Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

by 8 Comments

Competitive Mindset vs. Savior Mindset

The American political opposition, whether on the right or the left, tends to adopt a ‘savior mindset.’

The general model that they operate under is in thinking that if only enough people hear ‘the truth,’ enough people will be converted over to the new way of thinking, and the day will be saved. Happiness will return to the country, the budget will be balanced, social justice will come to the land, everyone will be equal, the income tax will be eliminated, and the mountain will come down to Muhammad.

You get the idea. The spiel tends to be “listen to what I have to say, eat my red pill, and you’ll get everything you want.”

This tends to ignore how effective political change tends to happen. Effective political change happens through conflict and displacement. It just about never happens through internal reform, because, as a rule, most people have little ability to change their ways, even when there is a strong desire to do so.

The savior mindset leads to an indiscriminate way of speaking and acting politically — the leaders speak endlessly to the crowds in an attempt to convince the crowd about what is and isn’t righteous. Whom they speak to is less important than growing the size of the crowd. There’s often also a strong tendency to want to debate and convince people that they are wrong and that the ways of the savior-politico are correct.

In the real world, the rhetorical part is only really important insomuch as it builds up a large enough crew of supporters to use to clobber the other group’s supporters through physical and legally repressive means. Shay’s Rebellion did not succeed because George Washington’s gang was bigger and stronger. However right Shay’s men might have been in a cosmic sense from a certain perspective, Washington could muster more and better guys when the conflict came up, so the rebellion failed.

In a more contemporary context, it’s mostly a waste of time to attempt to convince people who have no interest in being convinced of something. Vestigial ideas of national unity also tend to get people trapped into mystical ways of thinking, because to win elections, democratic politicians have to promise impossible programs to compete with the rival political parties which are also promising impossible programs.

Syriza in Greece was never going to be able to both keep the Greek welfare state intact and regain Greek independence from the dictates of the European Union and the European Central Bank. An American politician will have to promise that taxes will be cut, there will be no resort to inflationary policy, entitlement programs will be expanded, crime will be suppressed, infrastructure will be constructed, forward progress in technology will be made, pollution will be reduced, and aggressive wars against evil will be fought.

Bismark called politics “the art of the possible,” but in the case of universal suffrage democracy, winning elections is the art of pre-selling every childish voter a unicorn that excretes gold.

By comparison, it’s more achievable to form a competitive faction and focus on breaking away from the people dazzled by incredible promises. That’s why it’s better to emphasize exit over voice.

The competition in the ‘voice’ space is all around puffing up imaginary futures, whereas ‘exit’ is wholly practical… if a bit rougher and more dangerous, but perhaps no more so than sitting tight and waiting for your unicorn to come in the mail.

by 2 Comments

Interview w/ Pippa Malmgren About Markets & Geopolitics

This interview from Matterhorn Asset Management was worth listening to. They’re part of a larger financial company with somewhere north of 5 billion CHF under management.

As a side note, I have fond memories of the real Matterhorn, and look forward to my next visit.

The general theme of the interview is the global re-alignment between Russia, China, and Europe along with the skittishness that foreign powers are feeling in relation to the US in general and the dollar in particular.

Malmgren’s sense is that influential centers like the Council on Foreign Relations seem to be discounting this more than they really ought to, even though it’s broadly understood that the US has dropped dramatically in terms of diplomatic standing in recent years.

What’s difficult for Americans, even those who have been theoretically raised to have a global outlook, is that American education is so weak even at the elite level, that most Americans don’t really have a good understanding of either themselves or how their country is seen by foreigners.

The interview subject basically tells it like it is: the US has a history going back to the revolution of defaulting on its external and internal obligations through inflationary policy. Chinese and Russian elites recognize this, and are saying “we want hard assets.” This is one of the drivers of the conflict in Ukraine. Russia acted to keep a key agricultural country within its sphere.

With the US willing to use sanctions against a major country like Russia, undermining rhetoric about global free markets, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing echoes of mercantalism show up, with these countries going after land and influence, edging away from the American-dominated international trade network.

The US subverted Ukraine without any real material motivation that made any sense at all — it was evidently driven by democratic messianism, with some gibberish about natural gas routes thrown in to enrich a few consultants here and there.

Malmgren also notes that the motivation behind austerity policies is diminishing, because all that’s really being done is that it slow the speed at which debts are accumulated, rather than addressing the root issue. She phrases it as “the social contract will need to be renegotiated,” because what people currently expect from states is not actually deliverable.

Parties like the AFD in Germany and FN in France are growing rapidly in popularity, and it’s evident that Europe is not likely to hold together. The doctor is confident that Germany and the Bundesbank have plans in place to replace the Euro with only minimal disruption to the Germany way of life.

Market participants tend to be at least moderately irritated that the markets have been tipped to financial institutions — she terms it as “the playing field is tilted” — and it’s not clear that that state of affairs can be maintained for all that long. People are confident that the markets will remain open even during a crisis, but are not confident that it will remain anything like a fair playing field in terms of purchasing power in a crisis.

What’s heartening to hear about these sorts of discussions is that people are becoming somewhat more willing to be open about what’s going on in the global markets, but only by a little. The new era that we saw come into play in the early 1970s is coming to an end. It’s going to upend a lot of common-sense assumptions about how the world works and how it’s likely going to work in the future. To put it mildly, there are going to be a lot of ‘renegotiations’ and ‘realignments’ going forward.

by 17 Comments

National Review on the Decline of the University

This piece turned out well, even if some of the suggestions are terrible.

It is a dubious idea, admittedly, to address the dearth of conservatives in academia with a deliberately politicized hiring process. The best remedy to leftward drift or narrow academic bias in the academy surely isn’t the introduction of self-conscious conservative counter-programming, which would remain on the margins in any case. But it is tempting to paraphrase the axiom of that other Churchill (Winston) about democracy: that it’s the worst idea imaginable — except for all of the others that have ever been tried. So, with ever-accumulating evidence of bias against conservatives in academic hiring and advancement, perhaps an effort to introduce a conservative perspective in a high-profile way is an experiment that should be tried.

I insisted on one condition in accepting the appointment: that I be hosted by a regular academic department and teach departmental courses out of the catalogue, rather than be an ornament for an ad hoc or free-floating “conservative studies” program. Setting up a “conservative studies” program would ironically ratify the intellectual rot of the various “studies” departments that have sprung up over the years to appease the most radical, grievance-minded factions in academia. “Conservatism” is not a discrete subject, like biology or English literature; as with liberalism, it is a point of view or disposition that informs nearly all the traditional disciplines. And in any case, even a conservative professor who feels like a Soviet dissident on today’s campuses ought to uphold the traditional model of teaching by presenting a full spectrum of views in the classroom, rather than engage in counter-indoctrination.

… [jump to the end]…

But these glimmers of reform are insufficient to the scale of the decay. Universities won’t begin to turn away from the intellectual corruption of radicalism until some kind of serious, organized opposition arises. A few isolated or token conservatives scattered in various departments, or visiting in a high-profile way, as I did at Boulder, won’t make much of a mark. To speak out alone against the relentless and insatiable demands of grievance leftism is to risk losing out on promotion and advancement, even if you already have tenure. Academic conservatives — along with disaffected moderates and liberals — need to emulate the campus Left and organize effective counter-programming, with their own centers and topical curricula, to contest the intellectual ground on campus. The thin ranks of academic conservatives need a campus rallying point, and a guerrilla mentality to match the determination of the Left. As Hemingway said of writers, conservative faculty ought to stick together like a pack of wolves.

The writer does a good job in explaining the current predicament of the university, although he’s probably too charitable to the sciences and engineering schools. We should expect academia to become even more radical as time goes on.

The best suggestion to the universities would be to figure out a way to terminate most of the faculty. The details of how that would be done aren’t really all that interesting to me. State governments can also gin up methods to deny funding to state universities. The Federal government is not that likely to back off from its commitments to continue inflating the student loan bubble until financial markets somehow force them to do so.

Considering the massive endowments of the most prestigious universities, not to mention the value of the real estate that they own, the faculty and bloated administration can be replaced or reformed. Most universities probably do not need to exist, and can be dismantled as quickly as they were thrown together over the last century.

Since the political side of things is unlikely to change without a financial shock, what parents should strongly consider is to choose alternatives to higher education, like apprenticeship, aggressive pursuit of demanding internships, freelancing, and other similar methods to help their sons to find meaningful work or a vocation without recourse to the university system.

Most university students and parents are not really interested in the academic life, and are instead looking for vocational preparation. The market there has to be un-muddled, so that the two groups of students stop mixing together as much as they have over the last century or so.

Parents that think that the Ivy League schools are major exceptions to the overall trends should audit some classes there and read the university newspaper every day for a year before fronting anything for tuition, room, & board.

American universities are unlikely to enjoy the international reputation that they currently have in the next 20 to 30 years. The catastrophe of the American university may be as long-lasting and devastating as the collapse of the German academic complex was during and after World War II. The problems are broadly understood, but no one in authority has the courage to do what is necessary to set these institutions on a more respectable path.

Top Posts & Pages