I think his usual formulation (and mine) is "there's no individual prior to society".
Yeah all of that is clear. My query was more about individuals - we read weird old books and obscure blogs and came to our conclusions. We are clearly not 'normies'. So this ability at least should exist independent of state and societal incentives.
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Right. But the state has some control over that, not just in terms of being able to censor, but also because none of us would be doing this if the state wasn't incompetent. Our dissatisfaction reflects the state's incompetence.
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Does that imply, then, that in a competent state there would be little to no deviation like ours? Intriguing hypothesis. I think Moldbug himself posited that his blog couldn't have come about if the cathedral was doing its job.
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There's different sources of deviation. In a functioning society, anyone could be a source of knowledge (i.e., imagine living on the outskirts of a medieval city and being the first to see and invading army) or could spot an error. A good sovereign would account for that.
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To the degree that you need something like 'free speech' it's that you can get at knowledge and get errors corrected, although the manner in which it's done is as important (modern journalism isn't the best way to do this).
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But I don't think you'd have serious ideological deviation like we have in a well-run state. That generally comes from dissatisfaction. It'd be minor stuff that a good government would be want to see: empirical knowledge and error correction.
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That makes eminent sense. Thank you.
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One way to think about it is incrementally. My current near-total non-participation in politics is mostly due to the liberal democratic regime. But if I was Chinese I'd probably join the Party and try to contribute from within, even though it's far from ideal.
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And if I lived in a state that was even closer to the ideal, then I'd probably forget about politics altogether!
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