Dearest friends,

We all have choices.

For instance, I am often confronted with the weighty and significant choice between the Quadruple Stacked Beef McChapula and the Double Down Syndrome Ultrachicken Pentawich. Naturally, being a man of culture and taste, I always make the right choice. But others are not endowed with as fine powers of discrimination*. How are they supposed to decide what to eat in this crazed Gibson Guitaresque Cyberpunk reality not rated for teens?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Speaking of buying things, let’s talk about customer service. I have often been treated poorly by receptionists. A decent number of them are not particularly generous with time. The same holds true of customer service representatives, TSA grunts, and all sorts of people with a little power. By contrast, I have never been treated badly by the branch manager of a bank.

Just a little power.

Now, one might counter-argue there are real economic reasons for this. The branch manager generally deals with more important patrons, so of course they’re going to be kinder. They are, after all, more profitable. However, I’m not quite sure this is true. Certainly, this is true at the margins. A billionaire customer no doubt generates far more revenue than a streetrat. But when you compare your average prole to your average millionaire, the former is a reliable source of fees, while the latter is quite stingy. And if pure profit was the main reason, representatives would be easily swayed (or at least trained to be swayed) if the customer is important. Suggestions that the firm would like not to lose a valued customer, I find, have little effect. The kind ones are kind even before they find out who you are (and this is quite admirable), while the mean ones are unmoved.

It generally takes the harsh intervention of reality to change minds. When it comes down to it, only raw force will persuade.

So what’s the payoff matrix for being rude? In the best case scenario, they go away, unsatisfied with you, but do nothing for one reason or another. In worst case scenario, you get disciplined and maybe even crushed like a bug. So why do it? From an economic standpoint, it’s a dumb idea. Well, it’s simple. It feels good! But that’s not a terribly satisfying answer, now is it? Why does it feel good?

It comes down to a very simple thing. Signalling. Humans care about social status. They care about social status a lot. One would expect that the deepest group hatreds exist towards very alien strangers, but that tends not to be the case, really. The medieval Europeans were willing to ally with Mongols to strike down the Saracen. The alien has the element of the exotic. Familiarity breeds contempt. And why? Well, the more similar two groups are, the MORE DIFFICULT it is for people to tell them apart. Therefore, it means people must signal even more vigorously! In this light, ethnic wars become a very, very expensive and bloody way for Serbians to signal they’re not Bosnians. The more alike two groups are, the more powerful the signalling must be to distinguish them.

The person with a little power abuses it not for real material gain (nobody’s going to bribe a fucking bank teller), but for social gain. In that moment, they raise their social position over those they have power over, their kith and kin with no power. A person with real power? They don’t give a shit. They’re above all of this. It’s only because it’s very, very hard to tell between a little power and no power that this small amount of power must constantly be demonstrated. And sure, there might be a Black Swan event of fucking with someone you shouldn’t have. But, by and large, people are surrounded by people like themselves, so it becomes a rational decision to make small gains in social position through power abuse. So what if the real monetary or power payoff is at best negative? Viewed in the light of Homo Economicus, this is dumb. But as a signal, it makes perfect sense. Signals have to have costs and not benefits because if they were genuinely beneficial, everyone would adopt that practice since there’s no reason not to and it would quickly lose its signal value. It has to be costly to convey information.

Nobody really likes castes. But then again, who really likes casts? The purpose of both is simple – to keep things in their place. Do allow me to illustrate.

Once, in the before times, society was not free. You are probably well-aware of the standard narrative, but I will briefly repeat the tragedy of it. Because of arcane legal privileges and various systems of oppression, the talented were kept away from positions that they could have thrived in, thus depriving society of many boons and consigning many brilliant people to lives of meaningless drudgery and deprivation. And you know what? That’s not wrong. Neoreactionaries often like to gloss over the flaws of the past, making it into this idealized golden idol, but the truth of the matter is that the past was pretty shit. Even being noble in the past was pretty shit, and does not hold a candle, let alone an energy-efficient lightbulb, to the wonders we have now. Now, the neoreactionaries like to say that those improvements come not from the political structure, but from advances in technology – but those advancements in technology are intricately tied with the liberalization of society. If half the salarymen at modern Japanese megacorps come from samurai lineages, that means half of the salarymen come from the bottom 95% of families, who, thanks to liberalization and the free society, were able to lift their families up and advance to the upper middle class, our modern, democratized aristocracy. The modern education system really is an efficient machine to pipeline talented commoners into an upper middle class and inculcate into the roles and cultural traditions of its aristocratic predecessor. And this does not just mean the upper middle class is twice as large as its predecessor. It isn’t. In our hypothetical restricted world, that half is not just gone, it is replaced by dumb sons of fine families, meaning advancement should be *less than half* of what it is, thanks to the mucking up one bad apple can do to a barrel. The standard narrative is not a lie!

The problem is that it is only a story of first-order effects. It does not address the second-order side effects.

In our original society, class status is formal. A strapping young lad, through one way or another, goes to Venice U and, four years later, gets a sheepskin saying “BS Civil Engineering” and a fine little form letter in the mail from His Imperial Apostolic Majesty congratulating him on his accomplishment and elevating him to the nobility. He proceeds to go down to the local tavern to hit on local wenches as Freiherr Lad, a Somewhat Important Fellow, gets slapped a few times, and thinks nothing more of the matter. Or, today, a lad goes to law school and exists Lad, Esq., a formally protected title. When things are formal, there is a designated font of honor and the government enforces status. That means, at least in regards to matters of class, there is no point to signalling. The government shuts down the signalling spiral.

When society is freed, it begins the spiral. No longer can people pull out their business card and point to it as a definitive final word on status. Instead, status is marked via various indicators of taste and other informal mechanisms. What came to dominate markers of class? As recounted by Bourdieu and other such scholars, the answer was pretty simple. The Ancien Regime fell, but the University took the sovereign’s place as font of honor. It had many advantages – it was already tied to the old system, it had a formal hierarchy, it was easy to understand and communicate, and it was even somewhat formal, since a degree is a real and verifiable thing. Now you had the University, and it made sweeping decisions on who was Harvard Material and who was not. And though many Harvard Material lads were so because of their socioeconomic status, there were also many young lads of common origin who possessed talent. If things stopped there, it would’ve been pretty good.

Things didn’t stop there.

How could they? Universities couldn’t own up to the truth and admit they were just the new fonts of honor. They had to come up with some sort of lie as cover. The lie was that education created wealth. This is, of course, a farce. A society needs doctors, but a society of only doctors would quickly come to resemble a syringe-themed Lord of the Flies. Universities credential people to enter prestige professions, but there are only so many of those to go around. We quickly enter elite overproduction as the signal is diluted more and more. But the natural impulse of people is to try and aim as high as they can, and since education creates wealth, why not? Even if it didn’t, the individual incentives would still be the same. A Bachelor’s degree quickly becomes worthless. The education signalling spiral intensifies. Today, 42% of the modern descendants of Europe’s high nobility have doctorates. That is a spectacular rate of educational over-representation. As more and more people crowded into education, one had to flee higher and higher to maintain the status signal.

At this point, you may be exasperated with me. Either you are rolling your eyes and spouting the standard prolish wisdom of college education being good for nuthin’, or you are reminding me that as a Classy Person, you read the Important Books, and you already read Caplan’s book, The Case Against Education, and you already know all this.

Please, bear with me.

What’s the core problem with this signalling race? It’s pretty simple. Education is not purely a signal of status. It is also used to select people for certain professions. “No duh,” you say. Well, as education becomes diluted further and further, you start seeing scary things like the average IQ of psychology majors falling to 100. And engineering? 106. The problem is that jobs need a minimum level of intelligence to be done at any level of competence. This is why the Armed Forces gives an IQ test to all people who want to join. And for some jobs, this minimum is relatively high.

If engineers were becoming dumb, you would start seeing projects go more and more poorly. Slower, more expensive, less reliable. Bridges would collapse. Outlets would write articles about the end of infrastructure. Mysterious holes and cracks would be found in new buildings. Past feats would become impossible. Websites would slow down even though, by all rights, they should become ever faster.

A job is not just a fancy hat. Societies need aristocratic castes in the first place because societies need persons who can manipulate complex systems, and those people will then reward themselves handsomely. When the Cathedral gives an important bureaucratic position to an Evil Fat Black Lady as a signal, government starts to run a little bit worse.

A caste system puts an end to all this. In a system of free labor, people are constantly trying to push to the highest prestige level they can reach, which is not always the highest level of work they can competently do. Under restricted labor, people are kept in their place. This may keep men of talent away from where they might make the most impact. But those people don’t just disappear. In an unfree system, they have to make the best of what their lot is, so they practice, practice, practice (not like they have a choice), and they push the envelope and make advancements in their low prestige fields. And they serve to help stabilize lower strata of society and ward against destructive tendencies.

Just as desegregation removed the pillars of the community from black neighborhoods and sucked them into white suburbs, leaving a tremendous void, so too does a free society create brain drain across social classes. The proletariat is stripped of its most talented members and receives only dregs as recompense. Belmont may get nicer year after year, but Fishtown sinks into a deeper and deeper swamp.

Of course, I would be in favor of more restricted labor, now wouldn’t I?

Crushed by competitive wages,
Monsieur le Baron

 

*See my book, 50 Shades of Grape Soda: A Field Guide to Racial Slurs

Dearest friends,

I must admit to a deep and enduring flaw.

I cannot properly tie a tie. It’s really knot my forte. Windsors, Italians, Orientals, Hanovers – the technique escapes me. It seems that I will exist in a permanent state of scruffy dishevelment. True, true, I could practice for quite a while, and perhaps I’d get it. But if my younger self, with a juicier, more plastic brain, could not manage the task, then why should I suspect I’d be more able now?

So I won’t do it! Bah, to hell with practice.

Anyways. On to a more pleasant and easy topic. Let’s talk about class signals. Signalling is a topic near and dear to my heart, but it may be a hard cell for you. Still, humor my mad ramblings and accept that this behavior is generally true. Even then, a few behaviors would seem not to trickle down in the same way our black and white cells change color. Namely, we would expect the middle class to be the most fervent and reliable signaler of the ideology.

Why would I say this?

The middle class is plagued by its own anxious gentility. A strict adherence to the party line, the dominant signals of the day, can be considered essentially risk-averse. No one ever lost their job for expressing too much rightthink. Therefore, someone without any sort of independent power and who very much wants to hold on to their job will signal correctly. And cognitive dissonance being a painful thing, many of them will come to believe it. However, this does not explain why the middle class should be *especially* correct in its signalling. Wouldn’t higher classes also have an incentive to signal correctly to preserve their own status?

Yes, they do. But the strict adherence of the middle class to the perfect version of the signal creates its own opportunity to signal. Namely, if the middle class deploys a polished, well-rehearsed 100% signal, then the upper-middle class ought to deploy a sloppy, half-assed version of said signal. Why? Because signalling in that way shows that one is not afraid of the consequences of failure. If an upper-middle class person is fired – so what? What’s the big deal? He’ll retire to his estate to play Extremely Irate Birds on his iPhone XXX, perhaps listening to the lewd noises of the Pornograph and awaiting the next e-telegram from his fellows. A half-assed adherence to the norms of the day becomes, in and of itself, a signal of independent wealth or power.

Only the middle class, bless them, would do a foolish thing like go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for a useless piece of paper. We’ve got to follow the party line, after all.

It is relatively popular in the Manosphere and the Reactosphere to come up with all sorts of biological or cultural explanations for why women vote and act more reliably left-wing than men. They’re wired to love invaders, or kidnappers, or despise the ingroup, or have too much empathy.

And these explanations sound quite plausible. The problem? In the Weimar Republic, women were far more right-wing than men. If only women voted in Weimar, Hindenburg would have won the first round, and Hitler could have won an outright majority, or at least close to one. The same held true in France. It was a good long while before women won the right to vote in France – lest their irrational, reactionary natures strangle baby democracy in its cradle. And when they did, they confirmed the fears of the menfolk, voting right-wing 25% more than men.

So much for the left-wing nature of women.

Let’s consider class behaviors as emergent properties of g, that little blob of wisp we call intelligence. Women are middling in many respects. The standard deviation of their intelligence is lower, so you will see them cluster around an acceptable, but often not exceptional point. Many women go to college, but women geniuses are rare. Many women could play chess, but they do not number among the grandmasters. At the Most Selective institutions, these shining beacons of reasonableness and respectability, men outnumber women. And the women there are like the howling terrain of Dzungaria or the wind-swept prairies of Kansas – plain.

Women are the middle class of genders.

What does this mean for a would-be purveyor of ideology?

The Rationalist community is a pleasant place for debate. People constrain themselves with certain norms, thus ensuring constructive conversations and learning for all. It is polite. It is learned. It is elegant. What a wonderful place. Why can’t the world be more Rational, like the Rationalist community? And ideology architects have such lovely arguments for why their solution would be so much more efficient and orderly and well-run than the present state of affairs. The best part is is that they are often correct, and that their explanations and solutions are exceedingly simple. Simple is good and correct is better.

If you lived in an elite community governed by the norms of the Cathedral, you would believe it was heaven on earth. And though you might search and search for any imperfection, you would be unable to find one. Move over, Rasselas, your quest is at an end. This is the Happy Valley perfected. And it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the virtues of the Cathedral.

As it turns out, if you give a bunch of IQ140 geniuses with relatively high conscientiousness *anything*, *anything at all*, as a blueprint, they will probably make it work and look damn good in the process. But the problem is that it has nothing to do with the merits of the ideology, and everything to do with them. The architects of ideology are usually of the upper-middle class, and if they are not, their high intelligence has allowed some of its behaviors to independently emerge, and so the unspoken caveat to every prescription is “except in cases where doing this would make no goddamn sense”. Take that privileging of logic and debate to a population more representative of the general populace, and you don’t get the Rationalist community. You get Reddit. And Reddit is a terrible, terrible place, full of all manner of trolls, scoundrels, circlejerkers, snobs, and plain idiots. Worse still, this probably represents a high estimate of privileged reason, not a low one, since there is reason to suspect Reddit is still somewhat more intelligent than the real average America. That beautiful ideology you designed as 100% Neo-Reaction? Remove all the implicit slack and take everything to its logical but retarded conclusion. Now you have 120% Hyper-Reaction and it doesn’t really work very well at all. Or swap for your favorite flavor of Neoliberalism, your own new infallible version of Communism (this one will work), Anarchism, etc.

You may object and say you’ve built some wiggle room in to account for the foibles of man. Wise, very wise. But unfortunately, this is not a one-and-done process. Who teaches the next generation? Teachers. And teachers are terribly female and terribly middle class. So even if 120% Neoreaction is fine, what about 140%? 160%? 180%? Sooner or later, your ideology will reach a breaking point where its solutions stop making any goddamn sense. This is how you start with the well-reasoned, eminently sensible writings of Saints and Church Fathers and end, through aeons of church ladies, with the dog-and-pony show absurdity of modern American Protestantism.

Imagine two principals. Both are issued a zero-tolerance policy regarding violent acts. One day, Count-Principal Maximilian Howe IV, clad in half-askew tie, notices two schoolchildren playing a rather rough game of Cowboys and Elizabeth Warrens. Now, the letter of the law would demand he crack down. On the other hand, he uses his expandingbrain.jpg and correctly assess this as not really a threat and not quite what the policy is meant to curtail and leaves it be. The other principal, Bob Smith, sees this and shuts it down. It’s in violation of the policy, even if it is a natural expression of the need of boys to play. Now, you might protest this is unfair to Mr. Smith – I’m not giving him the same intelligence as our dear Count-Principal. But suppose I do. Mr. Smith sees this play for what it is, something healthy and harmless. Then what? If he is found in violation, that’s the end of his fine career in education. For the Count-Principal, this is a non-issue. He didn’t need the job, as it was a passion project to begin with. He’ll retire to his estate to play 5 dimension hyperbilliards. But Mr. Smith? That’s his ass. That’s a foreclosure on his house. That’s a car payment going unpaid. So he’s going to crack down, even knowing in his gut that he’s wrong to. After all, he’s only following orders…

Only a perfectly fault-tolerant ideology would be immune. Let me know how formulating that goes.

I’ll be here.

Or… or…

I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish take out of their stomachs; then thought I, “if you eat one another, I don’t see when we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

– Rucka Rucka Ali

Yours in shabbiness,
Monsieur le Baron