There is no magic set of political policies that can solve our economic and social problems, nor any political system that can reliably implement such nonexistent policies. Some policies and laws are better than others, but no system can consistently determine which policies are best and enforce them effectively.
Dictatorships can work but they are far too leader dependent to function consistently1.
Oligarchies can’t solve problems because groups strive towards consensus, not truth or value.
Marxism doesn’t work because humans are innately self-motivated2.
Naive liberalism doesn’t work if everybody else isn’t a naive liberal3.
Patchwork (states compete against each other) is a joke because the size of human states is not something that can be set by an extraneous political actor4.
Democracy doesn’t work because the public have no incentive or ability to determine which policies work.
Populism (democracy votes for the dictator) doesn’t work because the kinds of characteristics that make somebody a good populist and a good ruler are not that highly correlated.
Anarchism devolves into polycentric law (competing law systems that citizens can voluntarily subscribe to until somebody wins the monopoly on violence).
Futarchy (rule by prediction markets) doesn’t work because good political policies cannot be reduced to the ability to increase good numbers or decrease bad numbers.
Properly explaining why these theories are all failures in their own way would betray my central thesis; if I really thought politics was a dead end, would I bother putting any effort into researching the intricacies as to why the 9 leading metapolitical theories are all failures? I would not and will not do so. The path of intellectual politics, when walked correctly, can only lead to the recognition that all high values (truth, morality, justice, freedom)5 devalue themselves6.
What are politics for?
Conflict. Politics are about conflict.
The fight might be over ideas. The fight might be over interests. The fight might be over values. But there is always a FIGHT.
Let’s assume I’m wrong for a second, and that politics is actually about conflict over ideas. So step back: how is the truth achieved? What is the theory of metaphysics that advances us to englightened politics? And then step back again. Why should we care about truth? Does the disinterested pursuit of the truth survive the disinterested pursuit of the truth? There is no more ground to step back to, I am afraid.
If politics is just about material conflicts over interests, then there is no solution to the politics because conflicts will eternally recur as long as limited things exist. The theory of value differences provides no solution to politics because the process of value creation cannot be universalised; values are relative. Not in the hippie sense where everybody can do whatever they want, but in the sense that values arise from relationships between the components of the body and surroundings which… Relate to each other.
Ideally, if the existence of humans were threatened by something like climate change, nuclear holocaust, resource exhaustion, ecological collapse, mutational breakdown, or something like that, we would all get together and voooote on something to solve the problem. The fact that people are as obsessed with the bad collapse theories (climate change, mutational breakdown, AI risk) as they are with the good ones (oil exhaustion, nuclear holocaust) proves politics cannot solve X-risks either.
One could embrace this truth: that politics is about conflict, therefore all we need to do is just fight.
And that’s stupid. There is no such thing as eliminating the opposition. If every single right winger on earth dies. the feedback loops that kept certain policies in check (e.g. >70% taxes on the wealthy, freeing all criminals from jail) will continue to exist and so will civilisation. Political debates would move from right vs left to far left vs center left.
The offspring of the next generation will be more liable to left wing views, but surely some will adopt the old beliefs and keep them. Political beliefs are heritable (~40%) but aren’t genetic (was Das Kaptial coded into Karl Marx’s genes?) and cannot be instilled with selective breeding.
Political activism?
It’s a surrogate activity: an activity that feels meaningful because it pretends to accomplish a goal that it does not actually accomplish7. Politics is unsolvable, but if we think we are contributing to its solution by supporting policies or people, we feel good, but our soul will later wrestle with the contradiction between perceived reality and truth.
People who engage in politics thinking they are contributing to the next 1,000 year fascism reich by posting text and images on the internet and getting likes will inevitably get depressed because they are not going to get anything from it. They will not accomplish any political goal, find long-term friends, or increase the amount of status or resources they have in real life.
Time spent engaging in politics is time that could be spent being authentically hedonistic: playing video games, bantering with the girlfriend, or watching anime; all more honorable activities than the farces that are “discourse” and “activism”.
Ideologially labelled political factions like “ecofascism”, “traditionalism”, “ethnonationalism”, or “libertarianism” are all massive wastes of space and I would be happy if not a single additional cent were to be spent on their existence. People who form part of these factions are full of narcissists who are really into turning themselves into a random thing or people who really care about abstract ideas beyond their instrumental value.
I also object to the idea that individual actors have any non-negligible influence over what political ideas pervade in the world, technology and demographics are better explanations. I must ask: abolition, feminism, and wokeism — were these caused by intellectuals writing papers and books most politicians don’t bother reading, or the industrial revolution (abolition), development of household appliances (feminism), and racial integration (wokeism)?
One can see a bulk of abolitionists surge right before slavery was abolished in most of the world in the late 1700s and 1800s. One could argue that the abolitionists influenced the world to end slavery… Or notice that the abolition of slavery preceded the industrial revolution which made farming and manufacturing less dependent on labour, and therefore allowed nations to free slaves.
Some clarifications
In contemporary life it’s impossible to avoid politics and its presence. Politics enters personal life through sexuality (e.g. homosexuality), lifestyle (e.g. guns), or current events (e.g. COVID). Anybody who seriously thinks about philosophy will inevitably find themselves politically leaning in a direction, centrism is usually a product of cowardice rather than temperate virtue.
What I object to is investing resources and attention into politics, be it by voting, calling for action, or engaging in “discourse”. Discourse is not concerned with the pursuit of truth. If one is talking about the truth with another being, it is either a negotiation over agreed truth (sheeping) || a fight over status (debate).
Hegel was an ugly and despicable man.
Further reading:
Biofoundationalism: moral foundations utility theory and hypermoralization
Politics Is Worse Than Video Games, Drugs, and Porn Combined.
Scott Alexander has a nice takedown of monarchic theory.
This idea is not falsifiable, but it’s true anyway.
This is obvious to anybody who isn’t a naive liberal. And naive liberals can’t learn through concepts (they’ve demonstrated themselves to be conceptually void), so there’s no point in convincing them of anything.
I don’t think anybody has made this criticism of patchwork theory before, so I can’t actually link to anything.
Truth for the sake of truth does not survive the search of truth for the sake of truth. Infinite freedom is impossible because both rights and the absence of them act as limitations. Systems of morality are not compatible with each other. Justice devalues itself because nobody actually deserves anything and we just made all of that stuff up. And the drive towards truth devalues everything.
Polytropos explains:
I believe in the will to power, not the will to live, so I disagree with how the classic definition of a “surrogate activity” is framed. But I think the concept itself is useful and is adjacent to something else that is similar but not identical.
This argument is a bit too specific, in that it limits its criticisms to political activity, rather than broadening the argument to all activities in general. Politics only provides temporary solutions; it never provides permanent solutions. And this is true of all events in life. If this is the standard by which you judge usefulness, then nothing is useful. One never needs to use the word "politics," but can apply the argument consistently. This argument was not first made by Nietzsche, but is made simply and clearly in the Bhagavad Gita.
Politics is a sort of surrogate for religion in an increasingly secular age, but it is far weaker than religion was in the historical period at shaping society. Belief in policies is a way to signal one’s morality, just like belief in a certain religion, but belief in policies doesn’t demand a deontology in the way religion does. The only thing it demands is advocacy, which causes normies to get extremely upset when someone doesn’t vote or protest or whatever. Furthermore, no state prior to the 20th century could have possibly existed without a certain degree of religious consensus. The state was a collection of oaths and rituals whose importance had to be motivated in part by a fear of supernatural retribution against the riteless and dishonest. Politics people believe that the gods will turn their backs to the world if not enough people vote. They mask it with witty secular statements like Fascism being built off the backs of the apathetic, but deep down they believe that they can manifest their beliefs if they believe in them really hard.
The only way to actually achieve 3/4 of people’s political desires would be some sort of religious movement. There is no policy solution for most of it, it’s a result of human decadence