Robin Hanson is the leading voice (anywhere?) in the analysis of everything as status. Sure the PUA community talks personal interaction as all status all the time, but Hanson wins the broad analysis contest.
It seems to me that Hanson or Tyler Cowen or someone once posted in this direction, but I can't very well find it, so here's my line on the negative interpretation of political analysis, as parsed through the Master, Monk, Merchant context.
Progressivism is the position that Monks should be highest status, with Masters second, Mothers idolized, and Merchants belong in the morally suspect class with Malefactors, below the Masses and Mendicants. Shockingly, this is the default position of anyone who considers herself an expert.
Conservativism is the position that Masters should be highest status, with the Masses second, and the Merchants a distant third, though still above others. Monks and Mothers should be narrowly respected, inside their expertise, but not accorded particularly high status. Mendicants are well above Malefactors, but both are morally suspect. I think that this is actually the position of 90% of the world population (masses, military folks).
Libertarianism is the truly radical position that Merchants deserve the highest status spot (which they have come to occupy rather often), with different libertarians placing the Masses, the Monks, and Mothers in various positions of 2,3,4. Mendicants are bad. Malefactors are worse. And Masters are truly evil. By observation, this position is fundamentally opposed to the ESS morality, as merchants as a force for good emerged only very recently, and the science of it (Micro-econ) is even more recent.
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3 comments:
i VERY much like this "cui bono?" approach to ideology.
Refining quibbles:
1) Progressive MOTHERS value mothering very high. Not sure other progressives do. ESPECIALLY since progressivism is SO highly correlated with being young, single, sexy, dangerous, urban, (wanna-)urbane.
Conservatives value mothers pretty highly, and it's only in light of 'modern' (and very suspicious to me) Progressive values that the folk conservative views of mothers' roles can be construed as less than awesome for mothers. See Big Love.
2) I keep reading Mendicants as (semi-)fraudulent snake oil salesmen. Combiners of slick entertainment and feel-good wishes into lining their pockets and building their networks. This obv needs to be a category! It is, like most of the categories, SOME part of what most people do (knowingly or not). Pure BEGGING is rarer, unless you include asking for simple quick NON-MONETARY help (like, "Do you mind if I go ahead (in line)? I just have this one item and am running super late!")
3) I VERY much know the post you're thinking of (I think it was on MR)...but also fail to quickly search for it. It's a great post about how much of one's disappointment at the OTHER side winning an election is tied to one's model of how this raises the status of one's dis-preferred groups!
4) Most libertarians do NOT put Masters very near last. (If we did, we would argue with conservatives more than with liberals in my quick opinion -- because that total status flip would be way too huge for us to feel the common ground we usually do.)
I guess you're too used to anarcho-capitalists ranting against AUTHORITAH, and not enough used to seeing us band together to decry and defend against the rarer more out-of-control criminals.
5) Distinguish between intellectual Conservatives and whatever you want to call your "90% of the population"!! Intellectual conservatives don't put the Masses (I hereby deprecate that category btw, and would replace it with a ton of more specific life-sustaining roles as I started to elsewhere) on top, and most 'mass' members SURE AS HELL don't truly put the Masters on top. Almost every status class (not-so-)secretly feels itself is TOP (lunch table status cliques)...but habitually defers where it feels it 'must'.
So, maybe it's useful to see political coalitions as bands of status groups agreeing to rough status gang affiliations. The merchants who wanna psychologically join forces with most Masters...align Rightward. The merchants who see themselves as more bohemian...sway Left and deemphasize their Merchantness in their own personal sense of identity.
Again imprecision
1. Mothering (taking care of things) is idealized in the progressive world-view.
1.5 Conservatives value mothers highly, but seem to narrowly construe their status-claims.
5. Intellectual conservatives tend to themselves be Monks, so of course they don't put themselves so low.
5.5. However, I think the class of people that takes orders about what they are supposed to do is properly referred to as masses, as per my response in MMM.
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