If you could summarize my meta-views on politics, you could probably make them into a couple little bullet points:
- Societies and cultures are complex systems whose norms gradually arise to solve for the general problems of life.
- These norms are always emergent and never rationally designed.
- Because humans have a sense of reason too deficient to understand the whole design of society, any "norms" they sit down and decide will inevitably be counterproductive.
- All of Western political culture and the Enlightenment assume the exact opposite, and their objective is to destroy all aspects of society that they cannot find superficial reason for.
- The Enlightenment has given inordinate power to the opnion-molding class and academia because of this.
- The "rational management" that comes from this gives us routine financial crises, failed wars, state-sponsored pharmaceuticals and most everything else terrible about the modern world.
People will often ask me "what I am" ideologically. I can't really answer that because to me, any ideology is a form of LARPing. People who have some kind of rationalistic worldview are really living in a kind of fantasy land where the concepts in their brain actually do model reality well. They're really just imagining alternate realities in their head and the whole viability of their worldview is based on the assumption that their teeny meat-muscle hasn't ever overlooked anything.
Human intelligence is sharply exaggerated anyway. Our rational faculties aren't built for much more than the meta-heuristics we've been doing for millennia, and all of the findings of cognitive science and rational choice theory only serve to illuminate the fact that humans can only think "logically" in the same way you can assemble a boat out of syrofoam casing. It can be done in a piecemeal way, but not on the fly, and only as a wasteful experiment.
About every step a modern advances in knowledge, he had advances three in arrogance. That's the main problem of the Enlightenment. "Rational" people are snarky and oblivious. The snark comes from the fact that they think of everyone who doesn't LARP and fantasize like they do as some kind of doltish religious fundamentalist who just hasn't seen the "light." The reality is that our society has designated places (universities, the civil service, NGOs) where we train LARPers by disconnecting them all the harshness of reality and encourage them to fantasize without any reference to the world beyond.
"Stupid" people who live outside of this hermetically-sealed ideological masturbatorium seem stupid because they don't have LARPy or indulgent ideas about the world. They understand that the world is more complex than any possible ideology, and enforcing a contrived pattern on it is always counterproductive. They understand that ideological purity is meaningless. They understand scarcity. They understand opportunity cost. They have a much better anecdotal grasp of the world and get the fact that who can transpose your idealisms on the universe and expect it to oblige.
In the real world, the focus is on virue on results, in LARPolitics, it's on looking good. It's not an accident that that's the case. In the real world, you get real world payoffs. In LARPolitics, you're immune from actual failure and you just have to "win" by getting the best of your opponent rhetorically.