Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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About the NRx Re-Organization

The recent reorganization under Hestia Society was less sudden than it seems. The sudden bit which I didn’t know anything about until it actually happened was the shift made by the volunteer staff at More Right, along with the closer cooperation under the Hestia umbrella organization.

It’s been the product of a couple years of social jostling, getting to know people in person, attempts to quell open drama, and work behind the scenes to create formal organizations to coordinate our efforts better and to socialize profitably.

Most people are passive. They don’t tend to understand all the informal and formal work that has to go into making it possible for a bunch of strangers, most of whom have never met or worked together before, from different backgrounds, in different parts of the world, to cohere into a functional institution (or in our case, some affiliated proto-institutions). People tend to expect the benefits of new institutions without putting in much of the work that goes into organizing them.

For a long time, people in the ‘peanut gallery’ have asked us to go get organized and get our moon base together — and have been carping that it didn’t happen in an hour. This gets  mirrored by the complaining that the various high-grade people who got this whole ball rolling, many of whom are high earners outside the unpaid blogosphere, don’t donate their effortful time (sometimes worth $100s, $1,000s, or more per hour) to various ungrateful blog readers and commenters in return for nothing.

When everyone started taking the first steps last year, it wasn’t really feasible to do this, because people just didn’t know each other well enough, opinion hadn’t gelled sufficiently. Most of us were communicating on public channels, often generating more noise than communication.

There were several abortive attempts to create private channels for communication. It took a bunch of false starts before people started using the things consistently and actually coordinating on projects. And we’re still a lot worse at that than an ordinary for-profit company would be.

Trust takes time to develop, in part because it’s based on people building a reputation and a track record for behavior. There’s no shortcut around that.

What happens when you build up a large crowd of contributors who are disorganized is that the work environment comes to resemble an open plan office, but worse. The chatter increases the cost of coordination, making it so that the only way for anyone to get anything done is to put on the noise cancelling headphones and work in solitude.

Now that we have the beginnings of some more formal organization in place, the noisy drama should be reduced. That formal organization couldn’t exist without a quorum, and it took some time to accumulate that stable number of people. At least within that smaller group, our communication costs are low enough to actually get some things done.

As far as what I do, very little is changing. I now have an editorial role at Social Matter, and we’re going to continue to improve it as a publication. In particular, I’d like to do better at soliciting submissions on certain topics. We’re also doing better at raising and managing funds — to start, internally, and later, through other operations. At the very least, I’d like to encourage just about every project that we put together to be materially self-sustaining without demanding self-sacrifice from all the contributors involved, without creating too much of a racket.

The other plus is that, because we now have a sort of virtual back office, it’s becoming less necessary for people to be effective hacks to be useful to our general intellectual and political goals. Most people don’t want to be hacks or to have to address the public. It’s easy to get over your head when serving in a public role. Further, getting out in front of people paints a target on your back. Most people don’t like being pelted by things by the mob — nor should everyone have to do that in order to be useful.

That’s about all there is to say at this point. Over the past year, a lot of the writing going on in our space could have been intended for a smaller, more internal audience. Now that those various private speaking clubs have been put together, more of what makes its way to the general public will be more polished and organized.

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The Skimming Economy

Countries that go through paper money crack-ups tend to be overwhelmed by some combination of financialization and taxation — both of which amount to close to the same thing.

Finance, properly understood, exists to make complex plans feasible. Finance under central banking tends to perform some of the same functions as with more historically stable hard-money finance, but with some critical distinctions — namely, that to make most plans possible, everything needs to go through the public banking system at some point.

Further, a central bank or some sort of coinage monopoly can continually skim and redistribute throughout the financial system. Currency ceases to be a highly accurate unit of account — a means of ‘keeping score’ — and becomes more a measure of how well connected and obedient you are to the system as a whole.

Under such a system, price distortions become systemic. This is what Mises called the ‘calculation problem’ — when the currency is elastic, it becomes a matter of debate as to whether or not its quantity is increasing or decreasing. Traders and other actors in the financial markets will often debate whether or not conditions are ‘inflationary’ or ‘deflationary,’ because even with all the reporting requirements, it’s not even possible for the central banks to ascertain with total accuracy what’s actually going on with the money supply and what the direction is likely to be.

Just correcting these price distortions becomes an entire industry. Speculators correct price distortions, but the need for them becomes most dire in paper-money type systems, since the unit of account is systemically and unpredictably distorted through unequal and challenging-to-predict gyrations in the supply of money and credit along with the political system.

Under such conditions, to be a skimmer becomes higher-status than to be a producer. If producers exist to be milked by the connected, more people will try to pile in to the skimming side of things than the productive side.

The overloading of university systems throughout the modern world tends to be a good indicator of this development. Students who attend for careerist reasons tend to be there to accumulate credentials under the false pretense of learning ‘skills’ or ‘relevant knowledge,’ while they’re really accumulating connections and pull.

This problem has become most severe in Europe in particular, as entire generations of young people — who had expected to enjoy happy, fat lives as parasites upon graduation — discovered that the existing parasites were not too keen about leaving their blood-sucking spots. So they must return home, be unemployed, and collect paltry welfare checks instead while they post updates on social media.

It’s less that, as Ayn Rand had hoped, the producers would band together and rebel. Rather, it’s mostly the opposite — the producers will instead happily collude with the parasites to kill off their competitors. Rand also sort of understood this — which is why she put so much effort into the construction of Objectivism as a secular philosphy and social group — but it never reached the stature of a religion or full culture which could have prevented the eventual destruction of the West on the predictable socialist line.

The descendants of the classical liberals will tend to want to save liberalism from its own consequences, while still preserving it as a tradition. What seems to be more likely is that the liberal states will just be destroyed by internal strife and external competitors. Its line will be broken, and the land where it thrived will be salted over.

This is the difficult-to-conceive of aspect of things that few will want to say. It’s one thing to contemplate your own death — quite another to contemplate the death of your civilization.

The alternative prediction, which some have made, is that no such external competitors exist, and that the internal strife will be manageable. Judging on the longer historical scale, neither seems all that likely, even allowing for impressive technological changes like the development of nuclear weapons.

This doesn’t pass the test of observation, as states like Russia have seized territory from the American orbit with only a weak, erratic, and unenthusiastic resistance — quite recently besides. Weak rebels have sent Americans packing from Libya to Yemen, with no attempt to mount a defense or a retaliation. The loss of informal territory is already happening abroad. The highly unstable and unpredictable international financial system is a fulcrum on which all the other international systems rest. As it destabilizes, so will everything else.

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Leftists Work For the Total State

It’s sometimes difficult to understand why progressives will often be so unamenable to persuasion, even when they don’t seem to work for the state or have a direct interest in it.

It’s easy to understand a dogmatically left-wing primary school teacher. Their interests and their political beliefs are entirely in alignment. It’s a little harder to understand someone who is both left-wing and is at least indirectly harmed by left-wing policies — like, say, a small business owner, or even a high-earning employee at some firm or another. Why would he be happy to have half his income taxed, and then his free time further ‘taxed’ on paying attention to the latest developments in politics and cultural degeneration?

The easier way to understand it all is that leftists all work for the state, even when they’re not on the payroll. They’re also, to some extent, the eyes and ears of the state — or at least some of its lower-order nerve receptors. The state has certain needs of its people, and most people are more than happy to perform the functions that it requires of them.

So, why is this? It’s because the modern state is totalitarian. There’s a tension between totalitarian and liberal tendencies in the modern West that has become increasingly undone as there is no alternative pole for the West to distinguish itself against. When the Soviet sphere was still strong, Western leaders found it useful to emphasize classical liberal limits on state power over society and to some extent over economic society.

Now that the contrast is gone, the logic of the total state progresses without serious impediments. The characteristic ‘informer culture’ common to totalitarian states is now something that we all have to deal with, with some special empowerments thanks to easy-to-use internet tools like social media which ’empowers’ everyone to become deputy commisars, on the lookout for unacceptable speech and deviationist tendencies.

The destruction of liberal political norms does cause some consternation on both the left and the right. Plenty of leftists understand that without liberalism, modern democratic societies tend to degenerate into civil conflict rather quickly, as the leading party faction proceeds to liquidate all of its rivals. So, they feel uneasy, and tend to complain about violations of liberal norms in areas like privacy and restrictions of speech. These complaints have no force (they’re backed by feelings rather than weapons most of the time), so amplifying those complaints is mostly useless. Complaints about the NSA’s mass spying, for example, are the whimpers of a dying animal — not an expression of authentically vigorous resistance.

This is where the liberal remnant tends to go badly wrong: they think that they can persuade people dedicated to eradicating the liberal remnant can be persuaded through debate to either not eradicate their liberal opponents or to slow-roll the eradication. It’s important not to mistake a fight for a debate. The two types of conflict have entirely different rules and results.

Instead, we need to reconsider the political construct of liberalism, think more about why it has failed, and what alternative supports can be developed for the maintenance of the good life under civilized conditions. Civilization predates liberalism: one isn’t a requirement for the other to exist.

The liberal remnant’s effective position is that they will, even in the face of people determined to  eradicate them, never let go of their liberal beliefs and restrictions on their behaviors. Liberals have tended to be brakes on the excesses of the left, which has a tendency to engulf entire continents in fire & destruction.

If you understand leftists as people who are fascinated by the flames — who authentically want to bring about the apocalypse — it starts to make sense as to why they would want to eliminate the liberals first, because of their moderating effects on the rest of the population. They wouldn’t give prizes to photos of rebels chucking molotov cocktails if they didn’t love the fire.

The mental model that people tend to have about leftists tends to be fundamentally rationalistic and utilitarian. It’s perhaps more useful to conceive of them like one of the many species of animal with an instinctive urge towards self-destruction and mass death. That’s what they shoot for, and how they ought to be understood as political opponents. They have to be contained rather than bargained with.

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