God never speaks directly. When we grant sovereignty to public opinion, we grant sovereignty to the teachers—the persuasive institutions that manage public opinion. This is no different from granting sovereignty to Army, Church, or King. Unless public opinion is an ultimate, self-governing, self-creating cause, beyond the power of any other power to manage or regulate, popular sovereignty cannot substantively exist.
The paradox of public opinion is that if public opinion is irrelevant—suppose absolute power, both real and formal, is in the hands of King and Army, jock Chad boneheads to a man—no power has an incentive to coerce or seduce public opinion. No power has any reason to compel the public mind; so the public mind is effortlessly independent; it is the only cause of its own opinions. It has to be ruled by boneheads, though.
The Amish are right on this one. The only reliable path to freedom is through not mattering; rejecting power totally. They figured out what Jesus meant. The truth sets you free.
But if the lack of will and confidence in modern America is in any sense a consequence of a long-term decline in public virtue, the trend is in the opposite direction. America is not like a child. America is like a grown man with the mind of a child. The child will grow up; the man is growing down.
As above, so below. As we talked about on TSNCast, there's a reason feminizing men and masculinizing women is a thing in this system. It weakens all to the benefit of the currently powerful.
The freedom characteristic of young oligarchies comes from their stability. The stabler a regime is, the more controlled chaos it can safely tolerate. Unstable autocracies cannot even tolerate free enterprise. Extremely stable autocracies can even tolerate free speech. The stabler the government, the more liberty it can safely allow. Unfortunately, this means aging oligarchies grow more repressive as they weaken.
Pretty much USA history in one paragraph.
In the old, vanished world, there was only one power to persecute you. In the modern world, everyone does unto their neighbor—or is starting to think about it. At least if their neighbor has put up the wrong lawn sign. In the old world, the king was easy to dethrone. In the modern world, how do you dethrone your neighbor?
A decentralized oligarchy is still an autocracy. It has no Hitler and no Goebbels—and needs none. Vae victis! Next time we meet, it will be on a tank. A luta continua.
Welcome to the future. The reality of the anarchy we actually live in. Public opinion and clout is all there is.
What the resource curse tells us is that “fully automated luxury communism”—the hypothetical apotheosis of luxus populi suprema lex—is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed. Some of it is in Venezuela—most of the rest is in the Persian Gulf. (Heavy religion seems to ameliorate the disease.) The 20th-century dinosaur-juice curse is just a preview of the hell that 21st-century technology is scheduled to unleash on the earth.
For the closer we come to this tech resource-curse apocalypse, the closer we come to hell—except for a louche, talented, largely parasitic elite, which is doing just fine. (So is Venezuela’s elite.) This problem is only becoming more urgent. We cannot even start to solve it until we understand it; and we have not even started to understand it.
Which would be why this ridiculous canard of "automation gon take our jerbs" has been touted so much. Keeps your eye off the ball.
The sealed village is one single starship—or whatever the game’s metaphor may be. The whole village inhabits a single virtual story. This story consumes the rest of the village’s life. If the village bears children (as it should; a childless village is inhuman; but this need not imply above-replacement fertility), the story can last forever. In the back room, the programmers are coding up more planets to visit.
His vision of the future is much like things currently are in large corporations. They are essentially becoming these beehives sectioned off from the world doing largely useless busy-work.
