage, i.e. in this case information arbitrage: if there exist two or more groups or markets and if only one of the groups or markets has the privileged information “priced in,” then there is an opportunity for the privileged-information holders to profit. In this way, the most sophisticated advantageous strategies26 would therefore be to economize information access whenever possible to facilitate conditions for arbitrage; further, the longer an information asymmetry exists, the greater the potential reward.
Any given piece of known information creates a natural bifurcation in the market: rational actors who possess the information, and those who do not. According to the Hayekian, this natural segmentation will resolve itself—that is, prices will equilibrate—as the information is disseminated through traditional word of mouth as well as through price adjustments and other market activity; that is, as with more common forms of arbitrage, the state of disequilibrium is usually short-lived. To again borrow from Mirowski: “Neoliberals cheerfully propose a democratization of knowledge,27 but in a curious sense: everyone should equally prostrate himself or herself before a market, which will then supply them with truth in the fullness of time.”28
To maximize the returns of information arbitrage, however, the ideal would be to elongate the period of disequilibrium for as long as possible; that is, ideally the market segmentation between the informed and the ignorant would be of significant lasting duration. Not only could this be done with a single piece of privileged information, but—for the purposes of profit maximization—an entire information economy could be created where multiple instances of deliberately-constructed information arbitrage may exist, especially if one could build systems whereby one could selectively “provide [individuals] with information that they would find inaccessible through any conventional recourse to research channels.”29 Thus, to truly maximize profit and to maximize the opportunities for information arbitrage, it behooves the actual or potential privileged-information holder to convince as many people as possible of “[o]ur necessary ignorance of so much”; for by what better means can the public be controlled than if they are tricked into believing that self-knowledge—and the self-control and self-determination it imparts—is impossible?
That is, for truly outsize payout—for example, the establishment of an entire alternative international order such as the Hayekian “ecumenical” “good society”—one would require a few things. First, to be able to maintain an information arbitrage environment, society must generally accept the Hayekian ignorance precepts:
Note how perfectly these beliefs lend themselves to probabilistic and statistical thinking: for each “particular fact,” the analysis of its particular causes is completely ignored in favor of aggregative takeaways. To the Hayekian, this is acceptable since, they believe, that humans already possess a “necessary ignorance of so much”; that the market provides both a better metric for relevance than rationality and a means by which relevant information will be surfaced in any case; and that, if a better-than-statistical model does exist, it may remain proprietary or otherwise private in keeping with elite tradition. The statistical loophole,32 in other words, is a means by which to mathematize historical aristocratic thought, allowing it thereby to become a totalizing philosophy.
By themselves, privileged information and a general adoption of these precepts cannot induce radical change; however, the general information arbitrage system could be used to set the conditions for it by developing the privileged-information holders into a coalition which works toward an outcome desired by the orchestrators. Given that the system is heavily focused on economics, it would be sensible for it to have a basis in game theory which itself places an emphasis on “standards of behavior,”33 so in principle one could work backwards from the desired outcome to design a robust system of interchange, i.e. by using the principles of mechanism design.34
The statistical loophole is a means by which to mathematize historical aristocratic thought, allowing it thereby to become a totalizing philosophy.
The largest problem would be to give a long life to the disequilibrated system (i.e. the bifurcation of society) of a given piece of information since, according to Hayekian thought, information distribution is supposed to naturally set in; it is not specifically that all agents become aware of the fact, per se, but rather that the market as a whole does. This points to a particular vulnerability to the “information economy”: given the presence of misleading information—that is, of misinformation or of disinformation—Hayek’s “necessary ignorance” becomes an insurmountable problem. A true Hayekian would have to believe that the reified, god-like market does not care about an individual’s or even a large group’s false beliefs; a weaker stance would be that the market would eventually “correct” for this, and in the meantime perhaps there would be market-based solutions to bear out true information for individuals. On the contrary, as suggested by the concept of information arbitrage, it is actually advantageous for market-based solutions to promote disinformation in the general case.
Disinformation campaigns, then, become a key means by which to artificially prevent general public information awareness, and, from there, a long-lasting profitable information asymmetry can be had. Where a simple conspiracy has a brittle vulnerability—all agents must maintain a straightforward simple secrecy—and therefore is harder to achieve meaningful duration especially as the potential number of agents who can contribute to the payout of the conspiracy grows, a formally-designed conspiracy facilitated by a sophisticated disinformation strategy makes maintaining secrecy and limiting the number of contributors less critical: at the extremes, even many contributors to the conspiracy are unsure what to believe—that is, if those agents’ truth valuation abilities are fundamentally weakened first by entering into the milieu of disinformation, second by the adoption of statistical over rationalistic thinking—then members of the public could be accidentally (or even deliberately) exposed to the facts of the conspiracy without worrying the designers.
In this way, privileged information has a different character in a disinformation environment: privilege comes not from being in possession of it since disinformation allows for its commodification, but rather the criterion for privilege comes from who has the ability to be certain of the correct facts which are most relevant to the desired outcome. And thus, a new game is formed that emphasizes an amalgamation of loyalty and savviness,35 i.e. natural ability to discern—or more likely having importance or value enough to be informed of—what is truth and what is lie and what is relevant and what is distraction.
Privileged information has a different character in a disinformation environment: privilege comes not from being in possession of it since disinformation allows for its commodification, but rather the criterion for privilege comes from who has the ability to be certain of the correct facts which are most relevant to the desired outcome.
Maintaining uncertainty about a world-changing event such as climate change, for example, would prevent the marshaling of the public and of leaders and of scientists to actually address it; in the slow boil leading up to the final regularization of disaster, much infrastructure could be laid down and much public conditioning could be attempted in anticipation of this final turn; in the end, the final goal being to place the means of weathering the storm into the hands of the few, the fall of democracy being positioned as necessary to increase “our” chances of survival (especially if the blame for climate change could be pinned on the failure of democracy in the first place). Climate change, in other words, affords the opportunity for neo-feudalism or other regressive forms of governance masked by futuristic technology and aesthetic: an era of scant, contested resources controlled by a few and lorded over underprivileged populations. Such a manufactured protection racket—built upon the labor of millennia the fruits of which are hoarded away at the last possible second to benefit a few elites—is the grimmest possible end to the project of Western civilization.
As Mirowski suggests, there is a sort of doubled doubt at play where both the existence of particular disinformation campaigns are hard to believe, and therefore even harder to accept is the possibility that there is a higher coordination at play: “the proviso that the populace is epistemically challenged ... has proven central to almost all [of the neoliberal thought collective’s] political activities. More important, it is a doctrine that the contemporary Left seems unable to take seriously, much less to confront its existence; and this, I believe, is one major motive behind the denial of the very existence of a neoliberal project.”36
Information arbitrage built atop a disinformation environment provides an underlying market mechanism to modern agnotological approaches. Oreskes and Conway, for example, identify the tobacco strategy where “documents released during tobacco litigation [] show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks”; those same documents revealed a staggeringly-widespread disinformation strategy using similar techniques being conducted by powerful figures in society that “was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.”37
Given that fascist and authoritarian environments are notoriously riddled with disinformation, the tobacco strategy unsurprisingly correlates with events surrounding Hitler’s concentration of power in Germany, including his reshaping of academia. As RA Brady writes:
The scientist, per se, is[] perhaps the most easily used and “co-ordinated” of all the especially trained people in modern society. The Nazis, to be true, fired a good many university professors, and dismissed a good many scientists from research laboratories. But the professors fired were primarily amongst the social sciences where there was a more common awareness and a more persistent criticism of the implications of Nazi programmes, and not amongst the natural sciences where thinking is supposed to be most rigorous. Those dismissed in this latter field were primarily Jewish or [] because [the individual had] equally uncritical acceptance of beliefs running contrary to the Nazi Philosophy.
Consequently the Nazis were able to “co-ordinate” scholars and scientists with relative ease, and hence to throw behind their elaborate propaganda the seeming weight of the bulk of German learned opinion and support.38
Looking more broadly at the structure of society itself and how it could be leveraged to further an antidemocratic project, we can also draw from a general observation about scientists from Brady:
there lurks [] a general misconception regarding the scientist. He is, after all, a human being and not a superman. He cannot be expected under the best of circumstances to be a clear-eyed, matter-of-fact searcher for “objective truth” and an expert in dispassionate analysis beyond the fringes of his own special field .... [Scientists can] become so careless as to assume that the attempt to think rigorously in one field automatically implies thinking rigorously whenever one thinks about anything at all. Here the scientist is no different from any man on the street. If he gives way to the temptation to generalise where he does not know he is merely allowing himself to abandon rational criteria in favour of uncritical belief. Uncritical belief is never science; it is always first cousin to bigotry itself.39
Russell concurs: “The State favoured one set of superstitions in Japan, and another in the West, but the scientists both of Japan and of the West have, with some exceptions, been willing to acquiesce in governmental doctrines, because most of them are citizens first, and servants of truth only in the second place.”40
As Russell put it, there would eventually form “the rule of an oligarchy of opinion,” in other words an “alignment” that wields great and undeserved influence over public thought.
Contrast these with Daniel Bell’s idea about the future direction of society,
that the making of decisions, because of the intricately linked nature of their consequences, will have an increasingly technical character. The husbanding of talent and the spread of educational and intellectual institutions will become a prime concern for the society; not only the best talents, but eventually the entire complex of social prestige and social status, will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.41
This defines the vector by which Russell’s artificial society could be—and has been—actualized: this social theory has become social fact as the wealthiest people have largely gained their wealth via the technology sector; unfortunately for everyone, society has over-invested trust in them. Much blame can be laid at key American institutes: for example, the decision by MIT’s administration to turn away from the postwar Lewis Report42—and the decision by the federal government to provide continued and unquestioning support of the institute—when combined with the broad militaristic, political, and cultural adoption of Austrian ideology and technique all but invited the history of Nazi Germany to repeat: namely, the evolution of the values embodied by the Nazi project toward more covert mechanisms leading to the creation and subsequent use of scientific and technical devices to terrorize and potentially exterminate entire human populations.43
This, no doubt, is why Arendt labored to separate the concepts of power and violence: where a person in power is “empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name,”44 violence fundamentally has an “instrumental character,” i.e. violence at the level of political impact almost always requires “implements” which, “like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they can substitute for it.”45 Citizens must be wary of any technological advancement that would make possible the authoritarian hope of establishing unbreakable and lasting rule by violence and coercion. Violence manifests not only from overt weaponry but also from systems and processes which intensify and streamline destruction of populations and institutions, as well as from those systems which obscure personal accountability in such endeavors. Again, the scientifically- and/or technically-trained leader becomes a potential liability, especially when they are bereft of training or understanding of the subjects explored in the humanities.
Arendt, musing on Bell’s prediction about the “intellectual and scientific communities” notes that, during her time, those communities’ members “are more dispersed and less bound by clear interests than groups in the old class system; hence, they have no drive to organize themselves and lack experience in all matters pertaining to power.”46 Game theory, mechanism design, and other “psychological and economic technique[s],” therefore, could be used to organize them and even go undetected since those individuals “lack experience in all matters pertaining to power.” The “effective altruism” movement and the larger Parfitian thought collective47 is one powerful example which purports to provide the outsourcing of morality and difficult ethical judgment to simple calculation, most appealing to many with scientific and/or technical training, especially when they are trained in elite “mere vocational training”48 programs focused primarily on the technique of calculation that leave students to assume they are receiving a fuller education; the general venture capital model which has come to strongly emphasize anarcho-capitalism is another,49 dropping the pretense of altruism and morality altogether in favor of obvious, and simplistic, reward mechanisms.
As Russell put it, there would eventually form “the rule of an oligarchy of opinion,” in other words an “alignment” that wields great and undeserved influence over public thought:
As the example of Russia has shown, it is now possible for men of energy and intelligence, if they once become possessed of the governmental machine, to retain power even though at first they may have to face the opposition of the majority of the population. We must therefore increasingly expect to see government falling into the hands of oligarchies, not of birth but of opinion. In countries long accustomed to democracy, the empire of these oligarchies may be concealed behind democratic forms, as was that of Augustus in Rome, but elsewhere their rule will be undisguised. If there is to be scientific experimentation in the construction of new kinds of societies, the rule of an oligarchy of opinion is essential.50
One of the most powerful men in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, has fetishized Augustus for years, even getting a horrible haircut to match. Augustus, it must be reminded, presided over the transition of the Roman Republic into its imperial form, having fulfilled the threat that Caesar (and Catiline before him) had manifested; afterwards, the “Senate” still existed in subjugation, giving a continuity for the wealthy families to maintain their privileged positions while Westerners largely lost public power for well over a millennium. Athena’s light, borne out of ancient Greece and which had once burned bright, illuminating clarity and promise, was lost, and the eventual fall of the empire was all but guaranteed.
Via scientific and technical means, Zuckerberg maintains outsize power over the democratic citizenry, not to mention the world at large, via his participation in “the rule of an oligarchy of opinion,” namely in his ability to shape and enforce opinion among the public. His firm has been central to various scandals regarding election manipulation and even genocides; nevertheless, he is the exemplar of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem,51 which is structured on the unicorn model and, from there, has gone very far in shaping the technically minded toward the idea of a fundamental bifurcation in the market and in its participants: the participants in the “100x ROI” startup, and then everybody else. In this way, we can see the denaturing qualities of the aristocratic aim at play in miniature in Silicon Valley. An order has been created: originally designed to be “spontaneous” where capital allocators once created a set of market “rules” in which startup founders operated, it inevitably—and surprisingly quickly—devolved into a naked aristocracy where celebrities and the merely wealthy are now “smart money,” and it matters even more than ever that you know the “right” people, attend the “right” parties, say the “right” political ideas, and do the “right” things. Silicon Valley has taken massive public investment (and was even founded by the federal government), yet now it is entirely under private rather than public control: via the distorted organizing principle of the innovation market, massive power has been concentrated into the hands of a few firms and the individuals who control or are stakeholders in them.
The emphasis is on obviously-oversized monopolist firms Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, completely ignoring the multi-corporate enterprises that the “anti-monopolists” have now partnered with, i.e. each capital firm’s network of corporations—so-called venture-backed “startups.”
Given Trump’s close relationship with venture capitalists and Obama’s cozy friendship with tech leaders—the latter recently updated his brand to be “the first digital president”52 while simultaneously making up statistics favorable to AI tech leaders53—the antitrust movement during the intervening Biden years presented the best possible chance to reign in the outsize private power of our era. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats yet again failed to rise to the occasion (and not only because of the Democrats’ “Limp Whip” Dick Durbin): Schumer appeared to have directly blocked antitrust bills that had bipartisan support; though there is an argument to be made that Schumer’s support should have been secured more carefully in advance. The dismantling of the state by tech leaders shows how total a miscalculation that was; so total, in fact, that it raises the question as to whether or not an actually-careful calculation by the Democrats had indeed occurred, especially given the close relationship between Democrats—especially the Biden administration—and Parfitians and corporate power generally; for example, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, just days before the administration ended, issued Intelligence Community Directive 406 which instructs “the spy agencies to ‘routinize’ and ‘expand’ their partnerships with private companies. Agencies are even authorized to incur ‘risk’ in these relationships, the directive says.” Schumer, in particular, poses the obvious question: how can one not have identified and accounted for the most obvious roadblocks, especially those with whom one regularly meets?
In the end, Biden and those in his orbit appear to have been duped by, co-opted by, or are in more active cahoots with corporate power as is suggested by public actors such as Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan being absorbed by Silicon Valley and the “little tech” movement being championed by Y Combinator, Marc Andreessen, and others. The emphasis is on obviously-oversized monopolist firms Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix,54 completely ignoring the multi-corporate enterprises that the “anti-monopolists” have now partnered with, i.e. each capital firm’s network of corporations—so-called venture-backed “startups”—controlled by or aligned with venture capitalists and are thus a novel middle point between a shell corporation and a firm with independent governance; not to mention the staggering interconnections of business deals, co-investments, and personal relationships that enmesh all of Silicon Valley into a tangled ball that resists attempts at forming distinctions. The utter hypocrisy of such democracy-preserving “anti-monopolists” working under the banner of such firms is outmatched only by the fact that they are now appearing alongside Steven Bannon at YC events, i.e. YC is now hosting a fan of Julius Evola who had pled guilty “to defrauding donors to a private effort to build a wall on the US southern border.”55 In no way does the “little tech” agenda achieve anything of substance: the Biden administration’s decision to allow YC to shape the future of the innovation sector as though it is somehow an outsider, in combination with the weakening of the public sector both via the Biden administration and the subsequent dismantling being done by the Trump administration, was a decision not simply to continue the status quo but to drive the United States toward an aristocracy of the firm.
The “little tech” movement is an example of the bifurcation of society via information arbitrage: a spectacle of regulation by culling aging monopolies is performed to appease the public, while more vigorous and less recognizable monopolies are allowed to grift until the public catches on.
The recent legal victories against Google, for example, are long past due—and thus are modest successes at best—yet shortly after it was announced that the federal government sought the structural separation of the firm, OpenAI’s leadership immediately expressed their interest in purchasing Google’s Chrome browser. Such is the grand future promised by “little tech”: a new generation of monopolists run by crazed, egomaniacal grifters and delusional ideologues. This is of little surprise given how deferential Biden’s all-star antitrust folks have been, for example appearing alongside then-Senator JD Vance at YC’s RemedyFest early last year. The bipartisanship can be summed up in a quip delivered by then-FTC chair Lina Khan during that conference where she compares herself, of all people, to famed deregulator Ronald Reagan:
Nearly forty years ago, President Reagan famously declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Today, I might offer a slight revision. For many developers and startups, the most terrifying words in the English language may be, “I’m from the App Store developer support team, and your application has been rejected.”
Needless to say, the focus on app store developers is foreboding given its laughably-minuscule scope, especially when the state—democracy itself—verges on collapse due to outsize private power. To better understand how deceptive the antitrust framing is, one of YC’s darling investments, Stripe, has raised concerns in experts about its potential monopoly power, a particular problem given that the firm’s leadership has resisted an IPO for years and, as some speculate, “Stripe may never go public”; that is, one of YC’s most important companies may very soon possess monopoly power without any of the already-too few governance controls found in publicly-traded companies. (Software developers already feel the sting of the Stripe monopoly as entire businesses are often shut down without warning. Making noise on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum is notoriously one of the surest ways to get issues addressed. In fact, the forum’s moderators will directly connect jilted software developers with Stripe employees, thereby poking holes in whatever narratives of impartiality Hacker News employs and giving yet more credence to the idea of there being a multi-corporate enterprise at play.) All this to say that one of the most prominent firms in the antitrust push—whose leaders received an audience at the White House and which now hosts all the prominent figures of the antitrust push—itself mints monopolistic firms and regularly utilizes them as prize examples of the successes made possible by their program. It turns out that the sophisticated governance which the United States requires cannot, in fact, be reduced down to a slogan printed on a cheap mug.
The question of why fascists are so particularly interested in science and technology is well answered by Arendt: “power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence up to a point can manage without them because it relies on implements,” that “[t]he extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments.”56 The innovation market—the means by which new “implements” are devised—must necessarily be under final popular, democratic controls; for its governance elsewise is hardly a “spontaneous” hive of activity where “freedoms” must be exercised by private individuals at all costs and without exception, a gloss over the very real accumulation both of power and, far more worryingly, of the instruments of violence.
Science and technology will always be sought by any individual or group seeking disproportionate power or authority, i.e. a growth of outsize private power ultimately will always pose a problem to the public and to popular democratic mechanisms; the ubiquity of market thinking anywhere and everywhere masking the co-optation of the innovation market towards extra-market ends. As Niebuhr observes, a minority faction of power, such as a budding aristocracy in a democratic system of organization,
will yield only because the majority has come into control of the police power of the state and may, if the occasion arises, augment that power by its own military strength. Should a minority regard its own strength, whether economic or martial, as strong enough to challenge the power of the majority, it may attempt to wrest control of the state apparatus from the majority, as in the case of the fascist movement in Italy. Sometimes it will resort to armed conflict, even if the prospects of victory are none too bright, as in the instance of the American Civil War, in which the Southern planting interests, outvoted by a combination of Eastern industrialists and Western agragrians, resolved to protect their peculiar interests and privileges by a forceful dissolution of the national union. The coercive factor is, in other words, always present in politics.57
Thus, with all these elements in mind, we can begin to see how the establishment of a “natural aristocracy” in our highly-technical era could take shape: scientists and technologists, being especially vulnerable to the hubris described by Brady, could easily be taken advantage of, providing the particular means toward violence and its threat upon, to borrow from Arendt, “challengers—the foreign enemy, the native criminal.”58 Thus, the construction of Russell’s artificial society has artifice behind not only the management of the public but also of an emergent elite technical class. Arendt states: “For better or worse—and I think there is every reason to be fearful as well as hopeful—the really new and potentially revolutionary class in society will consist of intellectuals, and their potential power, as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind.”59
In the present period, the technocratic class, in conjunction with neoliberal thought leaders and programs, are conducting an antidemocratic revolution. The “little tech” movement is an example of the bifurcation of society via information arbitrage: a spectacle of regulation by culling aging monopolies is performed to appease the public, while more vigorous and less recognizable monopolies are allowed to grift until the public catches on. As Chomsky once questioned: “Quite generally, what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin?”60
After all, elites jumping on the bandwagon of absurd precepts is nothing new; as Fromm writes: the “phenomenon[] of seeing the emperor’s garments although he is naked[] has existed for many millennia. This is how even the stupidest people were able to become regents. They proclaimed their belief that they were wise—and it was, for their people, usually already too late by the time the ruler had to prove his wisdom.”61
There is a prevailing hypothesis that a mind oriented to or trained in technical disciplines may be automatically a better and less biased leader. Unfortunately this is not the case: excesses in ego, lack of critical thinking, and lack of objectivity can easily persist in such a mind which is still susceptible, to a startling degree, to fantastical thinking and superstition; perhaps this is compounded by educational trends that have favored a tinkerer’s inductive logic and that have eschewed well-roundedness. In any case, what has occurred is a large cohort of privileged semi-skilled thinkers whose abilities to rationalize in “tech-speak” outweigh their ability to handle complexity. The extension of this rationalization impulse to the occult has led to the bizarre dystopian ideologies coming to prominence lately.
Julius Evola—the occult fascist author whose works are read by Silicon Valley elites62 as well as other figures such as the ex-editor of Compact Magazine—explicitly ties occult beliefs to aristocracy and even sets occultism in direct opposition to the democratic motive:
we must state outright that the only principles that an initiatic knowledge, rightly understood, can establish and justify are those of difference, higher authority, hierarchy, and aristocracy .... It was the heritage and privilege of royal and priestly castes, the legitimate holders of supreme power, who exercised a formative and orienting influence on every facet of life in the subordinate social strata. Esotericism and adeptship are by definition as antidemocratic as one could possibly imagine.
....
The principle is [] true that the mixture of castes, when these really answer to their function in traditional civilizations, is a crime, because it thoughtlessly breaks an occult and precious continuity, which is of the blood and also beyond the blood.63
This, of course, at once shines quite a light on the antidemocratic agenda at play among the technocrat leaders and the potential plans for their charter cities; more curious is the implication of potential “initiatic” practices also occurring among the tech elite and who are selected for prominence above and promotion through the ranks. This may potentially explain the very odd suite of psychologies and behaviors at play in Silicon Valley: it cannot be ruled out that more than a few tech leaders may be entirely psychologically compromised in service to an explicit occult-aristocratic agenda meant to overthrow the United States of America. Recall that these people largely have no imagination as they must be economically incentivized to do anything creative. They also have no grounding in or respect for theology or philosophy beyond the popular level. In other words, if under the spell of some cobbled-together occult or new age beliefs, they are generally useless at best and fanatical at worst.
What has occurred is a large cohort of privileged semi-skilled thinkers whose abilities to rationalize in “tech-speak” outweigh their ability to handle complexity.
It is immediately obvious from the resurgence of such bizarre beliefs, from historical incursions into academia and industry in Nazi Germany, and from the “instrumental” nature of violence that public power should have been maximally exercised over Silicon Valley and in particular over those who “set[] out to educate the intellectuals” (as a former president of the Mont Pèlerin Society has stated as being one of the organization’s purposes). Take, for example, the ultra-subjectivist, unscientific—frankly radical—stance on “academic freedom” by Michael Polanyi, a founding member of the Mont Pèlerin Society:
Science or scholarship can never be more than an affirmation of the things we believe in. These beliefs will, by their very nature, be of a normative character, claiming universal validity; they must also be responsible beliefs, held in due consideration of evidence and of the fallibility of all beliefs; but eventually they are ultimate commitments, issued under the seal of our personal judgment. To all further critical scruples we must at some point finally reply: “For I believe so.”64
In fact, in an article for The Lancet titled The Foundations of Academic Freedom, Polanyi builds those foundations upon a statement by Enrico Fermi to the US Senate—as Fermi stated, that there must be “an intensive freedom of the individual scientific worker to choose his own subject”—but, given Polanyi’s close relationship with Hayek, Polanyi’s actual chosen language is unmistakably derivative of the “knowledge problem” originally published two years prior: i.e., this suggests that postwar conceptions of “academic freedom” are crafted to maintain compatibility with Hayekian thought. For example, Polanyi writes that “the independent actions of individuals may become spontaneously and efficiently coordinated in a joint task, and [] subordination to a central authority would destroy this coordination.”65 It is interesting that “academic freedom” as commonly communicated to the public—including and especially in STEM—emphasizes freedom from whims and repression upon specific lines of research, rather than focusing on facilitating “spontaneity,” a more Hayekian notion.
Also, perhaps not coincidentally, the push for the more Hayekian “academic freedom” was concurrent with America’s notorious Operation Paperclip program where, scandalously, ex-Nazi scientists and engineers were smuggled into the United States and given positions of power, a massive betrayal of the humanitarians who prosecuted the Nuremberg trials and of the scores of people who died and otherwise sacrificed of themselves to secure our original victory. Rather than simply seizing their research and handing it to capable Allied researchers, “academic freedom” could have narrativized the continued employment of Nazis: that their participation in and contributions to a massive ideological war effort were nevertheless “neutral” and in keeping with our own “principles” which contributed to our own victory; a whitewashing of the dangerous thinking surrounding these better “thinkers” who, nevertheless, had collaborated, and all for extremely-unclear practical benefit to the United States.
Polanyi also states that “[t]he free society—of which a free scientific community naturally forms part—can be defended only by expressly recognizing the characteristic beliefs which are held in common by such a society and professing that these beliefs are true.”66 The difficulties with such a relativistic structure can be seen with the potential problem of drift and the potential problem of co-optation: a scientific community with no self-discipline beyond “an intensive freedom of the individual scientific worker to choose his own subject” is obviously subject to both; for why should science, or the scientist, be somehow magically immune to the human folly against which all other disciplines and all other workers must endeavor to prevent?
Indeed, given that “academic freedom” is a de-facto appeal to special rights, what other profession in the history of the United States bestows unique privileges upon its professionals? If anything, the exact opposite is the case as specialized practitioners in other fields have increased responsibility and liability: doctors must avoid malpractice, lawyers disbarment, asset managers must adhere to fiduciary responsibilities. Not so for the academic who, for better or worse, is bestowed the quasi-right of tenure, even less so for the technical entrepreneur whose only responsibilities, as we can empirically see in Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” methodology, are lip service to their shareholders. Needless to say, in both cases so much underlying effort went into a discovery or product—“standing on the shoulders of giants” as Newton famously stated—that these aristocratic practices obscure and deprive the roots, branches, and leaves of the tree that yields the budding fruit.67
As Mirowski and Nik-Khah observe, these appeals to blind faith have manifested a mix of drift and co-optation in the years since:
Some latter-day Austrians have argued that entrepreneurs are just “smarter” than any dedicated intellectual, since they are marinated in [market] information and thus quicker to respond to market signals. Yet, almost by definition, there is no instrument available to humankind to “test” this proposition. As with all the great world religions, the sole and final terminus for the skeptic is to surrender to faith: The Market as a super information processor knows more than we could ever begin to divine.68
The nature of science is to restrict and reduce normative valuation and to prevent fallback to a reliance on mere “belie[f],” be it self-serving, occult, or otherwise. A tinkerer’s inductive logic struggles with direct engagement with assumption and contextual frame; not to be confused with “belief” as has been done by Polanyi and the like. The scientific method, the research process, and even application and conceptualization are not immune to rationality, and neither is the selection of what to research or the researchers themselves; what Polanyi advocates strikes directly at the heart of the objective goal of science and academia, a pollution which is evident to this day and which facilitates the belief in the je ne sais quoi supposedly inherent within the “natural aristocrat,” the visionary entrepreneur, or the pop academic celebrity. Indeed, Russell states that the possibility of the artificial society in his time had already “led to an intoxication with love of system, and, in this intoxication, the elementary claims of the individual [in society] are forgotten”:69 it is common for a person’s desires to be limited “to the interests of some one group, such as his own nation, race, class or sex,”70 and three ethical fallacies may arise therefrom.
Here, we outline what may be called Russell’s tribalist fallacies of solipsistic excess71 in which flavors of aggressive unawareness curdle into specific worldviews about population groups based on a person’s mismanagement of their subjective experience:
The latter two fallacies have a basis in obvious alienation of other groups; its perceived absence from the enlightened imperialist’s viewpoint fuels their feelings of self-superiority. In fact, the first two fallacies have a basis in supremacy over other groups; the difference being in the means by which, and perhaps to what degree, outside groups are discounted.
(Note how segregationist policy is an example of the mutually-excluding subjectivity, i.e. the idea of “separate but equal” is a poor solution from the perspective of union; but that, via game-theoretic “objective” policy, this dynamic remains in play even in “integrated” democratic societies such as the United States. Note also that the fallacies themselves are not mutually exclusive: e.g. the game-theoretic fallacy can easily be combined with instrumentalizing other humans, i.e. that it is fair game for each group to attempt to treat all other groups as “mere means.”)
The Parfitian thought collective—highly influential in both technocratic and some neoliberal circles—is a good example of these fallacies—especially, and unsurprisingly, the utilitarian fallacy—put into practice and packaged in pseudo-intellectual language. In particular, Parfit applies this segmentation of the human race along temporal lines in order to seem more sophisticated, i.e. the present, actual persons versus future, statistically-possible “persons.” Even more, we often see the Parfitians—Peter Singer73 being a well-known example—defend animal rights, a concept which Russell himself draws on when discussing this fallacy:
“the good” is something limited to a certain group, the rest of mankind being either obstacles to be swept away or means to be utilized to the best advantage of those who alone have importance as ends. Most people, quite unreflectingly, take up this attitude towards animals .... [We generally do not] consider their welfare as part of the general good at which a wise statesman should aim.74
The Parfitians’ argument is to attack those who do not appropriately reify future “persons” to be of the same value and importance as actual living persons: that those who do not take Parfit’s unusual stance, according to him, are guilty of thinking that “‘the good’ is something limited to” the contemporary person, and “the rest of mankind”—i.e. future “persons”—are “either obstacles to be swept away or means to be utilized.” In other words, such actual persons are objectifying future “persons” according to Parfit.
This, however, is preposterous: by bestowing actuality on those who do not yet exist (and are therefore materially needless), those who possess the property of actuality (and who therefore have actual needs) are inappropriately devalued. One cannot sweep away a nonexistent thing, but here we see the common rhetorical technique among the new right wing of suggesting “gotchas” that they hope create paradoxes for their opponents. Clearly the Parfitian stance has anti-choice implications: everyone’s gametes are now subject to his pseudo-mathematical population calculations and spurious argumentation around reproduction.75
Parfit applies this segmentation of the human race along temporal lines in order to seem more sophisticated.
They also are attempting to appeal to love of one’s descendants—and/or the preservation of one’s own “cultural inheritance”—in some pseudo-mathematical, pseudo-global-consciousness way, but speaking in this calculated language only reveals the fact that they must indeed calculate to simulate concern for future generations because they have no primary facility for empathy. Furthermore, bestowing importance on those who do not yet exist is clearly a transparent attempt to devise a mechanism by which to control these future “persons” which can only occur, conveniently, by control of the present power systems—something they have openly admitted to as, for example, Anthropic’s cofounder Jack Clark has stated that he and his compatriots should be worried about what could go wrong “when a tiny group gains a huge amount of power and makes life-altering decisions for a vast number of people.”76
Russell gives an example of how this supremacist utilitarian fallacy could play out. This, again, is predictive of the current eugenics mania found not only among the more obvious modern tech fascists but is also similar to the utilitarian quantification arguments77 commonly found among the Parfitians; the aforementioned Peter Singer, for example, has been accused by the National Council on Disability of advocating “for the government or private insurance companies to deny treatments to infants with disabilities” and “routinely contend[ing] the ‘right to life’ is related to a being’s capacity for intelligence.”
Russell sarcastically writes:
it could be said, for instance, that the only men who “count” are those with an intelligence quotient78 of 180 and upwards. It is to be expected that men with an intelligence quotient of 179 would wish the doctrine slightly modified, but perhaps a government of the super-intelligent would find ways of dealing with them.79
This is an example of what the German philosopher and political scientist Lothar Fritze terms a scope rule in an examination of ethics and ideology in Nazi Germany: “Scope rules determine to whom moral norms shall be applied. Some scope rules determine who is to be a member of the moral community. Other scope rules result from the function which certain members of the moral community have or rather in which capacity they are acting.”80 They are used in conjunction with “[b]asic norms [which] determine only imprecisely what is or is not to be done,” i.e. scope rules determine basic norms’ “realm of application”; for example, “the scope of the prohibition to kill may be restricted according to ethnicity, race, or also in reference to other (e.g. medical) criteria.”
Ultimately, as Fritze writes, “[t]he morality a person has is essentially dependent on [their] accepted scope rules,” meaning that, for example, two people could entirely agree on a principle such as “Thou shalt not kill” and simultaneously disagree as to the actual individuals who may not be murdered: all possible ways of understanding this principle “might all meet the same universalization demand,” i.e. that it has general validity; however, each of the individuals’ interpretations may have a “different scope[].”81 Thus—clearly echoing Singer’s and common stances within the Parfitian thought collective—actions such as “infanticide, suicide, killing those not belonging to one’s own tribe or people, or killing the mentally disabled” may be considered entirely acceptable by those who claim to forbid murder: in their eyes, it simply wouldn’t count. The individuals within the group that may be slaughtered are outside of the scope of applicability, i.e. they, in one way or another, are not seen as being truly human and thus do not have the same rights conferred to others. Scholar Pauer-Studer observes how scope rules were concretely translated into policy in Nazi Germany: National Socialist “jurists claimed that racially alien individuals could neither ethically nor legally comply with German law and justice. They thus had to be excluded from the German community. The jurists also directly linked racial-biological factors to crime. Crime prevention entailed the racial protection of the German community.”82
(Compare this with beliefs held by AI researchers and others within the Parfitian collective where, for example, “a lot of them believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one.” If all human life is discounted when compared to AI, then “moral” scope rules are in play where a human may be in scope only insofar as they are beneficial to the outcome of the “birth” and proliferation of AI “beings”; AI researchers themselves, their billionaire backers,83 and other useful market participants and structures—such as chip manufacturing firms and their owners—therefore being of chief moral value; after all, scope rules can be used to construct an “Übermensch” segment of humanity—why not bestow a je ne sais quoi to some set of useful people? Towards that outcome, intermediate stages—namely, genocide and eugenics—may need to be facilitated, especially given economic and/or environmental pressures. This gives some clarity as to what the Future of Life Institute may have in mind for the future of both human life and computerized “life”; of no surprise given that the institute reportedly has connections to Neo-Nazi groups.84)
So, in view of Russell’s aforementioned supremacist utilitarian fallacy, scope rules are the means by which one makes a determination that a person is within the scope of deserving being “count[ed] in the realm of ends”; if that individual is found to be outside the scope, then they “are to be regarded as mere means towards satisfying the desires of [one’s] own group.” Our prospects are grim: the discipline of philosophy has been weakened over the years,85 and utilitarian ethics have made incursions into academia and the general populace. Unfortunately, falling back to Kant and picking up from there will also not suffice. The dignity of the Kantian agent, though described as being an end-in-itself, can be easily sidestepped by those inculcated by scope rules, i.e. in such cases dignity would be contingent upon an individual’s or group’s beliefs about what constitutes a human in the first place.
This is an inescapable flaw at the core of the Kantian system as it finds its highest satisfaction in conceptual thought as a desired end-product which, at its heart, is a matter of discrimination among observables. Thus it is a given that people, noting differences among individuals in the population, may easily and too-quickly reify those categories into groups to which they belong and those who are outside those groups. Kant may have identified this problem,86 but he only swept it under the rug when he introduced the forever-unknowable “noumenon,” i.e. he simply created a category of conceptual entity that acts as a boundary to further conceptual investigation.
In view of Russell’s supremacist utilitarian fallacy, scope rules are the means by which one makes a determination that a person is within the scope of deserving being “count[ed] in the realm of ends.”
Thus, without sufficient conceptual structure, training in it, and social inculcation of it, a not-insignificant dose of faith-like belief is required, which, as shown above, is highly variable and almost as far from universality as one can get (not to mention very explicitly expected among various worldviews including in the neoliberal thought collective): for the weak-minded who require strict conceptual necessity to determine their actions and how to view their fellow human—such as the Parfitians—the seeming necessity of an allowable lapse into relativistic belief even in the midst of a utilitarian calculation gives them all the excuse they need to believe themselves aristocratic, especially since, after all, such a status would be advantageous to them were that socially achievable. That is, advantage usually competes with truth, often with deadly results.
Perhaps one of the most striking early modern examples of population-level “thinking” is a comment made by Herman Kahn, one of the original “brain trusters” who was employed as a RAND Corporation physicist and futurist who was also one of the inspirations for the titular character in Dr. Strangelove. Kahn wrote the following in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, ideas which he had repeated to Congress the year before in a hearing for the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy:
[W]ar is horrible. There is no question about it. But so is peace. And it is proper, with the kind of calculations we are making today, to compare the horror of war and the horror of peace and see how much worse it is.87
Fromm, who has a background in psychoanalysis, concludes that “one would have to say that [Kahn] is insane, and one can pity him.”88 On this last point we disagree: “pity” has no place in the evaluation of those in power for “pity” is contrary to the nature of power. Fromm argues that, while atomic weapons “are the product of man” and that
[t]hey are indeed an expression of his greatest intellectual achievements, [nevertheless] they control us. And it has become very questionable whether we will ever control them. We living people who want to live are becoming powerless, although we are, seemingly, omnipotent humans. We believe that we control, yet we are being controlled—not by a tyrant, but by things, by circumstances.89
From here, Fromm concludes: “We talk of progress and of the future, although in reality no one knows where he is going, and no one says where things are going to, and no one has a goal.”90 Indeed, no one in power says to the public “where things are going to,” i.e. no leader reveals to the public clear long-term goals, including and especially regarding how the catastrophe of climate change will be handled. Nevertheless, power is increasingly being accumulated by a few elites, and the public doubtless is becoming more powerless by the day, though critically elites are only robbed of power by the ascendant autocracy when they fail to bend the knee, i.e. they suffer only a contingent material deprivation and are incentivized daily to go along with injustice to preserve their own petty luxuries and comforts.
It should also be noted that population-level planning is ironically simply a variation of the central planning strategies that were heavily criticized in the twentieth century.
In other words, Fromm falls into the fallacy of “blamelessness”—that a possibly-exculpating “pit[iable]” “insan[ity]” is at play, no doubt in part from the apparent “objectivity” that game theory provides: a framework which looks as though it can tell humans what to do. What is missing—and what should have been obvious even back then—is that Kahn provides an early example of what in the modern day has been termed “population ethics,” that is: population-level planning which, as history has shown time and again, is an exercise of power as far as one can get from pity. Parfitians like John Broome, who has been involved in international climate change programs like the IPCC, are largely responsible for the contemporary variant. The overlap, however, is undeniable: RAND, for example, now has as its president and CEO Jason Matheny, a prominent figure in the EA world who was the director of research at the Future of Humanity Institute, who created Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) which has received funding from Open Philanthropy and has ex-OpenAI board member and ex-Open Philanthropy senior analyst Helen Toner as a director of strategy and grants,91 and who implored “effective altruists” to enter governments while he was the director of the ODNI’s IARPA.
Indeed, given the very close connections with “brain trusters” and their ideas,92 it should come as no surprise that there is very particular overlap here even with Hayekian thought, as Hayek—the very person who is credited for identifying the so-called “knowledge problem” which did so much damage with the conflation of centralized governance with “central planning” and to the nascent discipline of logical positivism—explicitly and intimately ties “necessary ignorance” with probabilistic and statistical thinking, especially when paired with his vehement attack on rationality reflected, for example, in Rules and Order where he calls all such thinking a “synoptic delusion.”93 To complete our earlier quotations of him: “Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances.”94
It should also be noted that population-level planning is ironically simply a variation of the central planning strategies that were heavily criticized in the twentieth century; in fact, where at least the twentieth-century versions were focused on maximizing the benefit across the entire population, the modern aristocratic version very explicitly is about managing the population itself with the given that climate change will put global constraints upon what had been a globally-interconnected civilization; therefore, population-level planning and coordination which also preserves the aristocratic class will, to these statistical thinkers, require population-level sacrifices. Even more, where central planning was justified in many corners by logical positivistic assumptions, the modern-day equivalent could be said to be based on a version of marketism: a market-oriented statistical positivism which is rooted in the statistical loophole,95 i.e. one of the many misapplications of devices from mathematical and statistical physics upon the human population. Indeed, the problem, from Kant to von Neumann, lies in the inadequate nature of mathematical physics as final explanation; as Whitehead writes: Kant’s “temporal world, as in [Critique of Pure Reason], was in its essence dead, phantasmal, phenomenal. Kant was a mathematical physicist, and his cosmological solution was sufficient for the abstractions to which mathematical physics is confined.”96
While today’s statistical positivist may reject the historical political agenda of many logical positivists to establish central planning, they still agree with the core approach to epistemology of logical positivism.
Even more, the statistical variant of physics lends itself rather explicitly to traditional aristocratic thought: viewing the masses as a container of stochastic bodies not unlike a gas in an enclosure, an unruly collection of entities incapable of reason or self-organization needing to be corralled and controlled; thus reason must be imposed upon them for their own good or to make them useful. It is a tale as old as time: the means of interpretation and of enforcement are simply updated to match the modern implements of the technical age. The embrace of statistical positivism, knowingly or otherwise, is the embrace of aristocracy as the embracer necessarily serves to reinforce private power.
While today’s statistical positivist may reject the historical political agenda of many logical positivists to establish central planning, they still agree with the core approach to epistemology of logical positivism: the emphasis upon a single inductive conceptual scheme for both universal explanation as well as for the organization of the entirety of civilization. The logical empiricists suffered from an over-eager exclusion of interpretive approaches which is reflected in the actions of the statistical positivists, for example the frequent and open disdain for the humanities common among many in the science and tech elite, particularly the entrepreneurially minded. But that is not the end of the story. Where the logical positivists, in keeping with their approach, were rigorous about their expectation of rationalistic interpretation, the statistical positivists, unsurprisingly, have a fuzzier relation to statistical interpretation, not least because their approach is grounded in market fundamentalism. Given the mixed motives at play, it is easier to understand their approach as having developed a trimodal interpretive framework that is highly competitive in our game-theoretic society:
That is, when something cannot be accounted for—or dismissed—using probabilistic and statistical methods or cheap argumentation, the backup strategy is to appeal to market thinking.98 This schizoid approach, it must be noted, is a form of exceptionalism usually found among aristocrats and which is highly compatible with a might-makes-right philosophy, in this case in a market-oriented society which allows and already came with significant power imbalances: curiosity only insofar as it serves existing power and its buttressing.99 The reductive act of de-emphasizing internal relations which necessarily comes from probabilistic and statistical thinking has an irremediable consequence on the person, especially in the Kantian frame: the end-in-itself becomes de-emphasized, and each person is considered primarily according to their external relations which, for example, includes their value to the state apparatus or their relevance when compared to the population as a whole.
Parfitian thought, which seeks to conflate future “persons” with actual persons, is a means by which statistical physicists’ constructs could be used, via the statistical loophole, to radically reshape society toward the ends of concentrated private powers; it is an exploitation of the postwar doctrine of American hegemony via its adoption of game theory as a central organizing principle of society, extending it to police the totality of the present by specious appeal to the future.
When something cannot be accounted for—or dismissed—using probabilistic and statistical methods or cheap argumentation, the backup strategy is to appeal to market thinking.
Take, for example, Peter Norvig,100 who about a decade ago wrote a counterargument to Chomsky wherein the former argues that language and reasoning itself are inexorably probabilistic, providing one of the strongest arguments for a statistical positivist interpretation of human consciousness:
languages are complex, random, contingent biological processes that are subject to the whims of evolution and cultural change. What constitutes a language is not an eternal ideal form, represented by the settings of a small number of parameters, but rather is the contingent outcome of complex processes. Since they are contingent, it seems they can only be analyzed with probabilistic models. Since people have to continually understand the uncertain, ambiguous, noisy speech of others, it seems they must be using something like probabilistic reasoning. Chomsky for some reason wants to avoid this, and therefore he must declare the actual facts of language use out of bounds and declare that true linguistics only exists in the mathematical realm, where he can impose the formalism he wants.
Norvig’s entire stance is questionable: among the “actual facts of language use” is the common occurrence of a clarification request, be it due to a mishearing of the actual spoken words or because of a need to disambiguate correctly-heard spoken language. The clarification request, in fact, is a concrete example of what Norvig misconstrues as “a mystical facility” “to get language from this abstract, eternal, mathematical realm into the heads of people”: clearly, given a conversation, a finite number of possibilities are identified in a listener about what was possibly meant, and, from there, it is a matter of understanding which selection to make once it is understood what the speaker actually meant (or understanding that the speaker meant something entirely novel with regards to the listener’s finite, describable expectation set). This is simple enough to identify in one’s daily experience. Norvig confuses a natural human process that does not require formalization in its utilization with one which is incapable of formalization.
Even the precept that language, being “contingent,” “can only be analyzed with probabilistic models” is itself an overreach. Norvig’s fretting about the “whims of evolution and cultural change” are overblown given how quickly, for example, groups construct pidgins. Language, undeniably, is a precision tool, as each concrete word has a distinct set of senses, and there is a clear negative reaction in a person when a word is used incorrectly or imprecisely. Though these senses and word usages may change over time, they do so in traceable ways. What’s more, language has been formalized along one set of parameters, but we use holistic thinking to interpret other aspects of communication pragmatically—like body language or other non-linguistic cues—and this may be what Norvig is trying to ignore when he paints language as mushy. Language can be seen as an adaptive precision device which necessarily implies that its essential mechanisms are rationalistic and not of fuzzy probability. A good human interpreter, for example, must understand several things at once: the immediate conversation, the larger situation in which the conversation is occurring, the cultural and even political nuances of all participants, even the given historical conditions of an historical document which may be relevant to the discussion; to suggest, for example, reducing a high-stakes international negotiation to be dependent on probabilistic methods is a gross oversimplification.
Worse still, the Parfitian thought collective possesses a rather striking ideology built upon a particular concept called the “timeless population,” which Parfit’s colleague John Broome—who possesses a PhD in economics from MIT—defines as “all the people who exist at some time in history. The timeless population includes Julius Caesar, me, and all the people who are yet to be born. Killing a[n actual] person does not remove her from the timeless population.”101 This itself stems from the “Total View” and the “Average View,” where utility scores are assigned to each person’s total life and then, in the former approach, there is an absolute tally, whereas in the latter case it is averaged over the total number of people;102 importantly, in both cases, the selection of humans spans across the entirety of the “timeless population,” taking into account, as Hilary Greaves and Toby Ord103 write, “the well-being of everyone in it—past, present, and future.”104
Parfit’s dainty little thought experiment is primarily a calculated ape of some concepts in Eastern thought.
These ideas, based on an extremely-questionable relationship to time, are derived in part from Parfit, who in his work himself shows a pointedly-concerning relationship to time that opens the door for the concept of a “timeless population” as a supposedly-meaningful conceptual entity. As Parfit writes:
Remoteness in time has, in itself, no more significance than remoteness in space. Suppose that I shoot some arrow into a distant wood, where it wounds some person. If I should have known that there might be someone in this wood, I am guilty of gross negligence. Because this person is far away, I cannot identify the person whom I harm. But this is no excuse. Nor is it any excuse that this person is far away. We should make the same claims about effects on people who are temporally remote.105
One striking effect of the “temporally remote” concept is that the commonsense conclusion one has when seeing a person next to us and another person in the (spatially-) remote distance—that there are two actual people being observed—also applies to one person in the present and one “person” in the future. Clearly, no “person” in the future can be granted the key property of actuality; rather quickly, the entire argument falls apart.106 This is used, for example, in Bostrom’s Infinite Ethics where Bostrom puts forth a false dichotomy107 between necessarily performing “both temporal and spatial discounting” and treating all past, current, and possible humans as of the same moral worth. Note that both options in the false dichotomy allow for population shaping: the former suggests that some regions in both time and space have less moral worth than others—i.e. the establishment of scope rules—and this could be used, for example, to “ethically” “justify” regional genocide and resettlement, thereby increasing the “moral worth” of that space over time. In the latter option of grouping all humans over the span of all time into a single model, then there is a massive imbalance toward the future: the past is filled with only about one hundred thousand years of humans, the eight billion or so of actually-alive humans of the current period, and the untold numbers of possible humans that can exist in the future across the entire universe until the heat death of the universe in 10100 years; a tipping of the scales achieved by simply adding zeroes at the end of important-seeming numbers, conveniently making the actually-alive humans insignificant, especially when thinking through potential sacrifices that may need to be made during climate change in service to the “future.” This is not mere conjecture; as stated earlier, some Silicon Valley AI researchers have observed about the culture surrounding them: “a lot of them believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one.”
Nevertheless, Parfit ventures further to even attack humans’ fundamental relationships to the nature of time, putting forth a “conceivable” case where a man, whom he terms “Timeless,” has peculiar abilities: “when [he] is reminded that he once had a month of agony, he is as much distressed as when he learns that he will later have such a month .... When he is told that he will later have some period of great enjoyment, he is pleased to learn this. He greatly looks forward to this period. When he is reminded that he once had just such a period, he is equally pleased.”108 According to Parfit, the “description [of ‘Timeless’] is coherent,” and therefore “[w]e can reject the suggestion” that “[i]t is not merely true that the thought of future pleasures gives us pleasure. We anticipate these pleasures. Similarly, we anticipate pains. Anticipation cannot have a backward-looking counterpart.”109 Therefore—according to Parfit—humans are capable of being “temporally neutral,” i.e. “[o]ur bias towards the future is bad for us. It would be better for us if we were like Timeless.”
Once such a scoring technique is accepted as a valid standard for quality of leadership or society, then those who hold the power to tip the scales of living standards toward the negative could make the calculation turn out as badly as they want for any individual at any time without affecting the “score.”
Parfit’s dainty little thought experiment is primarily a calculated ape of some concepts in Eastern thought: for example, the by-now-familiar encouragement to live in the present moment, neither dwelling in the past nor fearing the future. Here though, Parfit is not encouraging the reader—the individual—to adopt this mindset oneself in order to increase one’s autonomy. Rather, he instead exhorts his audience to apply this quality to a fictive in order to build a case for viewing individuals as exchangeable, both in the present and through time, lulling the reader—the actual person—into a fatalistic complacency. Here we may also identify a characteristic of Parfit’s and others’ work: even though “Timeless” is a “man very different from us” and, in fact, is an utter impossiblity, we are to take Parfit seriously nonetheless because the “description is coherent” and accept such arguments as philosophically useful, perhaps even as fact.110 According to Parfit, the criterion for coherence is imagination: the “technical” impossibilities are to be accepted in contrast to “deep” impossibilities, the difference being that “[w]e may be unable to imagine what such cases [of the latter] would involve”;111 in other words, he, in fact, has built his entire framework on magical thinking where actual engineers who deal with actual problems are replaced with Disney-style imagineers.
Make no mistake: they are only pretenders of engineering and of science who have already co-opted the entire innovation market and now pretend to engineer society itself; in actuality unmaking sound structures that have stood for centuries. There is nothing scientific, nothing in the principles of engineering that warrant wanton destruction or the proliferation of immiseration.
Yet, despite the number of rather extreme deficiencies of these conceptual entities, these ideas nevertheless are taken seriously. Broome, who was the PhD advisor of Ord and Will MacAskill,112 finds his work explicitly built upon by the new generation of Parfitian leaders; for example, Ord, along with Greaves, write about subordinate and adjacent conceptual entities such as the “timeless average” of “living standards”; as they posit: “Even if living standards stopped improving now”—that is, if everything were frozen in place to the current cultural norms through the entire future of the human race, a precept awfully-convenient for the Parfitians’ billionaire backers who have entrenched market offerings—then “additional generations at this level would continue to bring up the timeless average.”113
This appeal to a calculated “score,” built from no actual hard data—an entire Weltanschauung that no actual person would feel satisfaction living under—is what passes for “population ethics” among those who are vocationally trained in statistical thinking. It should be noted that such schemes are by definition meant to be applied only to the masses, leaving the aristos as special cases with special dispensations. It should also be noted that once such a scoring technique is accepted as a valid standard for quality of leadership or society, then those who hold the power to tip the scales of living standards toward the negative could make the calculation turn out as badly as they want for any individual at any time without affecting the overall “score.”
Interestingly, the Nazis themselves held very similar ethical views as the Parfitians and, as the world saw, built an entire system of governance and a war machine around it: Nazi-style central planning based on what may be termed Hitlerian utilitarianism which underpins the particular form of the social Darwinism that ultimately manifested under National Socialism.
This aristocratic, statistical form of central planning should be seen as a Nazi-style central planning approach because of its predication upon this particular belief set: having a flawed relationship to the nature of time (what appears to be a difficulty coming to terms with its vastness) and utilizing the resultant coping mechanisms formalized into conceptual entities to make decisions about populations. As it turns out, this is highly compatible with Hitler’s Weltanschauung which is based on loss mathematics:114 i.e. a philosophical outlook held by none other than Adolf Hitler himself. Coming back to Fritze, “according to Hitler’s understanding [based on his ideological beliefs], it was possible to include both the non-conceptions of the past [that is, births that could have, but did not in actuality, occur in the past] as well as future births in the end accounts”115 of his utilitarian worldview. Even disregarding the deeply-flawed comparisons of races, there are numerous examples of Hitler making wholly-inappropriate comparisons of population variance, reducing everything always down to a simplistic numbers game; for example, he writes:
The losses resulting directly from war cannot be compared at all to the losses caused by the bad and unhealthy life of a people. The most horrible war is the one that appears the most peaceful to humanity today: the peaceful economic war. It is precisely this war whose end result leads to sacrifices that far surpass the sacrifices of the Great War. Because it affects not only the living but, above all, takes the unborn. While war kills at most a fraction of the present population, the economic war murders the future. A single year of reduced fertility in Europe kills more people than all those who fell in all European wars from the French Revolution to the present, including the Great War.116
Fritze continues:
[Hitler’s] thinking was orientated to a radical way of understanding the utilitarian idea of the exchangeability of individuals [where] the loss of one individual’s life can be compensated by having enabled the continuation of life or the thus-realized birth of another individual. In this thinking, the individual is replaceable. The actual individual is so to speak just a place holder for a certain amount of life. Everyone’s life can be taken, even deliberately, if this way the total amount of human life will increase. This idea is incompatible with the granting of an unconditional right to life. Even the innocent individual may be sacrificed under the condition of his replacement.117
Parfitian ideology is a recapitulation of Hitler’s concepts: the reification of a population into a singular, concrete entity that is “timeless,” therefore overvaluing its hypothetical future members—“above all, [] the unborn”118 to borrow from Hitler—and using that as justification for radical present-day policy direction. Their constructions provide the tools to make such stances justifiable, giving ample “philosophical” and “mathematized” cover for a private coalition of elites to erect legalistic frameworks based on Hitlerian population “ethics.”
This aristocratic, statistical form of central planning should be seen as a Nazi-style central planning approach because of its predication upon this particular belief set: having a flawed relationship to the nature of time.
Even the “longtermists’” approach of representing and comparing populations using exponentiated numbers across time is not original to them. In the end, when utilitarian thought was taken to its extreme,
Hitler had at his disposal a figure of thought which seemed to be suitable for justifying victim calculations even on a grand scale. “If Germany had a million children a year,” he stated in a speech in August 1929, “and 700,000-800,000 of the weakest were eliminated, in the end the result would perhaps even be an increase of power.” If one gets involved in this kind of accounts of gains and losses, there are hardly any limits to one’s imagination.119
Parfit attempts to forestall this type of policy by putting forth his “repugnant conclusion” which may arise from his line of thinking, that,
[f]or any possible population of [some sizable population], all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.120
However, a closer examination across the thought collective and his own work—combined with a deeper understanding of National Socialist doctrine, philosophy, and belief—shows this to be a fig leaf. E.g., while Parfit himself states that, “[a]s my choice of name [of The Repugnant Conclusion] suggests, I find this conclusion hard to accept,”121 he frequently puts the question of who does and does not deserve to live into the forefront of his thinking, that some “people will have had lives that are worth living,”122 and, by implication, there are those who will not “have had lives that are worth living.” In fact, ethics scholar O’Mathúna argues that “[t]he notion of human lives not worth living was central to the ideological changes at the beginning of the twentieth century” in Germany, and that this was a key view that “ideologically prepared German doctors and nurses to accept Nazi social policies promoting survival of only the fittest humans.”123 Such ideas are currently being proliferated among “contemporary bioethical discourse”: “[Peter] Singer suggests that newborns can be viewed as non-persons if they are not wanted. ‘Thousands of years of lip-service to the Christian ethic have not succeeded in suppressing entirely the earlier ethical attitude that newborn infants, especially if unwanted, are not yet full members of the moral community.’”
This attitude is reflected throughout the Parfitian landscape and the policies which emerge therefrom. Take, for example, Klein’s124 and Thompson’s aforementioned Abundance book125 which suggests a ridiculous proposal that attempts to morally strong-arm the reader; implicit in the argument is the question of what constitutes a life that is “worth living” in conjunction with supposed hard economic realities:
Los Angeles is failing, and failing badly, at doing that. Given that failure, does it make sense to be asking for special air filtration systems for developments near freeways when the alternative, for many of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway? To pose the question sounds callous. But to refuse to pose the question, given the need for more housing, is cruel.126
As others have pointed out, such air filtration systems are nominal costs for housing developments—a solved problem—and, even more, may result in a net savings from the potential reduction of transmission of airborne illnesses, both of which of course raise the question as to why this false choice is being presented by Klein and Thompson. It becomes especially curious given that it is well known that poor air quality negatively affects cognitive abilities which could be measured via the IQ test that Parfitians are obsessed with; that is, why do Klein and Thompson suggest a totally-unnecessary policy that, to borrow a Parfitian term, induces “dysgenic” effects upon the population? Of course, one possible answer is that it does not affect the population equally: over longer time spans and with enough similar policies negatively affecting those same sub-populations, a eugenic outcome may occur for some sub-populations via deliberate “dysgenic” policies enacted against other sub-populations. (Compare this to the more obvious techniques of the Nazis where, by “deporting promising youth from occupied territories,” they believed that it would effect “a desired weakening of the biological force of the conquered people.”127) The “repugnant conclusion” thus would be only nominally avoided: a slow, covert death instead of a fast, overt one; in the place of an overzealous and obvious extermination program such as the one conducted by the National Socialists—the result of a hard “conclusion” being reached—instead there is a “long-term” program where no obvious “conclusion” is found, yet nevertheless material effects toward extermination are achieved via a series of policies put forth by those who “present themselves as reluctant savvy Truth Tellers making Hard Choices,” as others have put it.
The prevalence of these beliefs among the powerful in the West is of especial alarm given the massive economic uncertainty currently facing the US both from current monetary and trade policies as well as from climate change which are reflective of the conditions during the Weimar Republic. As O’Mathúna argues, strident economic conditions had accelerated eugenics practices in Germany: “Only when the economic pressures were combined with social Darwinism’s [negative] view of human dignity did the elimination of the weak and unfit become an acceptable option .... In addition to economic pressures and eugenics, social Darwinism’s prioritization of race over individual impacted the day-to-day activities of doctors and nurses.”128 In the end, “[t]he inherent dignity and special value of humans was rejected which permitted widespread destruction of human life during the Nazi era.”
Lest there be any doubt of the commonality between Parfitian thought and National Socialism, the idea of a “timeless population” was also explicitly used in “leading contemporary official commentaries on police law in Nazi Germany.”
Explaining Hitler’s own ardent belief in eugenics, Hitler writes that
population growth is such a natural and therefore self-evident process that it is not seen as exceptional. The expansion of the land, however, is limited by the general property distribution of the world and any change in it is deemed a particularly revolutionary act and an exceptional process; thus, the ease with which a population can be fed stands in opposition to the exceptional difficulty of territorial alteration.129
Where Parfit explores130 the question of overpopulation—as per usual, not giving firm conclusions one way or another—there is a mass of Parfitian rhetoric which focuses on massive, exponentiated numbers of future “beings” spread across the galaxy and beyond. It could be said that the Future of Life Institute and the now-defunct Future of Humanity Institute are programs which have adopted an interplanetary, nominally-depersonalized variation of the völkisch “struggle for survival” where the ostensible enemies are not other races but rather environmental conditions and humanity’s possible self-destruction. According to them, we must all keep our eye on the outcomes in Parfit’s “further future” to which we are connected as members of a “timeless” new Volk which includes future “AI” digital “sentience” that must be proliferated, including among the stars. If there are any who stand in its way, especially when looked at over long time spans—such as sub-populations that hamper this neo-völkisch technical mission with low IQ or, given the “inconvenience” of climate change, that require resources better allocated to ensure the future of the Volk—then they must be viewed in terms of the collective “race” and concrete policy adopted and enforced accordingly.131
In no uncertain terms, Parfitian thought provides an entire framework for ideologues in much the same way the völkisch milieu had for the National Socialists regardless of whether they conduct their mission with immediacy or with greater duration. As Fritze observes:
For Hitler, it was a question of personal responsibility to devote his (alleged) insights on the natural laws of the struggle of peoples and races to the (objective) interests of the German people .... His conviction of being able to derive the appropriate policy from a correct insight into the conditions for the possibility of coping with existence made him convinced of representing the objective interests of the Germanic people and thus of acting legitimately referring to putative consent. Goebbels had similar ideas. From Germany’s superiority, he derived both a “political obligation” and a “moral right” for the Germans to lead Europe.132
Lest there be any doubt of the commonality between Parfitian thought and National Socialism, the idea of a “timeless population” was also explicitly used in “leading contemporary official commentaries on police law in Nazi Germany.”133 National Socialist jurist Werner Best—the high-ranking Gestapo official who has been identified as an ideal of the technocratic Nazi, who helped create the registry of Jewish individuals, and who authored the 1936 Gestapo basic laws which stated that the actions of the secret police force “were not subject to the review of the administrative courts” and also that they had authority “for collecting political intelligence”134—writes in a 1938 article about the “renewal of police law.” As Fritze summarizes, for Best, “the people was considered a ‘common existence,’ a ‘transpersonal and timeless common existence of one and the same blood and uniform mental and spiritual nature,’ and the individuals were just considered ‘manifestations of their peoples.’”135 Two years later, Best published his book The German Police “which became a police handbook” and which uses the same conceptual devices: as Pauer-Studer observes, Best argued that “the völkisch state aimed to preserve and enhance the Volk as a ‘transpersonal, time-transcending totality of uniform blood and spiritual character.’”136
We see in the völkisch movement a variation of the “noble savage” concept at play: if one reifies the general population while also making it acceptable to sacrifice them en masse, then, just as with the “noble savage” who is at once celebrated while also exterminated, the crimes and ethically-bankrupt policies against them are swept under the rug with sentiment but nevertheless hardened into law to “protect” the “superior race and culture,” the main difference being that these techniques are not nominally oriented only against an “external” population but also “internally” due to its supposedly-global purview. It, in other words, is totalizing, exactly what the Parfitians create from their “timeless population” concept with a “transpersonal” quality which is implied from the coupling of its “law of large numbers” purview across both space and time with its utilitarian interpretation of the human being: rather than generalize first and foremost across the actual human population as a set of co-equal individuals imbued with inalienable rights and an irrevocable dignity and work forwards from there, they begin first with childish abstractions, such as utiles distributed across all of spacetime itself, and work backwards to see where, and if, humans fit in.
Arguing for a “timeless” quality of the Volk gives justification to build an entire legalistic apparatus around its defense since the “Aryan” population should be seen as a pristine manifestation that should be protected at all costs, ultimately providing justification for police mechanisms useful for “inner warfare”137 within the state such as those modeled after the National Socialists’ SS.138 As Pauer-Studer states, Best specifically argued that the old liberal, “individualistic-humanitarian state (an invention of the consensual will of individuals)”139 was an environment where “the police protected individual citizens by means of principles, regulations, and statutes,” while the new “völkisch state” must use the police “for ‘protecting the völkisch order against disruption and destruction.’” And, as Pauer-Studer argues: “In order to understand how the police under Himmler could assume such vast powers outside of the state’s ministerial bureaucracy, one must first acknowledge these radical legal transformations.”
Early Southern nationalist occult historiographical writings were key to the enactment of the Indian Removal Act.
A few years before Best’s publications, “Georg Dahm, a criminal law professor at the University of Kiel,”140 put forth similar arguments to justify, as Fritze puts it, “the claimed priority of the people over the individual.”141 Dahm’s work, as Pauer-Studer writes, was also used in Nazi Germany to effect the
moralization of law [where] traits like fidelity, loyalty, and honor found their way into criminal law. Accordingly, several Nazi legal theorists supported the reintroduction of honor-punishment (Ehrenstrafe). [Dahm] argued that this punishment helped distinguish between a concept of criminal law that sees it as “a rational technique to fight crime,” and one which “ascribes to law a transpersonal dignity and integrates criminal law into the whole context of völkisch life.”142
This provides a way for the state to police individuals’ internal beliefs:
Dahm claimed that the well-known liberal reservations against honor-punishment had lost their force in the NS legal system. In the liberal state, honor-punishment143 was forbidden on the basis of the separation of external and internal freedoms. According to liberal doctrine, Dahm wrote, “[l]aw can merely regulate the external coexistence of citizens and is thus only interested in the external legal behaviour, but not in the convictions (Gesinnungen) of the perpetrator ....”
However, in a legal system in which “law and ethics, criminal law and the perception of the Volk (Volksanschauung [or “the Volk’s view”]) grow together,” one could not do away with honor-punishment since each real community would need the loyalty and honor of its members. Accordingly, in his sentence the criminal law judge would also be expressing a value judgment about whether the perpetrator “still belongs or does not belong to the community, and, more generally, who at all belongs to it and where the legal limits lie so that the community does not completely split up with the offender of the law.”144
Similarly, Nazi jurist Otto Koellreutter “considered it vital to anchor political authority in völkisch community. The political form of the Führer state, Keollreutter claimed, was ‘determined by the people’s racial and territorial conditionalities and by the essence of the Volk’s spirit (Volksgeist).’”145 More explicitly rejecting the precept of fundamental human equality, “in their commentary on the Nuremberg Laws, Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke wrote: ‘Over and against the doctrines of universal human equality and the principally unrestricted freedom of the individual vis-à-vis the state, National Socialism sets the harsh but necessary recognition of the natural inequality and heterogeneity of humans.’”146 And, in a document by Stuckart and Rolf Schiedermair, they write:
The liberalistic era did not recognize any racial question. It had fallen into the fateful error that anyone with a human face was equal. Hence the state leadership at the time did not see the racial question as a state political task. The legislation of the liberal era thus did not cope with the racial question. National Socialism, however, puts the racial question at the center of its worldview.147
And as Hitler himself writes:
If the highest duty of politics is the preservation and continuation of the life of a people, then this life is the eternal stake for which it fights and struggles and of and about which judgment will be made. Its duty is therefore the preservation of a substance of flesh and blood. Its success is enabling this preservation. Its failure is the destruction, the loss of this substance .... [T]he two concepts of a peace policy or a war policy thus immediately become meaningless. Because the stake that is struggled for through politics is always life, the result in the case of failure or success is always the same, regardless of the political means used to try to achieve the preservation of the life a people [sic]. A peace policy that fails leads to the destruction of a people—that is, to the obliteration of its flesh and blood substance—just the same as a war policy that fails.148
Police law expert and National Socialist Walter Hamel states that “[r]estricting the police to averting danger was just an artificial fantasy of rationalist ideology, which considered this as the state’s only meaning,”149 i.e. we see an explicit rejection of strongly-rationalistic thinking at the core of National Socialism, and in its place we find, in part, appeal to an “ethical program.” These bases of non-fact and in non-rationality, in actuality, are precisely what explicitly occurred in both völkisch and the US Confederacy’s Southern planters’ modes of thought; once irreality was allowed, all manner of outlandish, radical, and most of all genocidal beliefs took hold. Civilization, hated and the source of all too many problems in the eyes of the völkisch thinkers, “embodied ‘Reason,’ whose essence was critical and cynical”;150 for example, the anthroposophists, originally a deeply-influential segment of the völkisch thought collective in Germany,
rejected historiography for relying on “documents” and disregarding “the supersensory spheres.” [Anthroposophist founder Ruldolf Steiner] derided “the academic approach to historical research” as “absurd” because it ignored “supersensible knowledge.” In Steiner’s view, “ordinary history” was “limited to external evidence” and hence no match for “direct spiritual perception.”151
Note that, in the Parfitians’ system, all debate and discourse comes after accepting the concept of a “timeless population”; one of their “unexamined priors,” to use their lingo. Given how crucial this particular conceptual entity was to the National Socialists’ legal project, we should therefore see this maneuver by the Parfitians as a highly-novel form of controlled discourse, a narrow window constructed using exploited philosophy which has been conducted and backed by the most prestigious Western institutes; this “prior” being “unexamined” by the highest individuals in governance across the world while they are convinced of everything built atop it.
Borrowing heavily from and building new worldviews cluttered with utter nonsense, one can easily make determinations either about literal racial or ethnic groups or new-ish segments such as along the lines of IQ scores or socioeconomic status to define some as a “true” core of humanity (putting a very stark light on the Trump administration’s recent demand for an autism registry, not least because of Best’s own involvement in creating a similar Jewish registry in Nazi Germany152); by appealing to a specific subset of properties of humanity as being “better” than others (arbitrarily or at best chosen according to variable contemporary circumstances, no less), then necessarily a “timeless” subpopulation is formed: those who, across all time and space, bear certain real, imagined, and/or misinterpreted desired properties.
This approach itself has a basis in proto-fascist thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the past contains members of this “timeless” subpopulation as shown by the völkisch appeal to “ancient Teutonic tribes as embodiments of the German spirit”153 (as well as the more obvious appeal to India’s Aryan tribe) as well as the Southerners’ appeal to classical aristocracies, all of which explicitly construct a trans-continental, trans-temporal and trans-personal ideal. As George Fitzhugh, a Southern thought leader, writes: “Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens, are a privileged class,” and: “Like the Roman citizen, the Southern white man would become a noble and privileged character.”154 Regarding the future, both clearly risked war to shape the populations of their land in terms of births, rights, and dispensations of power according to specific limiting criteria.
Thus, a neo-völkisch ideology can easily be harbored in the modern day; and, just as during the original proto-fascist movements, elements of legitimate science—in the end, abandoning and perverting true science—may be cherry picked to justify any number of dangerous pseudo-theories. As Staudenmaier notes: “National Socialist race ideology operated in different registers at once[, ...] conjoining instrumental rationality with deeply irrational elements.”155 Indeed, the trimodal interpretive scheme of statistical positivism shows just how a person or a group may “conjoin[] instrumental rationalist with deeply irrational elements.”
(Given their seeming inability to actually deal with vastness and totality, it may be that such individuals are incapable of understanding their experience without imposing arbitrary and stunning restrictions upon it, i.e. their utilization of scope rules may be inescapably necessary for their conception or even their cognition, an unsurprising natural consequence of a fragmented approach. Regardless of the cause, they should be firmly disqualified from positions of leadership as they, to borrow from Russell, are incapable of achieving “the general good at which a wise statesman should aim.”156)
The Southern overlap shows through via occult historiography—especially entirely-wrong, utterly-fantastic constructions about the origins of human races and ethnicities—which threads through fascist and proto-fascist thought; it even can be found in the rhetoric of at least one past US president. As some scholars suggest, early Southern nationalist occult historiographical writings were key to the enactment of the Indian Removal Act. In his second annual address to Congress in 1830, Andrew Jackson—another US president who ignored the Supreme Court—appears to have been inspired by an early Southern occult historian, John Haywood, who writes in his book Christian Advocate wholly-concocted ideas that Native Americans themselves had long ago exterminated a mythical “Nordic-like”157 predecessor race with “yellow hair”158 who lived in the Americas.
Haywood writes:
The fortifications in every ancient place, show that a civilized people, who were also numerous, and under a government which could command their services, were infested with hordes of barbarians and free booters, and were finally exterminated by them, at which time their arts were extinguished.159
Compare to this fragment of Jackson’s address where he proffers a similar ahistorical account to bolster the recently-passed Indian Removal Act and, in all likelihood, to better prepare the country for ethnic cleansing:
In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes.160
Jackson’s brutal, extensive aim is made quite clear in the sentence immediately following which also presages the later völkisch concept of an “eternal struggle” among the races where lofty aggregative thinking about the future of humanity is appealed to so as to mask the very immediate material ends of conquest and extermination: “Nor is there anything in this which, upon a comprehensive view of the general interests of the human race, is to be regretted.”161
Rather than renewing our commitment to crushing fascists, we instead are being forced by elite factions to repeat the worst mistakes of our past. The “ASI” which will solve all our problems, do all our thinking, and even wipe all our behinds for us; the fictive “digital sentience”162 of the future where, as Greaves and MacAskill argue with childish mathematics and reasoning, the Milky Way has “carrying capacity” for as much as “1045” of these supposed entities;163 the “xenodemon” which, like the “timeless population,” is itself a supposedly-atemporal entity where, presumably, the only way we can effectively interact with it is via population-scale ablutions and population-scale ritual sacrifices: all of these fictives—and more164—are already being utilized to reorient policy, infrastructure, and the market itself toward a belief set that is best termed an occult futurism, i.e. a variation of occult historiography that concocts ideas about the future instead of the past.165
Thus, Parfitian thought can and should be seen as a means by which to effect a Nazi-style central planning scheme by way of exploiting Russell’s supremacist fallacy of objectifying subjectivity by confusing the issue of who is and is not an actual person and by de-emphasizing the crisis of climate change which, in the end, will almost unavoidably result in mass death that, in all likelihood, will be very unevenly distributed across the actual human population. If the Parfitian approach were taken all the way, the existing order may conduct “business as usual” with minimized scrutiny since the mass of the professional-managerial class need only perform their tithing rituals to non-profits who are designated by Parfitians to be “effective” (read: also run by Parfitians or are otherwise compatible with the coalition’s climate strategy). But the end goal is clear: the “preservation of a substance of flesh and blood,” at minimum of an artistocratic class, but, given the total disregard for the Global South, the final goal seems to be more traditionally Hitlerian. Jackson himself gives his blessing to America: “Nor is there anything in this which [] is to be regretted.” In no uncertain terms, Oxford has been incubating rehashed National Socialist “ethical” “philosophy” for decades which has since spread throughout all major Western institutions, be they governmental, academic, or, chillingly, even military and defense related.
Rather than renewing our commitment to crushing fascists, we instead are being forced by elite factions to repeat the worst mistakes of our past.
Turning our attention to the United States and its political history, such outcomes are merely an extension of the longstanding hegemonic rationale given by game theory (which itself, as Jackson shows, is a formalization of an even older impetus): a coalition with the power of discrimination, i.e. individuals who “assign to [another agent] the amount which he gets,”166 in this case the doling out of the right to live and the necessary conditions for it. It, in theory, is the ultimate advantage that can ever be had over a person: the total contingency of their very life. In other words, it is maximally game-theoretically “rational” to endeavor toward this end, no matter the obvious parallels it has to the Nazis’ Weltanschauung.
The ultimate, actual goal of all this fantasy, as “moral” “philosopher” Singer suggests, is avarice and rapacious domination across at least the entire galaxy: “Perhaps[] the idea that we are essential to this process [of facilitating our descendants to spread through our galaxy] is merely the latest version of the self-important delusion that humans are the center of existence. Surely, in this vast universe, there must be other forms of intelligent life, and if we don’t populate the Milky Way galaxy, someone else will.” From literally one sentence to the next, he goes from humans having a “self-important delusion” about being “the center of existence” to a literal interstellar settler colonialism: from Scramble for Africa to Scramble for Asteres.
The “ethical” “philosopher,” however, in this case goes on to assuage the reader’s concern about the moral difficulties which would obviously emerge were humans to actually run into other sentient lifeforms out there, a trick-within-a-trick where another sleight of hand buries the earlier suggestion of interstellar genocide. Singer refers to statements by Open Philanthropy’s Holden Karnofsky wherein the latter references a paper co-written by Ord titled Dissolving the Fermi Paradox in which the authors use spurious math to come to the ridiculous conclusion that it is statistically likely that no other intelligent life exists in the universe (recall that Fermi is yet again167 being used to legitimate and advance radical theories and policies based thereon).
From this, Singer concludes that “the most likely answer is that intelligent life is extremely rare. It is so rare that that [sic] we may be the only intelligent beings in our galaxy, and perhaps in the much larger Virgo supercluster to which our galaxy belongs.”168 Just as easily as the Parfitians use incredible numbers to promote beliefs rooted in science fiction tropes, so too do they use those same techniques to dismiss possibilities inconvenient to their political aims but which are highly relevant to the largest contemporary political and ethical matters.
Why can humanity not effectively self-regulate and keep in check a known failure state of fascism in the West? Each person must ask themselves the critical question: must we “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”?