Yes, i think (though the task will be arduous) if we can get people to see that our obsession with inequality is really a sign of our experience of a great lack of meaningful reciprocity with the centre, that "equality" means rule by a hidden and distant hierarchy whose bribes and victims aren't really satisfying, the dam will break. I'm curious about your notion that China can be a model for our traditionalism. Have you been reading anything particularly illuminating on this? I think there is a renewed interest in Confucianism and Daoism, but the Chinese state is still pushing hard on Mandarin with simplified characters which destroy information and make for incomprehension between written and spoken in non-Mandarin dialects. (It is even worse than American English spelling corroding the memory of the French (Norman) era of English history!) And the Chinese are still destroying traditional neighbourhoods to put up modernist towers, and not doing much to stop their best (at least w
No, I have no big ideas about China--I'm following Gans here in seeing China as the most obvious example of an at least potentially successful authoritarian order. The twitter feed of "scientism" also contains, periodically, examples of ways in which China is advancing past the West in science, technology and even social organization. But I don't know what it's adding up to--you seem to know more than I do. I really wanted to make the distinction between the defeatist notion of surrendering to China (in which case we should hope for the simplified characters) and learning from, rather than being repulsed by, its authoritarianism. Maybe there's not so much to learn--but there must be something.
>Victimary thinking is an ugly and dangerous business, but the inhabitants of advanced economies in their “crowd-sourced” wisdom appear to have determined so far that it is the lesser evil compared to naked hierarchy. The “transnational elite” imposes its own de facto hierarchy, but masks it by victimary virtue-signaling, more or less keeping the peace, while at the same time in Europe and even here fostering a growing insecurity. As absolutists, don't we have to completely reject this line of inquiry; not only on the basis of anthropology, but also on the empirical evidence? This was not "crowd-sourced" wisdom, but an intentional introduction of weaponized ideology, correct? To then say, that a "trans-national elite" comes in to keep the peace in a conflict they have instigated cannot possibly articulate the reality of the situation. >the liberal-democratic model will perforce follow the bellwether universities into an ever higher level of thought control, and ultimately of tyrann
Yes, I would reject that first passage you quote, and think I have in my commentary on it. I am working on constructing an absolutist GA through a dialogue with Gans's liberal GA. And I want to introduce Gans to absolutists and NrX more generally. He does see victimary thinking in "anarchist" terms, as an spontaneous expression of resentment, but much of what we says about is still worth working with.
I'm not sure Gans sees the elite as believing in the "end of history"--Gans has rejected that concept, but is very sympathetic to the related (Fukuyaman) notion that liberal democracy is the "last," in the sense of untranscendable, form of government. I suspect here he is mourning the elite's abandonment of "end of history" thinking, not celebrating that elite's embrace of it.
Regarding talk on China, I think a lot of it is using China as a stick to beat the West with--I'm not sure how serious it is. Gans is in his way a very realist thinker--he doesn't propose any possibility without a real life model to point to. So, if he's going to talk about an authoritarian possibility, he looks around to see what best fits, and China's a good selection. But from your description they can't be thinking along the same lines I am because I think Trump does have control. It seems to me that a lot of our discussions here are about the best to talk about what is happening here and now, given how radically different an absolutist order would have to be. Are there any coordinates in today's world that point towards an absolutist future. I assume there must be.