Themes and Influences

Counterintuitive Insight Porn: The Last Psychiatrist, Hotel Concierge, Malcolm Gladwell

Gratuitous Longposts: Steve Yegge, Scott Alexander, (maybe Oswald Spengler)

Going out of your Way to Appear Like More of a Dick: Zed Shaw, Jim Goad, Friedrich Nietzsche, (maybe Nydwracu)

Giving Catchy Names to Patterns: Paul Graham, Big Yud, Robin Hanson, Richard Dawkins, Venkatesh Rao, David Chapman, Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, Friedrich Nietzsche, (maybe Oswald Spengler)

Reading Old Books: Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler

Not mentioned above: Hannah Ahrendt, Robert Jay Lifton, Eric Hoffer, Jane Jacobs

Style

A good way to get a feel for the style of an artist and why it works is to look at what happens when others try to copy him and to see what works and what doesn’t.

Darkly Hinting at the Fridge Horror is definitely the theme that ties them all together in Moldbug’s writing. But his essays don’t start out that way.

The Blueprint

Like an old The Simpsons episode, which starts out with a simple problem and its zany solution to set up the main plot of the episode, these essay start out with the description of a historical situation, or a very technical/procedural/non-ideological problem of modern society. The digression into history allows the author to set up the mental stage in a way that does not immediately raise ideological shields, activate old thought patterns and fall victim to cognitive dissonance. If I write about Kings, Jacobins and Girondists, you are much more likely to pay attention than if I wrote about Democrats and Bernie Bros.

Readers are intrigued: Jacobins, CPSU, Gavrilo Princip, Weather Underground - damn interesting!

In this historical situation, you start the narrative. You explain the problems of the common man, based on the contents of this old book you read about the man who you assume was quite common and typical for his era. This might even be a great idea to counteract your biases. The biases that colour your perception of history are not so much your own, as they are the biases of historians who tried to fit long-term historical trends into neat theories of historical development. In hindsight, the right side of history is curiously always the one that won in the end. Isn’t that neat? The older a book is, the more time was there in the meantime for written history to congeal into an overarching narrative.

After you have used the old book to start the historical narrative, you can extrapolate into later eras and today. Viewed from the past, the present looks not inevitable, but terrifying, and the future will be as terrifying!

Now, you need to go back into the past. Do not dwell too much on the present - yet! Start with another anecdote or statistic about New England in 1850. You must let the first anecdote percolate in the mind of the reader. If you let them think about the present again, they might reject everything you said based on tribalism, ideology or wishful thinking. The past is a place where intuitions don’t apply and we can examine situations on an intellectual level. (If not: Abraham Lincoln was a Republican! The Progressive Era was kind of racist!)

Repeat this a couple of times, so that the reader can form new intuitions based on these examples. Now tie this back into your Big Buzzword Theory! Give a catchy name to the pattern, and link back to an earlier post where you explained the pattern and its implications in more general terms.

Now, the the takeaway: Apply the theory to he present situation by showing how the situation fits into it and how it is similar to the earlier instances of the pattern, but don’t draw the conclusions explicitly! You can darkly hint, and leave it to the reader to figure it out. You must end the essay now.

When he walks away to the next tab, the epistemic fridge horror will slowly thaw and make him realise: “Oh my god! I don’t believe in democracy any more!” That feeling fades after a couple of hours.

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