Overloading 4 Progressive Ratchets
Have you heard of the High Elves?
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. ―Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Progressive monoculture is spiraling. Gaslighting is more and more frequent. If we see positive feedback loops on the outside, there must be some on the inside. What are the particular ratchets behind this?
There’s this handy nerdy analogy that Curtis Yarvin came up with in June 2022 piece that I’m too bookish not to use:
First he paints the dualism of Elves and Hobbits. Then he splits the former into High and Dark Elves. They are common in personality (high openness) and lifestyle. Yarvin himself identifies as a Dark Elf (imagery, quite BAPist I’d say), and defines it thus:
The set of elves who support any pro-hobbit regime, before or after its birth, are the dark elves.
The key passage for our purposes is about the praxis of the Dark Elves:
The first job of the dark elves is to seduce the high elves—to sow acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds. Once these seeds become trees, the elf becomes a dark elf. This is obviously the optimal outcome of the seduction process.
Yet even if only little saplings of darkness grow, mere shrubs and bushes of nihilism, the high elf is weakened. His conviction and energy flag. And as Napoleon said: in any battle, the moral is to the physical as ten to one.
Acorns of dark doubt.
What could be that? Pointing out the ramifications of the ratchets is certainly one.
Ratchet 1 - Simulacrum
The ‘Dark Elf’ label isn’t just a random sample of the Elves. There are certain preconditions for an Elf to be a Dark Elf. correlates with a certain outlook. A set of preferences that are not elvish preferences, for instance shitposting online
Naturally, being traitors and all, these dark elves keep a low profile. But culturally, they are still totally elves and into, like, “art films” and stuff. Any attack on elves in general weakens and demoralizes this important fifth column.
High Elves therefore look for these signals, and then commit ritual murder - which in Elf society is banishment from the social media. Out of the circulation. Thus the simulacrum increases. High Elves getting increasingly out of touch. Failing to model reality right accrues bad karma.
Ratchet 2 - Disunity
Elves are constantly competitive with each other. That creates a problem for coordination.
Among the eleves mentioning collective action as a class is low status. Hobbits are able to genuinely unite for some political purpose, as it’s far from their everyday lives. They want these lives to be better, but having pushed the change to the System they reliquish control over it. Elves when pushing any change always think how that will position them later on inside the Elvish power struggles. When Elves want to popularize something, the core team behind it receives a higher rent.
Also when negatives happen, competitiveness is a disadvantage.
The only shunning that happens among the High Elves is for not being on a high enough moral horse. Sending bad signals. Slipping. Moral failures (sex scandals, human trafficking) and ineffective policies (COVID, urban management) are largely forgiven. For moral failures the alternative is transparency, for policies - checkout Starkian Hypothesis’ substack. I really liked Politics over Poolside.
Ratchet 3 - Disenfranchisement of the client classes
Importing clients and providing bread and circuses can only take you that far. Groups will have their own interests in the real life, not only in the parasitic simulacrum. Rooftop Koreans from 1992 are a prime example.
Which groups are the most suspectible in 2020s?
The open minded progressives such as Peter Thiel are one group. But they already heard of the Dark Elvish gospel. Another such group is the “white nationalist latinos”.
An increasing number of Elves will be on net loss due to belonging to the High Elves. Having stopped making new production, running out of new plunder options, High Elves don’t have that much anymore to offer.
Ratchet 4 - Narrative changes too often to embrace it deeply
Beloning to High Elves at any point in time is synonymous with sending the correct signals at the correct times. Some signals are positive, originating inside the High Elvish memeplex. Others are reactive - countersignals merely responding to memes of the Hobbits or Dark Elves. Commitment to one thing is signalled through exclusion of other things.
Countersignals are different in origin and also function. Conservatives are all about countersignalling - reactionary voice to the progressive vision, without a picture on their own. That leads to losses.
Any movement that’s dominated by countersignals has a ticking bomb of loss of positive meaning inside
Let’s call it the law of countersignal overproduction.
When a decaying empire is forced to the defensive, countersignals rise in popularity. Countersignals aren’t kept deeply. They change depending on the enemy. The followers are good at repeating countersignals like a parrot. That creates a single point of failure. Failure of the central unit will paralyze the whole army. They rarely come up with new stuff, and if they do, the result is usually a wall of text.
These are the ratchets I think crucial. Let me know which ones I missed:
Now what happens when the ratchets go high enough?
Nick Land talks just about this
This is why NRx is dark. The only way out of a degenerative ratchet is catastrophe. Such processes are essentially unreformable, and this conclusion captures the critique of political conservatism from which NRx has been born. The only non-disastrous solution to a DR, or progressive lock-in dynamic, is to avoid entering into it. Once it has begun, normal politics can only modulate the speed of deterioration, and then only to a relatively limited degree. It will reach its end, which will be seriously horrible. NRx forecasting begins and ends with this thesis. - XS, ratchets and catastrophes
and Yarvin’s article gives a real life catastrophe for an example:
The Soviet empire was not overthrown by any centrifugal, secessionist force. Earlier rebellions in the outer provinces were suppressed easily. The Soviet empire was overthrown by its own leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had the same job as Stalin—and by the cadre of young officials who had come up with Gorbachev.
The path to the future did not run through the workers and peasants; it ran through this small elite. Once this elite was corrupted with Western doctrines, once it lost its unswerving faith in the socialist future, it and the regime it powered were doomed.
The demoralization increases until the power will fall into a group entirely composed by the Dark Elves, who’d then be able to shift the gears.
How to use this in practice
Let’s sum up the racthets
Simulacrum - bans, free speech restrictions
Disunity - constant status chasing
Client classes disenfranchisement - minorities
Countersignal overload - barren memetic landscape
A C C E L E R A T E the ratchets. Get more bluechecks banned on twitter to deepen the simulacrum. Keep pointing out moral and policy failures to sow disunity within the ranks. Pander to the client classes with good urban management (California → Texas exodus is a good sign of this).
And most importantly, force countersignal overload. Create bold visions of the future, new memes that push the other side on the defensive. wagmi.
Further reading
One of the earliest NRx mentions of the ratchet - habitableworlds blog post
Robert Stark about stopping the urban decay ratchet: “While aquatic amenities are no longer a civic priority, during the early 20th Century, swimming pools were a sign of civic pride.”
on economic ratchet by @Stahlblau4: “Neo-Africa arrives from the Future, and it might speak Russian.”
“Very interesting” - BHK