Non-Tribalist Politics Megathread

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Yeah, I agree with those examples. It’s reasonable to criticize the status quo, and point out ways it limits your available options. If the only jobs you can get are all unpleasant in various ways, do you have a choice to work a pleasant job? I guess not.

My problem with the socialist construction I alluded to above, e.g. “If I choose not to work for pay then I will starve, therefore work for pay is not a choice, therefore work for pay is slavery” is mainly that it attributes starving as a consequence of not working for pay, whereas I think starving is arguably a consequence of not working, period. Living takes effort, acquiring food/shelter/etc. all take effort. Whether the effort is working for pay or being a hunter gatherer or whatever else, it will still take effort.

I think that means all choices have some of these constraints. We don’t live in a paradise of plenty where we can have anything we want at any time. All choices are necessarily constrained by a particular context. And in a sense, no matter how horrible our context, we might still have some agency to make choices within a very limited set of unpleasant options.

So why do I think some of these situations are problematic and not fair choices, and others are okay? I think most people (including me) decide this intuitively most of the time. Choosing between working for a variety of suboptimal jobs seems like it might suck but I would say it is still a voluntary choice. Choosing which gun someone is going to shoot you with seems like an unreasonable situation and not a true voluntary choice.

Once again, it feels easy to identify if the examples are extreme. But where do I actually draw the line? I don’t know.

One guess:

When our options are constrained by something impersonal like biology/geography (e.g. “find some way to feed yourself, or starve”), those choices seem voluntary to me. When our choices are constrained by other people, the line starts to blur.

My guess is that how blurry depends on how notably bad the actions of the other people are. “Shitty work opportunities” are a constraint caused by people, but they are often caused by a huge amount of different people doing a variety of stuff that seems OK to them but sums up to a crummy situation across a big chunk of society.

Whereas something like prison slavery seems like a shitty situation caused by a more limited, specific subset of human action. It’s not the sum of thousands of employers all being a bit shitty, a bit petty, and a bit mean. It is a specific institution that imposes very strict, harsh control over people. So it is a lot easier to look at it and say “those people don’t have a real voluntary choice, because they’re in prison.”

Is this a sensible way to draw lines between types of choices?

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Are you asking about whether the choices are voluntary or not?

I think whether your situation is voluntary or not depends on whether there is human force put on you or not (I’m not sure if you should count social pressuring as force or not). When people are a bit mean and petty towards you they’re not necessarily forcing you in the political sense.

How good your situation is doesn’t matter (for the classification). If 2000 years ago there was working anarchy/anarcho-capitalism, then your choice of work would be voluntary despite you having a shitty job compared to current standards.

Opposite example: let’s say you’re an artist and the communist state forces you to be the state artist. You like the job and are well compensated. You had no voluntary choice, even if you would choose the job voluntarily.

Let’s say suddenly everyone lost the will to have high living standards and turned to hand-to-mouth living. You couldn’t do much in this society but you could still be living totally voluntarily.

You might voluntarily choose to work in a toxic workplace for high-pay or other reasons.

I would say constrained by nature.

Prisoners are the people we take freedom from because they didn’t respect other people’s freedom. So their life situation would never be totally voluntary. They can still have particular voluntary choices. Saying “the prison labor was voluntary” can mean the specific choice to take the labor or not was voluntary. But that could be misleading because it can be interpreted as the prisoners living in a highly voluntary situation.

You can argue that you can’t have any particular voluntary choices without living totally free. Because the choice you would’ve made is blocked by force. I think there’s usefulness in thinking about people having choice despite being artificially limited. The choice “to do X or not to” would be voluntary choice. Perhaps we could invent new terminology for this sort of limited voluntary choice.

Lastly I want to say that voluntary situation doesn’t mean automatically good situation or vice versa.

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Good distinctions. I will say upfront I tentatively agree with anything that I don’t specifically quote and disagree with.

I would say constrained by nature.

Yeah that’s a good way to phrase it. For the purpose of everything else in this post, I am ignoring choices that are only constrained by nature. I agree those constraints should not impact whether or not we consider something voluntary.

Are you asking about whether the choices are voluntary or not?

Yeah. I was thinking out loud about what we consider voluntary depending on the context, and whether or not the “blurry line” I was perceiving had a good answer to clear it up. I am not yet convinced that it does.

I think whether your situation is voluntary or not depends on whether there is human force put on you or not (I’m not sure if you should count social pressuring as force or not)

I agree. I think your parenthetical is one reason it seemed blurry to me. Another reason is basically just that a question like “how much human force is applied to me in this situation?” is not always easy to answer. It could be being applied to you in subtle ways.

Does that mean no choices that involve any potential (even subtle) human force count as voluntary? Next quote directly relevant, thoughts below it are a continuation of this paragraph.

If 2000 years ago there was working anarchy/anarcho-capitalism, then your choice of work would be voluntary despite you having a shitty job compared to current standards.

Does this imply that you think that all choices of where/how to work today are not voluntary, because we don’t have working anarchy? Seems like a similar question to my one above about any potential human force being enacted on you.

If your answer is “yes” to these questions, I can understand the logic there. Your reasoning makes sense to me. But I’m not really satisfied by it. The original context was analyzing decisions by prison inmates and whether or not they were voluntary. If we conclude that, because of potential human force, approximately zero decisions are truly voluntary then I think the concept has lost some of its usefulness. I think there is a big, meaningful distinction between the decision of where to work in a relatively free society (e.g. a modern first world capitalist state) vs. the extremely limited choices available to a prison inmate. Even if both of these are limited, one is way more limited, to an extent that warrants distinction.

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Have you read Thiel’s essay that the last tiktok in this post is discussing? And/or are you familiar with the 3 philosophers he mentions Thiel likes? Schmidt/Girard/Strauss? I have not read any of them.

If this is even a semi-accurate summary Thiel seems super bad, much much worse than I realized.

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Thank you for sharing this. I liked those examples as well, and I have also changed my perspective in similar ways to what both you and he described.

I’m on the fence about whether or not I was just very oblivious 8 years ago as to how bad misogyny and racism was, or if many racists and misogynists were genuinely trying a lot harder to hide their power level at the time.

My guess is it’s a mix of both: There was more plausible deniability from the bigots, but also I was oblivious or willfully ignorant regarding a lot of stuff.

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For Thiel, watch from 22s to 50s here.

Then you might like this video.

There’s also this essay site.

And Thiel is openly anti-democracy:

The people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

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For a lot of the left wing complaints about work that I see, the main complaint isn’t really about having to do any work at all. It’s about secondary aspects of their jobs that are unnecessary, like:

  • bad executive leadership
  • safety issues
  • retaliation against people who expose problems such as reporting illegal safety issues to the authorities or just complaining to their boss that e.g. they aren’t getting their legally required breaks
  • bad company policies that make it harder and more frustrating to do their job
  • issues with HR
  • office politics
  • unfair decisions about promotions, hirings and firings (which also lose the company money)
  • busywork
  • excessive pointless paperwork
  • time-wasting meetings
  • scheduling
  • return to office mandates
  • unclear directions plus not wanting to clarify enough when asked
  • not listening to suggestions
  • not rewarding people who do an extra good job and make the company a ton of extra money
  • different people getting significantly different pay for doing similar work, and also pressure for employees not to discuss wages
  • coworkers who gossip, haze, flirt, harass, say inappropriate things with the excuse that it was a joke
  • merit not rising to the top well

Dramatically improving all of this is compatible with capitalism. And if that happened, I think a ton of the complaints about work, companies and capitalism would stop.

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No.

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I agree completely.

I think the specific construction of “I have to work or I will starve, therefore work is slavery” is not a general left-wing perspective. I didn’t mean to imply that, so if I did that was a mistake.

I think “I have to work or I will starve, therefore work is slavery” is a fairly niche argument I’ve only seen from some socialists or communists. I don’t mean “socialists or communists” as a shorthand for “very left” either. I mean specifically people that either consider themselves followers of Marxism/Leninism or have been directly persuaded by those that do.

This also reminds me of the r/antiwork subreddit. From what I have seen the posters there are a total jumble. Some are left-leaning people who have the kinds of criticisms you list out here, and often share good strategies for dealing with those issues. But some posters (and the subreddit mods/creators, I think) are specifically Marxists who think all forms of work-for-pay are inherently exploitative.

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Thanks.

I haven’t finished all of these links yet, but just from what I’ve read so far I think that Thiel is indeed very bad. I’ll post again if I see something that contradicts this.

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I was just saying something relevant, not arguing with you.

I think there’s a lot of confusion where people associate these problems with work with capitalism and vaguely think socialism would help.

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I was just saying something relevant, not arguing with you.

Understood. I agree with you.

I think there’s a lot of confusion where people associate these problems with work with capitalism and vaguely think socialism would help.

I think that vaguely positive outlook towards socialism is a common type of reaction across many topics. One reason I think it happens is: it is generally easier to identify problems than solutions. In CF terms, maybe I could rephrase that as it’s easier to think of criticisms for existing ideas than it is to think of a new idea for which there is no known criticism? Not sure if that’s a good rephrase.

So a lot of times people will think of a bunch of problems with some aspect of the world, like working conditions even in some of the richest nicest places on Earth. And they’ll be able to think of a long list of really bad stuff. So then they conclude that a viewpoint framed in opposition to that (e.g. socialism in opposition to modern markets) must be correct, because there’s so much bad stuff with the current system.

But I think they are not thinking much past their initial assessment. All of their criticisms might be compatible with a better version of the current system, e.g. as you said, improving everything on your list is theoretically compatible with a capitalist society. Also, many of the things on your list can be found in real attempts to implement socialism, and/or easily imagined in some hypothetical socialist system. So even if it wasn’t possible to fix those problems with capitalism, it still would not automatically follow that socialism was the best alternative.

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Also, I think maybe a lot of people don’t realise how much and what kind of knowledge is required for even the status quo. Rather than seeing our societies as a landscape of many problems and also many good things that have been solved with sometimes subtle and ingenious ideas like e.g money and markets and private property, they tend to see just the problems.

So they have a mindset that any change at all would be an improvement, and don’t see change as being risky, and improving things being difficult. So they’re biased towards things like socialism which claim to be able to address at least some real problems.

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Someone shares their story of being deported from the US recently:

Meanwhile there’s concern about censorship on TikTok so some political discussion is labelled “cute winter boots” (an item that helps deal with ICE). American social media isn’t better and the TikTok censorship allegedly got worse when TikTok came back from going dark after it was banned in the U.S.

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What do you think about what Thiel says there? I’ve transcribed what he says (with ums and the like removed):

I have a single idée fixe that I’m completely obsessed with on the business side which is that if you’re starting a company, if you’re the founder entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly. And that you want to always avoid competition.

I haven’t watched the whole video, but I read maybe half of Thiel’s Zero to One book 5 years ago or so. It seems that this lecture or talk is on those same ideas from the book. I think he clarifies what he means by a business aiming for monopoly and avoiding competition in his book.

I found a relevant quote for what he means by monopoly in his book Zero to One:

To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state, or innovates its way to the top. In this book, we’re not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: by “monopoly,” we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: it hasn’t competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo!

And for avoiding competition:

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

I disagree with some of the stuff he says. But as regards what he means by monopoly and competition, the general theme I see is to aim to be a company that is singular and innovative, and to avoid doing what other companies are doing (i.e avoid competing with them).

What Thiel said in the intro of that video could be interpreted as him being anti-capitalist. But I don’t think that’s the right way to interpret it.

I don’t know much about Peter Thiel in general. I’m also not a fan of his. (I’m literally just not a fan of his. By that I don’t mean that I have negative opinions about him).

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Can you think of a business which is highly innovative but also has competition?

Also, let’s assume, as Thiel claims, that Google has had a search monopoly for 20 years. How did Google maintain that monopoly over time? In particular, was it by being so innovative that no other tech company could figure out how to offer a similar product? Or was it something else?

Also Google search quality is bad now, and the lack of enough competition seems like one of the main reasons they’ve been so non-innovative for many years. Isn’t it pretty typical that companies with monopolist power stop innovating and treat customers poorly?

Want to try analyzing that text?

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Apple? I think less so recently. But I don’t know much about that.

How did they? I feel a little out of my depth here. I don’t know? This seems to depend on facts that I don’t know, but it’s also a hypothetical.

There are other search engines. Other people know how to make search engines. Google don’t have a literal monopoly in that they don’t have the whole share of the search engine market. They have to be doing something to not lose users to other search engines. But Google isn’t just a search engine, they’re competing in a lot of markets. Advertising, web browsers, etc.

I feel like I’m missing the point of what you’re saying here.

Thiel I guess thinks that Google’s ‘monopoly’ has been because they’re a great company that innovates a lot and is way better than any of their competitors.

I think so. It makes sense that a company with no serious competition could become complacent and stop innovating yeah.

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This video advocates non-tribalist politics. The channel has other stuff related to empathy, being nice to people you disagree with, not believing false stories about how bad the other side is, being welcoming to people who change their mind instead of being mean about it, and not hating or alienating the other side.