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I made this based on Moldbug's latest.
The political narrative you buy into comes down to what part of this diagram you get fixated on. Without the whole picture, you are lost.
Left-normies think the power is in the factory.
Right-normies think it's in the bureau.
Both are wrong
The political narrative you buy into comes down to what part of this diagram you get fixated on. Without the whole picture, you are lost.
Left-normies think the power is in the factory.
Right-normies think it's in the bureau.
Both are wrong
The System is the actual engineering diagram of power in America. The Show is the nominal location of power. Most Americans see that the show isn't doing what they expect, and imagine that the show is being corrupted by something outside of it, e.g., the factory
If you are on the left: "The problem is that money is influencing politics" or, if you are on the right: "the problem is the vast inefficient bureaucracy". The brilliance of this diagram is that it shows that both fixations are a kind of arrested development
People who think "the system" is some kind of moral entity that is distorted by money are mental children. They are correct that corporations are ruthless profit-maximizers, but they interpret the small power leak up from factory to bureau as the major problem of the system
On the right, we imagine that the Bureau has been infiltrated by ideologues or activists, and that this is the source of of the Show's problems. What left and right have in common is that they think the Show is supposed to be in charge, and that its legitimacy is being usurped
And we also all sort of realize that the show is just a show, but we can't stop watching it. The civics lessons we learned in school mostly stuck, and we believe in its legitimacy in spite of its inefficacy https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1163961942848860160
The cynical take that "everything is just about profit, man" is not wrong because it's cynical, it's wrong because it's not nearly cynical enough. Truly wealthy people do not care about money, they care about is power, or more specifically, they care about feeling powerful
Moldbug identifies the problem with the Cathedral in its power bias, which is clever, because so many of its decrees are now formulated in the language of mitigating bias. "Bias" in cathedral speak means thinking anything that goes against the cathedral https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1281386497334284289
The bias of the cathedral is that it has learned to optimize for power instead of truth, because it is accountable to no one, because the Show always takes the fall.
Anyone, even you or I, can get the feeling of power by speaking cathedral incantations; we can partake of power by submitting to power, this does not make us powerful, it does make other people submit. The intoxication of this is the source of our collective insanity
