The problem I have with "the Cathedral" is the idea of mode…

The real answer is more complicated—no, the tyranny is not the result of a meticulously-managed top-down conspiracy that everyone is "in on"—it's the result of compartmentalization.
2/n

Complex operations and the roles of individual players within them are constructed, guided, and acted out on a need-to-know basis. Anyone who has ever worked on a government contract knows this: you may only know what's needed to perform your specific task, no more.
3/n

It's really not that complicated at all, we can even see it at play within something as mundane as an office workplace. Low level folks don't know the inner workings of the company's financials, what big wigs discuss in corner offices, etc.—they just show up and work.
4/n

Think of a scam as complex as, say, Enron. When the whole scandal broke, most of the company—the lower level people—were simply having the rug pulled out from under them because they had no idea how bad things actually were.
5/n

The idea that the gov'ts, intelligent agencies, or corporations could not keep complex plans secret on this basis is both stupid on a surface level and historically wrong.
The British gov't covered up the Lusitania's real cargo for 100 years.
https://t.co/wItc75ixZZ
6/n

Of course, it had been alleged before this that Lusitania carried live charges, but until they copped to it, it was just cOnSpIrAcY tHeOrY. None of the allegations ever stopped them from using it for propaganda.

Was everyone at British and US intel "in on it?" Of course not.
7/n

Did the reporter who wrote this story have intimate knowledge of some conspiracy? No need for that. But the information came from somewhere, didn't it? Someone up the chain must've known—and lied—about the live shrapnel shells. They got there somehow.
https://t.co/k6dA4mEGtm
8/n

So, the real point is this: if someone with privileged information—an individual or a group of people with specific authorizations or clearances—knows the truth of a plan or situation, there's no real need for the people who take orders to know that same information.
9/n

If a higher-up knows the truth, the abusive behavior of their agency or organization is, by definition, NOT merely emergent. The people taking orders are being misled as well, while still playing their role in the abusive action.
10/n

This is another perfect example: CDC's internally-produced data has only ever been reviewed by people who work for the CDC. Someone within the agency almost certainly knows the data is bad. It's very unlikely that everyone at CDC is a bumbling idiot.
11/n
https://t.co/7mw5A5TaO9

I\u2019ve seen people dismiss scientific studies because they are not peer reviewed. Most of those people don\u2019t realize that @CDCgov publishes scientific studies without peer review. Instead, CDC \u201crigorously\u201d reviews the science to make sure it does NOT conflict with their \u201cpolicy!\u201d pic.twitter.com/g2XIQHtzkP
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 5, 2022

The CDC director—before, Redfield, now Walensky—almost certainly knows bad or misleading data when they see it. So do other staff reviewing it. But agency heads also have obvious political motives.

How often do gov't agencies admit to error or wrongdoing? Almost never.
12/n

So, within a circle of people with privileged access, someone who reports to the Director or a review team is feeling pressure to go along with the official stance of the agency.

People outside this process don't even see under the hood, they just repeat what they're told.
13/n

SOMEBODY has been knowingly allowing bad, misleading health data to be published all this time. There is absolutely no need for "the CDC," as in, the entire staff of the entire agency, to be "in on it." Only need a few people with privileged access giving rubber stamps.
14/n

Of course, everybody who works for the agency has an interest in protecting the public image of the agency, and that's where the "emergent" part comes in. Even the lowliest office jockey at the CDC has an interest in hyping the official stance, because his job depends on it.
15/n

So, it's not an either-or proposition—the behavior of subordinates can often be explained by emergent phenom, where they simply follow their own interests—but at the same time, *someone* somewhere has privileged knowledge that makes their actions intentional.
16/n

We know that F_uci and other health "experts" said, in Jan. 2020, that m_sks don't work. We know that they are now admitting "cloth m_sks" don't work. They took one stance, then another, then another, all to save face.

But it was always true all along that m_sks don't work.
17/n

Idiot journos who blindly repeat what "experts" say? Probably emergent.

The "experts" flip-flopping on well-established scientific literature published over the course of decades? Probably deliberate.
18/n

"The Cathedral" is insufficient to explain intentionality by bad actors with privileged info, and actually serves to obscure the reality of these people's role.

F_uci, W_lenksy, even someone like L_ana Wen—they all know what they're doing. There's simply no way they don't.
19/n

If we think of all this as entirely, 100% emergent phenomena, then by definition, we have to let people who are clearly lying off the hook. There's just no way around that.

I say "regime" because that suggests that somebody is giving orders—that's what's actually happening.
20/n

A regime doesn't require a complex conspiracy, it just requires a hierarchical structure, with subordinates abiding by a recognized authority. All those subordinates have to do is follow orders for abusive, nefarious sh¡t to happen.
21/n

This is where we get the joke about people "just following orders" or "just doing their job." The Banality of Evil is a real thing, far beyond anything Hannah Arendt herself was able to appreciate. She ascribed it to muh N_zis. It's really more true than ever now.
22/n

"Cathedral" fails to capture how bad the institutions actually are. It gives them a free pass, suggesting that all of this is just kind of "happening" on its own, and no one is doing it on purpose. We know that's not true—don't use language that muddies the water like this.
Fi/n

That's fair enough, I can understand that interpretation. But the particular view I have a problem with is the redditor "nobody is in charge" take on it, which seems to have become a bit more common in hard-right circles. It's cringe and it's wrong
https://t.co/xFSAgWx52g

it really depends on how you interpret it

in my eyes, the Cathedral makes the institutions look even WORSE because it means that everyone running them is in a big circlejerk (the low levels are irrelevant, they don't count) and therefore irredeemable
— \U0001f41dSvevlad, Social Surgeon\U0001f41d (@3rdincarnate) January 5, 2022

Yes, it becomes harder and harder to believe the bigger that number gets. But you can think of it in terms of "cells" as well, where the knowingly bad actors are, themselves, also compartmentalized.
https://t.co/SUnCyfYTS3

it's a bug because the amount of people that can be defined as "in charge" exceeds the dunbar number and something about that spooks them so they say "nobody is in charge" like a measuring device when it goes out of bounds
— \U0001f41dSvevlad, Social Surgeon\U0001f41d (@3rdincarnate) January 5, 2022

Do we think B_ll G_tes or G_orge S_rosis are personally micromanaging every aspect of every project they throw money at? Of course not. But they delegate their visions to teams of people. Those teams don't need to know or care what the other teams are doing.

Mencius Moldberg

It's another episode of "leftist achieves Dark Enlightenment," except in this case it's a J_wish leftist achieving J_wish Dark Enlightenment.

Weinstein arrived at the same obfuscatory conclusion as Moldberg, through a sh¡tlib's thought process.
👨‍🍳🤌
https://t.co/TXsWycfZS2

I'm probably the only one in these parts that even knows enough to comment but Eric Weinstein's whole 'DISC' (distributed idea suppression complex) is such a laughably sanitized concept that basically boils down to a conspiracy
— \U0001d412\U0001d415\U0001d415\U0001d400\U0001d418\U0001d404\U0001d403 (@SVVAYED) December 30, 2021

And even then, we can't trust the average idiot to properly fit N95, which is the only way it can even be effective. Even a few mm gap lets infectious particles through, which is how you know s_rgical m_sks don't work either. They'll admit that soon, too.
https://t.co/zPG86RDswc

This was my first redpill moment on the dragon germ, when they said you didn't need them, then bought out the entire domestic supply of N-95's, and then suddenly said we needed to wear a mask of some sort.

The only effective ones had already been taken by then.
— Aristophanes Tragedy (@AristophanesTX) January 5, 2022

Eugyppius does excellent analysis of the bunk public health data and propaganda being fed to us. But the idea that this is all wholly emergent or spontaneous, and that saying otherwise requires "conspiracism" is just wrong.
https://t.co/W2cOwEqGyE

Spontaneous Order in Complex Systems

The question, is not whether there are conspiracies, or whether containment benefits our elites. The question, is what is the dominant force driving containment and universal vaccination right now.https://t.co/rih4CwgVP6
— eugyppius (@eugyppius1) January 5, 2022

The argument from @eugyppius1 seems to be that although there are clear bad actors acting as origin points, the narrative has now flown out of their control into an emergent self-sustaining panic.

The problem with this is that the bad actors are standing by with a defibrillator.

Every time the panic starts to subside and people start getting bored, they trot out a new variant to scare people with. The bad actors are intentionally resuscitating the narrative with new lies.

D_lta was detected in late 2020. We barely heard about it until mid-2021, when it became useful to the narrative. Same with Omicr_n—detected mid-21, not hyped until late-21. Rinse and repeat.

They are doing this on purpose and could stop it any time they want.

They know that the average person gets all their info from select few authoritative sources—social trending page, TV news, web app news aggregator. Whatever they put out on these platforms is what most people will believe.

So, when F_uci or whoever goes on the news to tell fearmongering lies yet again, he is deliberately keeping the narrative alive—he is flicking the first domino in a chain. Is it "emergent" for the rest of the dominos to fall? No. His lie is causal to the panic.

Exactly. And this is how they have kept this going for two years.
https://t.co/9hxRWhI4x9

If they will lie right out of the gate for their own advantage as such, they will lie about everything else if they have to as well.
— Aristophanes Tragedy (@AristophanesTX) January 5, 2022

Exactly, if we believe that then we might as well just throw up our hands and say "all is lost"
https://t.co/T3ERBcq0AI

honestly its much scarier if no one is in charge and society just did that
— bjecky (@goofysunday) January 5, 2022

He is mixing up distribution with decentralization, basically. Is it all 100% centrally planned from the top down? No. Are there people at the center of it, making important moves that have ripple effects on the whole system. Yes.
https://t.co/4mhopb398a

pressures makes no sense. You can see him hop between these two positions and try to maintain the "totally decentralized" position aswell in the tucker interview, it's obvious how stupid it is.
— \U0001202dSharmat\U0001f42c (@GnostikDrainer) January 5, 2022

I agree with him that the only real solutions are absolutist ones—I just think he gives far too much of a pass to the people who are steering the ship right now.
https://t.co/gUAiTwalMu

i think you got it wrong, for me the cathedral is an hydra, that's why Moldbug proposes a totalitarian regime as its only cure. But i'll read your whole thread
— Trying (@Tryin2BeGood) January 5, 2022

Yup, and it certainly couldn't have been everyone tied to the NSA. Part emergence from need-to-know goons, part bad action by a few in-the-know.
https://t.co/ZDNmZuZSSC

The scariest example of this for me was the mass surveillance the NSA was doing with corporations happily assisting. A TON of people knew all about it and no one said shit until Snowden. Insane.
— Mechanism Eight (@mechanism_8) January 5, 2022

If we acknowledge that Somebody is in charge, then we have to start talking about who Somebody is, and those Somebodies are disproportionately of a certain persuasion.
https://t.co/GMkkU9HS5c

Moldtermite had to come up with a totally fictitious concept like the "Cathedral" because he doesn't see any real influence from his co-tribalists.
— coma commuter (@commutercon) January 6, 2022

The issue is that making blanket statements like "it's all decentralized, man" abstracts us away from this and makes it *sound like* nobody is steering the ship. Not that he's literally saying that.
https://t.co/voKmJEGRiS

As I've always interpreted the cathedral model, it is not ought to say "it's none's fault"
Moldbug's cathedral has "the brain", the consensus creating apparatus. Those people do things VERY deliberately, it is them taking decisions etc
— Rex Siciliae (@RexSiciliae) January 6, 2022

Absolutism is necessary because the current system enables the kind of compartmentalization needed to conceal the tyranny and abuse. It makes it very easy for every elite to pass off culpability on some other elite, or onto subordinates...
https://t.co/miITM8BeMA

Absolutism wouldn't be necessary if you were right because it would mean just replacing people in key positions and things would all get better.
— CryptonMaximus \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8 (@CryptonMaximus) January 5, 2022

...so, if the compartmentalization is the mechanism of power in this system, then you must change the system to remove the compartmentalization.
https://t.co/msDqBgzDtW

I share this critique of systems, (I think Yarvin is equally shallow when on the fundamental reasons why monarchy is the ideal political arrangement)

but yes at the end of the day, the evil-actor analysis risks the misleading suggestion that the regime is salvageable.
— slow up (@slow___up) January 6, 2022

The access to power by Bad Actors enables them to do what they are doing, while the compartmentalization—the structure of the system—allows them to conceal and abstract what they are doing away from themselves. Therefore, both of these things must be changed.

If you have a compartmentalized (distributed) system, then you will always have a non-zero number of Bad Actors with access to power, which is why simply changing bureaucracies isn't good enough.

If you have a Bad Actor as absolute king, everyone knows he's responsible.

The problem I have with "the Cathedral" is the idea of modern tyranny as an emergent phenomenon rather than a machine driven and operated by interested parties.

It's a dressed up way of saying "come on, do you think everyone is in on it?" As if this is a necessary condition.
🧵

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The problem I have with "the Cathedral" is the idea of modern tyranny as an emergent phenomenon rather than a machine driven and operated by interested parties.It's a dressed up way of saying "come on, do you think everyone is in on it?" As if this is a necessary condition.🧵

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The problem I have with "the Cathedral" is the idea of modern tyranny as an emergent phenomenon rather than a machine driven and operated by interested parties.

It's a dressed up way of saying "come on, do you think everyone is in on it?" As if this is a necessary condition.
🧵