Crossposted from Twitter:

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about how the western world got so dysfunctional. Here’s my rough, best-guess story:

1. WW2 gave rise to a strong taboo against ethnonationalism. While perhaps at first this taboo was valuable, over time it also contaminated discussions of race differences, nationalism, and even IQ itself, to the point where even truths that seemed totally obvious to WW2-era people also became taboo. There’s no mechanism for subsequent generations to create common knowledge that certain facts are true but usefully taboo—they simply act as if these facts are false, which leads to arbitrarily bad policies (e.g. killing meritocratic hiring processes like IQ tests).

2. However, these taboos would gradually have lost power if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms. Instead, politicization of the bureaucracy and judiciary allowed them to spread. This was enabled by the “managerial revolution” under which govt bureaucracy massively expanded in scope and powers. Partly this was a justifiable response to the increasing complexity of the world (and various kinds of incompetence and nepotism within govts) but in practice it created a class of managerial elites who viewed their intellectual merit as license to impose their ideology on the people they governed. This class gains status by signaling commitment to luxury beliefs. Since more absurd beliefs are more costly-to-fake signals, the resulting ideology is actively perverse (i.e. supports whatever is least aligned with their stated core values, like Hamas).

3. On an ideological level the managerial revolution was facilitated by a kind of utilitarian spirit under which technocratic expertise was considered more important for administrators than virtue or fidelity to the populace. This may have been a response to the loss of faith in traditional elites after WW1. The enlightened liberal perspective wanted to maintain a fiction of equality, under which administrators were just doing a job the same as any other, rather than taking on the heavy privileges and responsibilities associated with (healthy) hierarchical relationships.

4. On an economic level, the world wars led to centralization of state power over currency and the abandonment of the gold standard. While at first govts tried to preserve the fiction that fiat currencies were relevantly similar to gold-backed currencies, again there was no mechanism for later generations to create common knowledge of what had actually been done and why. The black hole of western state debt that will never be repaid creates distortions across the economy, which few economists actually grapple with because they are emotionally committed to thinking of western govts as “too big to fail”.

5. All of this has gradually eroded the strong, partly-innate sense of virtue (and respect for virtuous people) that used to be common. Virtue can be seen as a self-replicating memeplex that incentivizes ethical behavior in others—e.g. high-integrity people will reward others for displaying integrity. This is different from altruism, which rewards others regardless of their virtue. Indeed, it’s often directly opposed to altruism, since altruists disproportionately favor the least virtuous people (because they’re worse-off). Since consequentialists think that morality is essentially about altruism, much moral philosophy actively undermines ethics. So does modern economics, via smuggling in the assumption that utility functions represent selfish preferences.

6. All of this is happening against a backdrop of rapid technological progress, which facilitates highly unequal control mechanisms (e.g. a handful of people controlling global newsfeeds or AI values). The bad news is that this enables ideologies to propagate even when they are perverse and internally dysfunctional. The good news is that it makes genuine truth-seeking and virtuous cooperation increasingly high-leverage.

Addenda:

1. I led with the ethnonationalism stuff because it’s the most obvious, but in some sense it’s just a symptom: a functional society would have rejected the taboos when they got too obviously wrong (e.g. by defending Murray).

   The deeper issue seems to be a kind of toxic egalitarianism that is against accountability, hierarchy or individual agency in general. You can trace this thread (with increasing uncertainty) thru e.g. Wilson, Marx, the utilitarians, and maybe even all the way back to Jesus.

   Michael Vassar thinks of it as Germanic “kultur” (as opposed to “zivilization”); I’m not well-read enough to evaluate that claim though. I’m more confident about it being driven by fear-based motivations, especially envy—as per Girard, Lacan, etc.

2. Some prescriptions I’m currently considering:
   - reviving virtue ethics
   - AI-based tools for facilitating small, high-trust, high-accountability groups. Even if we can’t have freedom of association or reliable arbitration via legal or corporate mechanisms, perhaps we can still have it via social mechanisms (especially as more and more people become functionally post-economic)
   - better therapeutic interventions, especially oriented to resolving fear of death

   But I spend most of my time trying to figure out the formal theory that encodes these intuitions—in which agents are understood in terms of goals (in the predictive processing sense) and boundaries rather than utility functions and credences. That feels upstream of a lot of other stuff. More here, though it’s a bit out of date.

Edited to add: I am surprised both by the extent of disagree-voting (-38 as of writing this), and by the extent to which this is decoupled from karma (23 as of writing this). This is an impressive level of decoupling. Given that the gap between my views and most LWers is much bigger than I thought, I'll have a think about how to better convey my perspective in a way that makes cruxes clearer. Since many LWers believe in something like Eliezer's civilizational inadequacy thesis, though, I'm curious about the best explanations other people have for why our current civilization is "inadequate".