Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

by 20 Comments

How to Shift Public Opinion

Most people don’t really understand how to shift public opinion because they have a tough time grasping the concept of leverage.

It’s easier to think about influence at the sub-Dunbar level, even with all the tools available now for even impoverished people with an internet connection to reach millions. To handle influence at scale, you have to think in terms of abstractions rather than in terms of individuals.

The typical response to a radical proposal is that “it will never work” because of inertia. While it’s possible that it will never work, the point is not necessarily to achieve the radical proposal, but to establish it as a gravitational center, and then to pull  and push attention & conversation to that center.

An example of such a proposal is “Restore the Stuarts.” Saying this absolutely po-faced on Fox News would probably not do the trick on any meaningful timeline. That doesn’t really matter all that much, because by doing that, you’re establishing a new boundary that more timid opinion-nudgers can define themselves against.

The timid person might want to be more radical, but they know that it wouldn’t be practical. But by appearing more radical than the timid person, you make it possible for the sissy with a larger audience to shuffle several steps to the right. The larger and more powerful that you can make the gravitation on the outer right, the stronger the pull is felt by the timid ones who minister to the masses, who in democracy only care about the consensus, safe opinion.

The timid editor or TV producer acts like the basic political science model of rational election-winning positioning. Their whole function is just to look at the scale of public opinion, and then to plunk themselves down at the center to maximize their appeal to their market. By forcing more weight onto the right side of the scale, you can shove around the timid people who react predictably with little in the way of meaningful agency.

This is why in politics, the intellectuals are more powerful than the populists — the populists only react to the frame set by the leading thinkers. Crushing the opposing side’s thinkers enables you to re-set the field that the little shiny spokespeople must reconfigure their positions to react to the changed field of public opinion.

This works better if you really do want  to achieve something like “Restore the Stuarts” or “Return France to the Bourbon Monarchy” or “Reinstate the Articles of Confederation” or “We Demand Texan Independence,” and behave as if you believe that it’s possible with absolute certainty. It’s the low-ball or high-ball offer that you don’t necessarily expect to get in the first round, but might be able to get through successive rounds of aggressive bargaining.

by 12 Comments

Disrupting Electioneering

Elections in the United States are much less popular than they once were. In 2012, the presidential election only earned a 55% turnout nationwide. That’s the most popular election in the country. Many other elections earn minimal turnouts and even less attention.

Why do people participate in elections? In Moldbug’s terms, elections are to power what pornography is to sex. People enjoy elections because it’s a simulation of having power over other citizens. The reality is that participating in an election is always a waste of time at the individual level, and only useful for the people actually driving the electioneering activity.

It’s not going to be possible to get everyone to abandon their addiction to pseudo-power. But whenever you want to replace a behavior in someone, you have to offer an alternative that meets a similar desire.

In short, you have to go after the issues that politicians use to get people to turn out to vote, and then help people either solve them for themselves or do it collectively. Instead of giving them a simulacrum of power through the democratic political process, you have to help them to take responsibility for solving their own problems.

The two typical responses to tough problems are either to petition the government to solve them or to throw up one’s hands and complain that the government blocks the solutions. Instead, better to route around whatever blocks there are and get it done, and damn the consequences.

by 13 Comments

The Outer Right Coalition

The outer right has no coalition, even if it appears all of  its component organizations are coordinating.

Part of the reason for this is egoism, but part is also a negotiating gambit among the people who resist forming alliances.

Generally, people writing and speaking on these issues have a special interest. They want to make sure that their special interest will not be downgraded if they collaborate with other people who either don’t share that interest, or don’t have that interest as their foremost concern.

To form a useful coalition, each of its members has to be willing to put aside some of their pet issues for some time, at least in the particular context of presenting a united front on a single issue, even if it’s temporary.

Part of the reason why Europe and its descendants have been so successful relative to other parts of the world is the unusual cultural capacity of Europeans to devolve and delegate authority to lower levels, to set strategic goals at a high level and then to use a high-trust culture to enable people closer to the ground to act on their own initiative.

In return, broadly spread property rights enable greater shares in the profits, as risk is similarly shared throughout the population.

Property rights are always present, even in the most despotic societies, although the sphere of protection that they represent is more restricted. Even in despotism, property rights are enforced within the limits of the imperial palace. When property rights are spread throughout society, recognized as social norms, and enforced predictably, the society can be more active and responsive to changing conditions. Decision making loops can become tighter and faster, rather than being regulated by a single decision loop in the imperial capitol.

Setting up a structure that is capable of making faster, better-informed decisions than the competition is an effective way to crush a competitor, no matter how small the starting point is. If you can make 1,000 effective decisions in the same time that it takes the competitor to make 1, then the defeat of the competitor is almost inevitable.

A culture based on decentralized leadership will defeat a consensus-based culture routinely, because reaching consensus takes exponentially greater amounts of time depending on the scale of the organization that must be brought to consensus.

For the outer right to become an effective force in politics, people need to be able to bargain without giving up the essence of what they want to preserve. Without the need to appeal to an entire society of hundreds of millions, it’s possible to form more effective groups that don’t require the surrender of every important point in the pursuit of winning an election.

It’s much easier to build a smaller culture of millions from the defectors of the mass-culture than it is to try to go after an entire mass-culture at once which has no interest in defection.

The aim shouldn’t be to form a counter-culture, but to create a viable alternative culture with all the trappings of a self-sustaining culture. Once that is on solid footing, then the other components fall into place. Counter-culture defines itself as the opposite of the culture that it opposes, ceding the opposition the frame of discussion immediately. A competing culture defines itself, with its opposition to the neighboring culture being a secondary matter.

Top Posts & Pages