Now speaking as me:

There exists an activist toolkit, an activist tradition, activist archetypes. You can see it in "Les Miserables." Nobody really knows or cares about the revolution of 1832. I don't even know what it was for. But I do recognize barricades, flags, singing crowds, workers led by brave young students, pamphlets, speeches. All the accoutrements. And all the accoutrements stir my blood, because like all Westerners I come from the Enlightenment tradition, and, y'know, "Aux armes, citoyens!" and "It's coming yet, for a' that."

The problem is that today, when people tend to be rather confused and ignorant about values and history, we respond directly to the accoutrements and don't check what they aim at. The Occupy Wall Street movement was, in large part, setting up the accoutrements and hoping the purpose would take care of itself. [I don't doubt that there were actual intellectual threads here and there. There are things to be said about financial regulation and corporate welfare. And straight-up Communism was, at least at one time, a well-defined aim. But my overall impression was that people were performing "Do you hear the people sing?" and not too clear on what they were singing for.] It was full of spirit -- as the Tea Party was full of spirit -- and even as Obama 2008 was full of spirit. (Don't laugh. I'm from Chicago. The ground in Grant Park rang with dancing. The love was real. And if I were president it would break my fucking heart that people spent a love so real in my name.)

I think Moldbug treats Revolution (or activism) as though it's an agent, rather than a spirit, an emotion. He treats it like an agent, and constructs a framework where it's the enemy. But a spirit doesn't have goals, so you can't actually be its enemy. It's just a force, like the reproductive drive or the force of gravity. Maybe the Enlightenment was an agent, but Revolution isn't.

It's a bit of a dangerous spirit, because it can rationalize pretty much anything. When something becomes a revolutionary cause, it captures the attention of smart idealists, and can suck up their energies. And smart idealists actually do quite a lot in the world, contrary to popular belief. "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." So causes that capture the hearts of smart idealists *are* powerful in the long run, or at least divert power away from other possible causes. In that way, Moldbug *isn't* overestimating the power of universities. The practical men of the world do hold most of the stuff, most of the reproductive fitness, but they only have the power to do what they want, and they got their idea of what they want from more ethereal sources. The media, the schools, the arts.

Where he and I differ is that I think Revolution is a force to be harnessed. It ought to be a tool in your toolkit. It may have to be softened and limited -- I don't want civil war -- but there have been plenty of defanged revolutionary movements, it's quite possible.

Moldbug's right that you can't have a conservative movement that uses the pacifist activist toolkit; that's a fool's errand, because you can't enlist the State. (I admire MLK, both for ethics and effectiveness; but you have to admit that what he did was goad the state to get involved. It was sound strategy; I have no criticism. But most of the people who imitate him do *not* have the strategy set up properly.)

But I don't know that there might not be a way to use the activist toolkit productively. I think it may even be necessary. People have the Occupy spirit and the Tea Party spirit and the Obama spirit for a *reason* -- because some things about life suck and need to change. I agree that some things suck and need to change! We might need to channel and ride that spirit to have half a snowball's chance in hell of getting things to change.

Now you have me wanting to watch Econstories again.

I do note that recently, the activist culture seems to be extremely, extremely hostile to actual tactics and that it seems to have no interest in coming up with a coherent yet limited goal that everybody can get behind. In Berkeley's rather absurd Occupy Cal movement, the demands just kind of spiralled.

I think the reason that the Occupy etc movements don't have a goal is that they subscribe to a philosophy where people are naturally good and it takes actual work by evil forces to pump the world into a state as nonoptimal as it is now. That if you smash the current order suppressing natural human goodness, then such natural goodness will arise of itself to take over. This seems like a reasonable assumption if you've never read any history.

I am less sure than you that the universities and intellectuals are all that powerful. Yes, they can get lots of people talking about them and endorsing them; it would not surprise me if one day a CEO of Exxon Mobil honestly believed in some form of environmentalism (assuming he doesn't already). I just don't think that really matters that much. Exxon Mobil will pursue its incentives no matter what powerful people want, unless those powerful people are the government, and as you know better than I the government has its own incentives. I am currently skeptical that philosophy can distort incentives in any significant way (though that could change). Even the classic example of an influential political philosopher - Karl Marx - seems to me to have mostly come up with clever slogans that people who wanted to revolt anyway could chant before instituting a government convenient to the situation and mostly unrelated to his ideas.

Even the classic example of an influential political philosopher - Karl Marx - seems to me to have mostly come up with clever slogans that people who wanted to revolt anyway could chant before instituting a government convenient to the situation and mostly unrelated to his ideas.

Are you referring to the 19th century antimonarchal revolutions or the 20th century communist revolutions? The former were the ones who Marx was writing his slogans among, but the latter were the ones who actually claimed to have established socialism.

I don't think you, as an intellectual, can reliably get people to do what you want by exhortation. There are really exceptional cases of intellectuals shifting politics intentionally and in their own lifetimes. (Keynes and Friedman, definitely; Machiavelli; I think Adam Smith; Szilard; probably more).

I would expect that the more common case is that creative and intellectual types start cultural trends, cultural trends set default assumptions (e.g. if you grew up driving, your idea of a "normal adult" is someone with a car who knows how to drive), and default assumptions frame actions, including the actions of the powerful.

"It takes actual work by evil forces to pump the world into a state as nonoptimal as it is now."

Which is why they end up in the Reign of Terror or the gulags. They attempt in their naivety to "reeducate" under the impression that their views are so self-evident that their opponents must not have heard them. When that fails, they restore to elimination. And when eliminating the obvious "evil forces" does not bring on Utopia, they decide on other ones.

That Russell quote is quite plausible, but the converse, that it's material conditions that do the lifting and the philosophies just get selected to provide commentary, is likewise plausible. Surely some of both is true, but it's really hard to tell how much of each.

Keynes, actually. And I'm inclined to think he's an example of a thinker who got a say in what happened in the world.

He is, yes, but it's not clear how to do the breakdown between the zeitgeist, the philosophers and the kings. All sides have partisans claiming all the power. Keynes was living at a VERY good time for philosophers aspiring to power.

The common narrative that the Occupy movement didn't know what it wanted was contradicted by my visit by the London branch of the movement, where they had a lot of information on display about what finance industry reforms they wanted.

Not to say that some participants or other branches weren't confused, but there were fairly specific calls for change.

Since the government (and most of the popular media) is pretty much in the pocket of the finance industry, it suited them to make out that Occupy were a bunch of confused hippies. There's also a very common narrative that the depression in the UK economy was somehow caused by the previous government "spending all the money" rather than by the global finance crisis - you see this get parroted in the business sections of papers all the time, although it doesn't add up at all when you look at spending levels excluding the bailout.