Stupidity Beats Intelligence

We Live in a Bee Orchid Democracy // Why Most Rationalists Suck at Politics

I recently stumbled on the work of Charles Haywood, a dissident right political theorist who argues that since the regime, or system of political elites,  consistently fail to execute complex plans, they are unable to react to sudden shocks, and are therefore very fragile. This chain of logic, which I believe to be incorrect, brings to mind the idea of cognitive dissonance of scale from Michael Shermer’s book Conspiracy (and from our discussion). I finally want to take this opportunity to answer the heart of DR political theory before leaving to work on AI pluralism for good.

I am in total agreement with Haywood’s observation that the elite primarily operate by limbic response. They do not optimize for consistency or function and instead make decisions in a style which Chamath Palihapitiya calls “kindergarten soccer”. In kindergarten soccer, all the young children chase frantically after the ball, fumbling and colliding in haphazard ways, devoid of the offensive or defensive synergies of even slightly more strategic players. This is a correct assessment of numerous major regime initiatives, including but not limited to: 

• The Iraq War and WMD (weapons of mass destruction) propaganda

• The PRISM mass surveillance system revealed by Edward Snowden

• Social progressives’ denial of biological sex differences and group differences in general

• The feminization of workplaces in general and academia in specific, and corresponding degrading of truth norms

• Covid lockdowns, which were far more destructive than the virus itself

  • The simultaneous banning of tests, treatments, and vaccines well after they each passed any sensible cost-benefit analysis

  • The transparent tribalist flip-flopping on whether to worry about the virus at all, masks, vaccines, and much more

• The 2008 financial crisis and response

Of course, there is some simplification necessary if we want to generalize regime behaviour across these different events. But it nonetheless reveals several important trends:

• Feminization - participants in discourse are encouraged (often demanded) to defect from truth norms, by catering to social status and emotional response (read: by lying).

• Limbic response - technology and norms increasingly manipulate hedonic desires of both masses and elites, from Cable TV to sugary food to porn

• Hypocrisy - politicians are increasingly not punished for taking contradictory stances on issues, even within a short timeframe. 

Stupid or Evil

The explanation for these trends strikes at the central question of dissident right political theory: is the regime stupid or evil? I’ve previously dismissed attempts to answer this question as an unnecessary, internally divisive distraction, but on this question I think Haywood cuts the Gordian Knot better than anyone I’ve seen so far. 

My answer is that slave morality has irreparably corrupted our definition of evil and rationalism has irreparably corrupted our definition of stupid. Evil is generally associated with competence. As Marc Andreesen remarks, “the supervillain is always the one with a plan”. This is also reflected in the overly conspiratorial right, which seeks grand, unifying strategies as explanations for regime actions. Yet the greatest 20th century mass death events, the mass famines in China and the Soviet Union, were driven not by plans but by Lysenkoism, or biology-by-kindergarten soccer. Lysenko denied basic biology and agricultural practice because it did not conform with Soviet doctrine. Instead of being punished, he was rewarded for his loyalty to his regime. There are many such “experts” today. In my view, Lysenkoism remains the best analogue for the ideological operation of the present regime (take, for example, managerial hiring). If we take evil as the ultimate enemy in the friend-enemy distinction, there is a far stronger case for classifying Lysenkoism as evil instead of the vapid cultural markers making up the political identities of both regime loyalists and boomer conservatives.

The second mistake is equating the ability of a social system to react with its ability to conduct rational forethought. It is true that in all the examples described, the regime has completely failed to accomplish its explicitly stated purpose. Yet individual actors within it are almost always in a position of greater power than previously. The military-industrial complex gained far greater budgets and unconstitutional domestic surveillance. The media dominance of social progressives and Lysenkoist civil rights laws persist despite their debunking. As I explained in my article for Tablet, feminized and mediocre workplaces select more from the feminized, mediocre milieu (even over more competent candidates), creating a feedback loop that deteriorates large companies. In a Lysenkoist regime, failing up is the norm. You don’t beat Lysenko by being better than him at farming. You get sent to the gulag for that. Similarly, you don’t beat civil rights law by posting crime statistics or the military-industrial complex by posting the military budget. There are realms of competition where logic does not apply. Of course, these realms of competition can only exist if they are shielded from the consequences of their own actions. Which they absolutely are.

Bee Orchids

The bee orchid is a plant which imitates the appearance and smell of a female bee, attracting males to attempt to mate with it and aid the orchid’s pollination. More recently, it’s a metaphor for “stupid” social deception that triumphs over “smarter” individuals. The bee orchid’s processes are relatively simple compared to the bee. The bee orchid did not become what it is because some evil genius wanted to mess with some bees. It adapted over centuries by the process of evolution, in which the more deceptive flowers were able to successfully reproduce. Elites within a Lysenkoist regime are selected for a kind of bee orchid charm, in which they manipulate the public while patronizing the right interests, typically while failing to fulfill their promises to the public, resulting in “failing upwards”. However, there is little evidence that most of them do this with any kind of coherent strategy. Nonetheless, the ones that do it, consciously or not, are selected to fail upwards and gain more power.

Bee Orchids Squared

Let’s call any system of subconscious adaptations that manages to outcompete others a bee orchid. Note that I mean this in the context of any iterated system, not just an evolutionary or biological one. Tragically, bee orchids are very good at dividing intelligent rationalists and dissident right political theorists. It takes advantage of the psychological problem of cognitive dissonance at scale. Paraphrasing Shermer, most people want to believe that complex problems have complex causes. With this line of thinking, massive conspiracies must have decided the results of the 2000 or 2020 election. It couldn’t possibly be midwitted people trying whatever they could and ending up getting enough votes through semi-random flailing. The media and federal bureaucracies’ hypocrisy on vaccines must be a coordinated effort, not just incredibly, incredibly stupid people who simply do not understand statistics. Et cetera. Because this instinct (and others covered in Michael’s book) makes people hyper-aware of conspiracies, political systems select for regimes that lack coherent strategies. In other words, democracy is a bee orchid system which generates an infinite number of bee orchid ideologies and sets them against each other. 

Unlike the dissident right or Nietzschian right respectively, I don’t see this as necessarily as a strike against democracy or Christianity. As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others”. I have similar beliefs about Christianity. While Nietzsche may have seen it as a cause of slave morality, I see it as something which limits and channels slave morality. We now know that the impulses of envy and victimization are not exclusive to Christianity, organized religion, or modernity. From Rob Henderson’s second appearance on my podcast, paraphrasing an argument by Christopher Boehm in his book Hierarchy in the Forest:

Someone in our tribe likes to take down a big animal immediately. We all start mocking him and making fun of him. You know, teasing him for how he runs or how he dresses or you know ah making fun of how he laughs like basically they're trying to cut him down because he did this great Thing. He kills this big animal and helps to feed. The group but they don't want him to think too much of himself. They don't want him to grow arrogant and so immediately all the other men start trying to ensure that he lets him know that hey just because you did this great thing doesn't mean that you're so special. 

I often use the phrase “those who cannot compete on ability compete on conformity”.* This makes perfect sense evolutionarily. Those who would be outcompeted have an asymmetric evolutionary incentive to defect. Hence the pattern going back to chimps that crime occurs in an egalitarian direction. This is also why I believe the world has actually consistently moved away from egalitarianism in the long term (and that this is a good thing). In a way, the effects of stupidity and the effects of egalitarianism are indistinguishable. I’ll leave this assertion at that since it’s mostly outside the scope of this article, but nonetheless interesting to consider.

My main takeaway from this line of thinking is the solution is not going to come from people believing things for “the right reasons”. Even if there is a founder-type figure (either in the American revolution or tech sense), he won’t be making and executing plans in the open. Instead, change will likely come in a new form of a new bee orchid ideology that is able to stop denigrating and repulsing many average people while also being able to manage status and govern effectively. I use the phrase message-mindset fit, which I elaborate on in the second half of my appearance on Outsider Theory. In short, a successful political ideology takes the same process as a successful product: creative genius, experimentation, and luck. 

This is also, indirectly, a case for one sort of Cowen-esque pluralism. Since I’m not able to anticipate to any high degree of certainty where this new bee orchid is likely to come from, I try to understand and cooperate with anyone in the largest possible tent of dissidence or populism. Simultaneously, bee orchids are a cautionary tale:

https://xkcd.com/1259/

*Sometimes this line is attributed to me, often linking this article. The sentence itself seems so obvious that I can’t have been the first to notice it, but I don’t remember seeing it anywhere else.