I mean 5 years ago. Yarvin wrote the piece (which I link to) 14 years ago. The term gradually entered what I call "the political culture" and entered into more widespread use later in the 2010s. This Wikipedia entry, for instance, covers the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
"For somebody like Yarvin, the takeaway is that democracy is a sham and fool’s game, and that it’s really easier all around to just skip a step and be avowedly a ‘royalist.’ And, in the political space, that’s much of what red-pilling looks like — an idea that elections are very, very surface, that the real business of government is in things like NSC-68, which with no democratic discussion whatsoever set policy for the U.S.’ policy during the Cold War; in the sort of black ops occasionally exposed by journalists like Seymour Hersh and Jeremy Scahill but basically kept completely under wraps; in the bipartisan consensus around the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, of which the majority of funds is virtually unaccounted for. This was the left-wing critique of government throughout the Cold War. It’s now most associated with a right-wing libertarianism, but the critique is essentially the same"
No his critique is based in James Burnham and Pareto who are right wing, he is very explicit about this if you actually bother to read his work.
Stick to feminist cat food reviews, or what your normal beat is, you are out of your depth here.
"Yarvin and the red-pilled manosphere...." No, no, no! Yarvin is not part of the gifting based "manosphere." Did you even bother to do read Wikipedia articles level research?
Interesting. This is about as sympathetic a contemplation on red-pilling as I would expect from anyone who isn't red-pilled. I'm politically liberal but temperamentally conservative so I pretty much fall in line with Sam, both in acknowledging the grim self-gravity of the war machine (my Berkeley days coming out) and in the reality of physical/biological limits to our grand societal project.
My one quibble is that while JPP and Charles Murray might claim to call for elevating our higher selves over our biological proclivities, my limited consumption of their interviews gives me a sense that they ultimately fall back to gravity and create an enervating influence for discouraging attempts at structural change. Of course, their partisan culture warring makes it particularly difficult to take anything they say seriously (I've tried).
During the pandemic, I finally sat down and read the Analects of Confucius. It's an interesting work revolving around maintaining proper relationships. The development of the philosophy over the millennia of empire did not go well (another example of the grim-self gravity of a self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine), but the Analects themselves are actually kind of liberating in a weird way. By creating limitations via strict relationship ties (but not necessarily in dogmatic codes of context) the sayings of the master creates an obstacle course to exercise creativity in managing our relationships with each other. Not that I'd want to be mistaken for a Confucian, but it might be an example of how acknowledging some limitations (as opposed enforcing a radical blank slate) may be the way forward for the liberal project.
Thank you Justus! I had a lot of trepidation in writing this - 'red-pilling' seems so far out - but the premise I'm working under is that any set of beliefs that's held to by a large number of people has some idea guiding it and that it's always possible to engage with that underlying idea. I probably should read a bit more of some of these people before really engaging with them. I don't know much of Murray. I was very startled when I read/listened to some of Peterson's stuff and found to be very different from the ogre that the mainstream media was portraying him as - but I do have the sense that more recently he's tilted into some positions that I actually am uncomfortable with. I have to admit, it hasn't occurred to me to apply Confucian thought to our current moment! - but that's a very entrancing idea, that "acknowledging some limitations may be the way forward for the liberal project." At first blush, that sounds like a very promising direction, as opposed to the current "we can engineer anything' idea that liberalism seems for some reason to have defaulted to. - Sam
Yeah I was JPP curious when he first came out big. Since I'm woo-adjacent (practicing tai chi, reading ancient wisdom literature, etc) I liked him at first, but he's a classic example of audience capture slipping hard into culture war stuff and fully embracing his guru-ness for the right.
Which is quite disappointing, because I agreed with his notion that there is a creative tension between conservatives being tied to the past (keep doing what used to work) and liberals being unwilling to accept a (possibly suboptimal) status quo.
But I suspect there is a lot more money when you go in hard for one partisan direction...and frankly I've seen enough heterodox/IDW folks go down that road to realize that fame is not something I want, cause I doubt I could survive the temptation.
For what it's worth, the Decoding the Gurus podcast has some good takedowns on JPP.
The Romans went through much the same societal breakdown several times over based on these same principals on some level. Basically power-wealth-sex cycled through their society slowly devolving over 5 centuries into compete self immolation. The Barbarians were NOT responsible and only provided the coup de grace to a rotten corpse of a corrupt society. One great example is the first three emperors Augustus - Tiberius - Caligula. Here you can see many similarities to the American decline through unhinged power dynamics and yet the first century only needed 12 emperors but combined the third and fourth centuries needed 50 emperors as they cycled through the corruption at increasing speed. Rome was sacked in the beginning of the 4th century and basically ended their world dominance. We’re witnessing 500 years of much the same breakdown in less than 100 years but the path is much the same and quite similar in many respects.
Thank you Paul. I've been turning into a Roman history buff recently, so very happy to think through things from this perspective! It is very sad to read the history of the Roman Empire and realize how completely ineffectual the Senate and the republican institutions were for several centuries. I don't exactly know what to make of that - if republics are always fundamentally weak and different kinds of autocracies something like the natural structure; or if republics can survive but required constant vigilance. I'm rooting for the latter theory! - but it always seems to be a close-run thing between these hypotheses. - Sam
Taking the chinese view of dynasties, I think all governments go through cycles of rise and fall. Internal contradictions accreeting towards failure and all that.
"And then about five years ago, through Curtis Yarvin, the term ‘red pill’ entered the political culture and came to mean the moment of truth..."
If by 5 years ago you mean 14 years ago?
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/
I mean 5 years ago. Yarvin wrote the piece (which I link to) 14 years ago. The term gradually entered what I call "the political culture" and entered into more widespread use later in the 2010s. This Wikipedia entry, for instance, covers the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
Only if all your sources of information are corporate media.
"For somebody like Yarvin, the takeaway is that democracy is a sham and fool’s game, and that it’s really easier all around to just skip a step and be avowedly a ‘royalist.’ And, in the political space, that’s much of what red-pilling looks like — an idea that elections are very, very surface, that the real business of government is in things like NSC-68, which with no democratic discussion whatsoever set policy for the U.S.’ policy during the Cold War; in the sort of black ops occasionally exposed by journalists like Seymour Hersh and Jeremy Scahill but basically kept completely under wraps; in the bipartisan consensus around the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, of which the majority of funds is virtually unaccounted for. This was the left-wing critique of government throughout the Cold War. It’s now most associated with a right-wing libertarianism, but the critique is essentially the same"
No his critique is based in James Burnham and Pareto who are right wing, he is very explicit about this if you actually bother to read his work.
Stick to feminist cat food reviews, or what your normal beat is, you are out of your depth here.
The critique I'm explicating is broader than just Yarvin's, whom I've read. You'll see that if you read the paragraph you quoted.
Thanks for the review suggestion, but I don't respond to personal insults.
You just did LOL!
Have a good life troll. See ya!
And yet you failed to actually block me, lulz.
But I did.
"Yarvin and the red-pilled manosphere...." No, no, no! Yarvin is not part of the gifting based "manosphere." Did you even bother to do read Wikipedia articles level research?
"I actually am a liberal..." Really I didn't notice, snicker.
Interesting. This is about as sympathetic a contemplation on red-pilling as I would expect from anyone who isn't red-pilled. I'm politically liberal but temperamentally conservative so I pretty much fall in line with Sam, both in acknowledging the grim self-gravity of the war machine (my Berkeley days coming out) and in the reality of physical/biological limits to our grand societal project.
My one quibble is that while JPP and Charles Murray might claim to call for elevating our higher selves over our biological proclivities, my limited consumption of their interviews gives me a sense that they ultimately fall back to gravity and create an enervating influence for discouraging attempts at structural change. Of course, their partisan culture warring makes it particularly difficult to take anything they say seriously (I've tried).
During the pandemic, I finally sat down and read the Analects of Confucius. It's an interesting work revolving around maintaining proper relationships. The development of the philosophy over the millennia of empire did not go well (another example of the grim-self gravity of a self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine), but the Analects themselves are actually kind of liberating in a weird way. By creating limitations via strict relationship ties (but not necessarily in dogmatic codes of context) the sayings of the master creates an obstacle course to exercise creativity in managing our relationships with each other. Not that I'd want to be mistaken for a Confucian, but it might be an example of how acknowledging some limitations (as opposed enforcing a radical blank slate) may be the way forward for the liberal project.
Thank you Justus! I had a lot of trepidation in writing this - 'red-pilling' seems so far out - but the premise I'm working under is that any set of beliefs that's held to by a large number of people has some idea guiding it and that it's always possible to engage with that underlying idea. I probably should read a bit more of some of these people before really engaging with them. I don't know much of Murray. I was very startled when I read/listened to some of Peterson's stuff and found to be very different from the ogre that the mainstream media was portraying him as - but I do have the sense that more recently he's tilted into some positions that I actually am uncomfortable with. I have to admit, it hasn't occurred to me to apply Confucian thought to our current moment! - but that's a very entrancing idea, that "acknowledging some limitations may be the way forward for the liberal project." At first blush, that sounds like a very promising direction, as opposed to the current "we can engineer anything' idea that liberalism seems for some reason to have defaulted to. - Sam
Yeah I was JPP curious when he first came out big. Since I'm woo-adjacent (practicing tai chi, reading ancient wisdom literature, etc) I liked him at first, but he's a classic example of audience capture slipping hard into culture war stuff and fully embracing his guru-ness for the right.
Which is quite disappointing, because I agreed with his notion that there is a creative tension between conservatives being tied to the past (keep doing what used to work) and liberals being unwilling to accept a (possibly suboptimal) status quo.
But I suspect there is a lot more money when you go in hard for one partisan direction...and frankly I've seen enough heterodox/IDW folks go down that road to realize that fame is not something I want, cause I doubt I could survive the temptation.
For what it's worth, the Decoding the Gurus podcast has some good takedowns on JPP.
The Romans went through much the same societal breakdown several times over based on these same principals on some level. Basically power-wealth-sex cycled through their society slowly devolving over 5 centuries into compete self immolation. The Barbarians were NOT responsible and only provided the coup de grace to a rotten corpse of a corrupt society. One great example is the first three emperors Augustus - Tiberius - Caligula. Here you can see many similarities to the American decline through unhinged power dynamics and yet the first century only needed 12 emperors but combined the third and fourth centuries needed 50 emperors as they cycled through the corruption at increasing speed. Rome was sacked in the beginning of the 4th century and basically ended their world dominance. We’re witnessing 500 years of much the same breakdown in less than 100 years but the path is much the same and quite similar in many respects.
Thank you Paul. I've been turning into a Roman history buff recently, so very happy to think through things from this perspective! It is very sad to read the history of the Roman Empire and realize how completely ineffectual the Senate and the republican institutions were for several centuries. I don't exactly know what to make of that - if republics are always fundamentally weak and different kinds of autocracies something like the natural structure; or if republics can survive but required constant vigilance. I'm rooting for the latter theory! - but it always seems to be a close-run thing between these hypotheses. - Sam
Taking the chinese view of dynasties, I think all governments go through cycles of rise and fall. Internal contradictions accreeting towards failure and all that.