Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions following Romanticism [1]. Eugenics [2] was taught in numerous universities at the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly, some people can find Romanticism appealing today for the same reason they found it appealing in the 19th c., and they will find it appealing, yet again in the 23rd. The only defense is knowing how and why it arose the first time around, and why it was ultimately rejected.
If you want to read a book about the struggle of Romanticism and Humanism, read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.[3]
For those interested in a direct response by a scholar to another, perhaps less extreme and more sophisticated, charlatan of Yarvin's general milieu, see: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein
Eugenics emerged in modern times as a Progressive-era policy. It seems kind of vague and perhaps misleading to link it to Romanticism, when actually it follows along the exact same lines as the secular, "scientific" Humanism that you evidently find so appealing.
It emerged as a result of both. Reactionary/romantic ideals have always co-opted what they viewed as scientific knowledge or technology in the service of their imagined past. That progressive ideals may have also ultimately employed horrific tools goes without saying, and that some conservative forces have sometimes opposed them is also true. But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong, regardless of whether it's done intentionally by a scholar wishing to push an agenda, or unintentionally by name-dropping, bloviating ignoramuses like Yarvin.
> But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong
All simplified models are wrong. Some are useful. (And it's very hard to avoid 'appeal' being a critical factor in the popularity of any model or narrative. It acts as a single point of failure in any truth-seeking mechanism, including academia and the like. This of course explains much about the popularity of some contemporary ideas.)
Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once mainstream, and quite harmful.
Yet, it was the horrible, horrible Europe that Moldbug mythologizes and romanticizes that made virtually all advances in science and technology until a few decades ago.
Ancient Greece produced mechanical computers. Only recently did the great civilizations of China and India overcome Hellenic science & technology. Having Mandarins cataloging the Emperor's property is not a great use of human capital.
While the so-called European Miracle of the past 500 years is a fascinating and complex area of research that will undoubtedly be studied for generations and centuries to come, I wasn't aware that anyone considers modern (18th c. and beyond) romanticist ideology to be the major driving force of science and technology.
"Romanticist ideology" is a remarkably vague term, but I think one could make a case that something like it ended up being very much a factor. Of course, the reverse is also true; in the absence of 18th- and 19th-century science (including advancements in the social sciences, mostly coming from the "humanist" side as Carlyle knew quite well!) no "romanticist" ideology would even exist.
Ignorant? He probably read more old books than you -- which does not mean he understood much. He spent 7 years of early retirement burning his dot-com loot on Amazon.
That seems unlikely, since 'pron has repeatedly identified himself as a (former?) history grad student / PhD candidate, and, in various threads on the site, has gone into enough depth on the topic that I'd be disinclined to doubt them.
Moldbug allegedly acquired enough loot during the dot-com bubble to afford spending 7 years at home reading something like 1 book per day. That could be 2500 books in total.
History grad students have to TA. They have to produce research. It's hard to consume as much as Moldbug when one has such demands on one's time.
More importantly, Moldbug almost certainly has more brainpower than the vast majority of history grad students. Whether he used such brainpower wisely is highly debatable.
The "amateur scholar" is a well-established 18th- and 19th-century tradition, and Moldbug would be merely following in it. While the 20th-century model of academia has more overall throughput and perhaps even more output, it's not clear that it's anywhere near as efficient in its use of human effort or brainpower.
Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion. It is not merely a sane outlet for human altruism, but is of all outlets for altruism that which is most comprehensive and of longest range.
It's well-known that the Nazis imported eugenics from Yale and Oxbridge. And eugenics was publicly defended by people all over the political spectrum until 1939. After 1945, it went underground. It never went away.
Moldbug can preach his Carlyleism all he wants. In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF. The pathological bloviators preach, the unsung soldiers and scientists make things happen.
> In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF.
I'm not so sure. There is a core problem here, and that is that intelligence is not all that it's made up to be. It takes no more than a glance at the current American president to see that. That intelligence (by which I mean relative intelligence) is some ultimate power is, itself, a myth perpetuated by people who consider themselves particularly intelligent. You'd hear similar things about beauty from beautiful people. Clearly, many great works were done by people who were not amazingly intelligent, and people who were amazingly intelligent have done some amazingly stupid things. Personally, I think charisma is far more important. I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.
You don't need to understand intelligence that well to change the world. A little predictive power can go very far.
In the end, it's a bit like playing roulette. A small edge and many bets will make you rich.
> I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.
It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb. Better brains means better weapons, which means conquering and annihilating stupider tribes. It's the history of Mankind.
Charisma helps uniting tribes. But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.
Yeah, but I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things (weighted by impact). Again, look at the current US president; or at stock traders.
> It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb.
No, but arguably neither would have been done when they were done if it weren't for a war that started largely due to charisma.
> But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.
But it's not high relative intelligence that brought us industrialization. Those same people who were later industrialized had had hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering.
What's especially ironic about this is that we do a terrible job of educating even people of entirely average intelligence, never mind 'morons'. But of course this has nothing to do with purported genetic bases of intelligence, and everything with how our "budget(s) devoted to education" are used.
> A dollar wasted on trying to educate a moron could be invested in military R&D.
How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? All humans are pretty bad at flying, yet airplanes are pretty useful. All of technology is spending on the respective meaning of "educating morons." Military R&D is a great example. A weakling with a gun can easily beat a strong sword-wielding knight. In fact, the difference between a strong fighter with a sword and a weakling with a sword is pretty much erased by guns.
> Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck?
I meant Hitler. Napoleon was a different story, but WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism.
> you outed yourself as a non-European
Well, I'm Jewish.
> You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits.
Traits? Have we already established that natural selection in the past ~10000 years since the agricultural revolution has had any significant impact in shaping human society? (To be clear, that was a rhetorical question; no, we have not established that).
Whoa, I don't know if I would start by teaching you history or the basic mathematics of natural selection. I'm always impressed by how the ability to form coherent explanatory narratives is inversely proportional to the amount of factual knowledge possessed (of course it is -- fewer points require a lower-degree polynomial -- but still, it does require some level of oblivious confidence that I've never had). I'm sorry, but I completely misjudged the nature of this conversation. Stepping away now, and I hope you get better.
By the way, my great grandparents weren't elites so much as they were poor tradesmen, except maybe in the addled minds of the followers of ignorant "great men," armed with a romantic ideology of an imagined past and pseudo-science -- and, of course, guns -- who brutally murdered them. Apparently, my great-grandparent's "superior Ashkenazi cognition" wasn't enough to ensure their survival -- maybe because of some other "weaknesses associated with their race," but I think that the more plausible explanation is that it was because of racism, a force that seems to trump intelligence time and again.
If you want to read a book about the struggle of Romanticism and Humanism, read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.[3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain