As a fan of both, I do see that both Richard and Destiny are low on compassion in general. Maybe it is some kind of mental illness they have. But both Destiny and Hanania are intellectually honest in general. Destiny does fantastic research streams. He is best in defending yours and Matthew 's political ideology of social liberal capitalism. Destiny is also very funny. Hanania is a libertarian capitalist like me.
glad you disagreed. I just nodded along to amos's comment, but no, neither disregard human life. I think less partial empathy is a far better way to to put it. thanks.
I am a fan of both Richard Hanania and Steven Bonnell II (Destiny). So, I am glad to see a post about them. EDIT 2025 - I have changed my views on both now. I don't like them anymore.
Good concept but not sure that Destiny and Hanania are good ambassadors. Destiny’s views on Israel/Palestine, while now backed by a trove of information, don’t seem to have changed much since prior to the hamas attack, a time when he himself said he knew nothing about the subject. Hanania’s transition to the centre seems to have been largely motivated by a dislike of the unsavoury people on the e-right, and unconvincingly rationalised post-hoc as being a response to China’s covid policies. I think both are strongly motivated by disgust at extremist kooks (real and perceived) which is probably a good instinct in the vast majority of cases, but sometimes realities are extreme, like animal farming. Destiny has argued vociferously and disingenuously against veganism. Hanania nobly conceded the wrongness of animal farming, but has opted not to change his behaviour or further advocate for the cause. Both are pro-choice and could doubtless justify their position with moral arguments, but I think their stances on abortion are more likely a pragmatic gravitation to the “reasonable consensus”. Do either hold an institutionally minoritarian position that requires drastic and immediate action? Maybe abolishing civil right law? But were it not already his most famous contribution, 2024 Richard Hanania probably wouldnt support it, and it seems like he’ll change his position on it later anyway. I think on any institutionally minoritarian issue that requires swift and substantial change Destiny and Hanania are likely to be on the wrong side of the equation. (Both remain valuable voices of course).
I feel like you're a valorizing a pretty small subcluster of people while overstating their virtues. Eg, most Americans get along well enough because they touch grass, not because they are extremely online and are above average at understanding basic data. Similarly, most Americans aren't ideological pundits and in fact it's the norm rather than the exception to not have ideological consistency and always take the party line on every issue. The latter is more due to people not taking ideas seriously, than it is due to a first-principles understanding serious examination of ideas.
It's great that most Americans are not extremely online and that they get on well together but that doesn't explain how or why, even though so many politicians have drifted far outside the mainstream, those Most Americans continue to give them their support. This seems to be something new.
Until recently, most politicians were members of the reality community and those who said outrageous things would be mocked and excluded and replaced with sensible ones. That no longer happens and the crazy ones are championed, even by average Americans. Why does that happen?
Oh I think many Americans have crazy beliefs, e.g. religion. Also many Americans don't believe in human-caused climate change, or think GMO foods are the devil.
I don't want to overrate them. In particular, I would not strongly bet that most Americans will get multiple choice questions about a bunch of moderately difficult randomly selected + relevant questions right more frequently than elected politicians would.
But I mostly think most Americans don't take their beliefs very seriously, which helps a lot.
Yeah that was a strange comment, given that Hanania at least was a professed racist, and has every incentive to pretend to have changed. We can't assume with any certainty that he *hasn't* changed his views, but I think there's some reason to suspect so.
It's another rather ironically uncritical assertion from someone claiming membership of the lives in reality caucus. And far from alone in this post!
I do kinda wonder if all these reality caucus people are to some degree autistic
And also how much of the conflict between them and the average person is that they view social signals/cues differently. In my experience they seem much more willing to investigate in the face of signals. And they have less assumptions in general (or are much more willing to be explicit about them and the implications.
Normal people usually assumes a huge amount of stuff about people or subjects, and assume you do the same and agree with how assumptions are done.
The problem with this is that one side is generally right and one is generally wrong. This means that people who truly "live in reality" must by definition come down on the generally correct side of things. Anyone on the other side is not living in reality, no matter how well-spoken. They still believe 2+2 = 5.
You can easily see this by observing that the crazy conspiracy nut who is voting for Trump because he believes in Qtard nonsense is still ultimately making the correct choice, even if it is for reasons that you personally find to be insane. Meanwhile someone like Destiny who is going to vote for Kamala Harris is making the wrong choice despite all of his supposed intellect. And if you think the left is better than the right then the same thing simply applies in the reverse direction. Someone who is actually intelligent would be able to make this deduction correctly. If they end up choosing wrong, either they aren't really that smart or they have ulterior motives.
Guy who flips a coin to decide who to vote for is smarter than a person who is persuaded not to vote for Trump because they think people who try to overthrow the government should go to jail, but ONLY if the coin lands on "vote for Trump", got it.
It isn't a coinflip though. The Qtard will likely vote for the Republican in 2028 as well i.e. continue to make the correct choice. While Destiny is likely to keep making the wrong choice (although I acknowledge it's not impossible he might change his mind by 2028, but still--it isn't a pure coin flip).
Even if we accept that premise, it means that pure chance has outperformed someone like destiny. It is therefore silly to act like destiny is some kind of intellectual heavyweight. He may be good at spergy internet debates but clearly this is not the same thing as an actual capacity to discern truth.
I mean, I specified in my comment that if you think the left is the better side, everything I said simply applies in reverse—in that case it would mean that nutty SJW stereotypes are ultimately better at making political choices than the right-leaning Richard Hanania. Did you somehow miss that part, and if not, why do you think I’m interested in arguing about Donald Trump instead? I don’t care about your TDS.
It is incorrect that one side will necessarily be right.
You wrote "someone like Destiny who is going to vote for Kamala Harris is making the wrong choice"
You see him as wrong from your point of view, but there is no reason to believe that your view maps on to the "reality" that Benham is talking about any better than his view. Ultimately your view (and his) are subjective, based on your paradigms.
History is stuff that happens. The stuff itself is objective, but meaningless without some organizing principle that allows one to categorize things enough to reduce the complexity to something your brain can handle. The organizing principle (paradigm) is different for different people leading them to perceive different realities.
Yes, obviously that's part of the conflict at play here, conflicting paradigms; and odds are that one of those paradigms is right and the other(s) are wrong.
Parts of one's paradigm are not recognized by the holder, like the water fish swim in. Slavery for example. For people living in a slave society like the Roman Empire, slavery was in the water so to speak. Even the Son of God did not speak out against it. Yet today, it is blatantly obvious that slavery is deeply wrong, an abomination.
Another example, that Benham here deals with., is meat eating. About 45 years ago I read Singer's Animal Liberation. I concluded he was probably right, but I did not then become a vegetarian. I rationalized that I was a man of my time. Though I saw it as likely that 200 years in the future people will look back on meat eating people like me in the same way we look at slave-owning people like Tom Jefferson. But I was sufficiently self-aware to know that if I were a well-to-do young man in the American South in the 1770's I too would own slaves, even though I would suspect it was wrong (just as Tom Jefferson did). And I would pay no price for this because I would be long dead before "the water turned" on that issue.
And so it has played out. During the current CPP, the issue of animal rights is being raised by many, just as the issue of abolition was raised during the early 19th century CPP. In fifty years, I suspect eating meat will not be as acceptable as it is today. But I'll be long gone by then.
Interesting article despite the rhetoric and framing which i found exhausting
One way one can think about people in the [reality caucus] is that they are much more able/willing to decouple; more willing to be seen as disagreeble and empahize facts that might hurt people feelings; and less tribalistic (or more universally empathetic but less partisan to any one person)
There is another, parallel 'LIRC', whose omission from this essay is deafening. They do not read boring academic papers, they do not hold idiosyncratic ethical positions wrt animals, they do not aspire to coherent, systematic worldviews.
I am, of course, talking about the 'grillpilled', and I would venture that the quartet in the subtitle would enjoy the company of 'xitter extremists' more than that of the 'grillpilled LIRC', despite being perfectly civil when invited to July 4th BBQs (whereas 'xitter extremists' stereotypically find themselves ruining the vibe, though the very clever ones can control themselves).
From this frame, the threads that bind the enlightened center and the political extreme together are:
- they like to read/write/talk at a sophisticated level about Current Events
- they often have third-party literature written about them (wikis, substacks, subreddits, etc), as individuals or as collectives
- they think grilling is fine on occasion, but terribly dull as a way of life
The trouble with Reason is that humans aren't primarily reasonable in the first place. Is sex reasonable? Or the will to power? One would think wanting to have power over others is reasonable but the people who desire this never say so outright.
Therefore, they use euphemisms to exploit a feeling, like hope and change. Which in reality means race and sex quotas, which obfuscate the actual parasitic strategy of the agenda.
The system goes like this: the politicians establish a connection with a particular group that identifies itself as a victim of sex or race discrimination. Since everyone discriminates in this way the field is ripe for exploitation. Group X's Rights are being violiated! Thus, they have no agency. They are powerless and need a powerful group or individual to fight for their rights. In the process, the victim group becomes entitled to special treatment in order to acheive equity, inclusion and diversity, or whatever. This strategy evolved over the years to include any group unable to compete fairly against white men and Christians. After all, nobody is stopping them from starting their own religion or company. Instead, the parasitical strategy allows them to infiltrate the institutiojns created by white men and Christians. And when the victim group's will to power destroys the institution they parasitized they can claim that racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-this or that were the cause.
> A sure sign someone is a propagandist is if all of their political views are on the same side—they’re either a left-winger across the board or a right-winger across the board—and if they rarely think that contested political issues involve tradeoffs.
They may also understand that we have a democracy of competing coalitions of interest groups. What Posner (via Schumpeter?) calls "Concept 2 democracy" as against a deliberative, principled approach that he calls "Concept 1 democracy". There may not be an overlap between the interests of teachers unions and environmental groups, but those interest groups have aligned and if I have an interest in either I should support the coalition as a whole. There are no points for "purity".
Destiny alludes to this. He says that yes, you can criticise your party, but when push comes to shove or when election time draws, you should be an unapologetic propagandist for your party. That is not the time to show weakness or uncertainty in the side you chose.
It is, to him, a choice between imperfect Democrats and vile, unredeemable Republicans. So, try making Democrats less imperfect, but if the Democratic Party is framed next to the Republican party, you better believe I'm doing nothing but praise the Democratic party 24/7/365, no matter my personal minor gripes with them.
Eric Levitz, now at Vox, is another essential read from the Reality Caucus. His analysis is careful, precise and grounded in an ethic of inclusion and egalitarianism that I share.
Another possible reason Destiny and Hanania get on is that both have an unusually powerful disregard for human life
As a fan of both, I do see that both Richard and Destiny are low on compassion in general. Maybe it is some kind of mental illness they have. But both Destiny and Hanania are intellectually honest in general. Destiny does fantastic research streams. He is best in defending yours and Matthew 's political ideology of social liberal capitalism. Destiny is also very funny. Hanania is a libertarian capitalist like me.
LITERALLY.
Elaborate?
As far as i can tell they care about human life and wellbeing, but they care about it in a much more general-abstract way then most people.
And they are more willing to disregard one individual (or story)’s suffering
Less partial empathy is one way to say it
glad you disagreed. I just nodded along to amos's comment, but no, neither disregard human life. I think less partial empathy is a far better way to to put it. thanks.
Im speaking as a heavy follower of both
I am a fan of both Richard Hanania and Steven Bonnell II (Destiny). So, I am glad to see a post about them. EDIT 2025 - I have changed my views on both now. I don't like them anymore.
I have changed my views on both now. I don't like them anymore.
Good concept but not sure that Destiny and Hanania are good ambassadors. Destiny’s views on Israel/Palestine, while now backed by a trove of information, don’t seem to have changed much since prior to the hamas attack, a time when he himself said he knew nothing about the subject. Hanania’s transition to the centre seems to have been largely motivated by a dislike of the unsavoury people on the e-right, and unconvincingly rationalised post-hoc as being a response to China’s covid policies. I think both are strongly motivated by disgust at extremist kooks (real and perceived) which is probably a good instinct in the vast majority of cases, but sometimes realities are extreme, like animal farming. Destiny has argued vociferously and disingenuously against veganism. Hanania nobly conceded the wrongness of animal farming, but has opted not to change his behaviour or further advocate for the cause. Both are pro-choice and could doubtless justify their position with moral arguments, but I think their stances on abortion are more likely a pragmatic gravitation to the “reasonable consensus”. Do either hold an institutionally minoritarian position that requires drastic and immediate action? Maybe abolishing civil right law? But were it not already his most famous contribution, 2024 Richard Hanania probably wouldnt support it, and it seems like he’ll change his position on it later anyway. I think on any institutionally minoritarian issue that requires swift and substantial change Destiny and Hanania are likely to be on the wrong side of the equation. (Both remain valuable voices of course).
I feel like you're a valorizing a pretty small subcluster of people while overstating their virtues. Eg, most Americans get along well enough because they touch grass, not because they are extremely online and are above average at understanding basic data. Similarly, most Americans aren't ideological pundits and in fact it's the norm rather than the exception to not have ideological consistency and always take the party line on every issue. The latter is more due to people not taking ideas seriously, than it is due to a first-principles understanding serious examination of ideas.
It's great that most Americans are not extremely online and that they get on well together but that doesn't explain how or why, even though so many politicians have drifted far outside the mainstream, those Most Americans continue to give them their support. This seems to be something new.
Until recently, most politicians were members of the reality community and those who said outrageous things would be mocked and excluded and replaced with sensible ones. That no longer happens and the crazy ones are championed, even by average Americans. Why does that happen?
Oh I think many Americans have crazy beliefs, e.g. religion. Also many Americans don't believe in human-caused climate change, or think GMO foods are the devil.
I don't want to overrate them. In particular, I would not strongly bet that most Americans will get multiple choice questions about a bunch of moderately difficult randomly selected + relevant questions right more frequently than elected politicians would.
But I mostly think most Americans don't take their beliefs very seriously, which helps a lot.
Politicians drift to the political extremes when the pie starts shrinking.
Calling someone a virulent racist is only smearing them if it's not true.
Yeah that was a strange comment, given that Hanania at least was a professed racist, and has every incentive to pretend to have changed. We can't assume with any certainty that he *hasn't* changed his views, but I think there's some reason to suspect so.
It's another rather ironically uncritical assertion from someone claiming membership of the lives in reality caucus. And far from alone in this post!
Good piece. It's unfortunate that your professed admiration for the "LIRC" (good term btw) doesn't extent to your religious views.
Boring. When Civilization collapses and my ideology emerges from the ashes, we’ll make sure that reality obeys us, as it should.
I do kinda wonder if all these reality caucus people are to some degree autistic
And also how much of the conflict between them and the average person is that they view social signals/cues differently. In my experience they seem much more willing to investigate in the face of signals. And they have less assumptions in general (or are much more willing to be explicit about them and the implications.
Normal people usually assumes a huge amount of stuff about people or subjects, and assume you do the same and agree with how assumptions are done.
In a righteous world, autists would inherit the Earth.
Haha i wish!
The problem with this is that one side is generally right and one is generally wrong. This means that people who truly "live in reality" must by definition come down on the generally correct side of things. Anyone on the other side is not living in reality, no matter how well-spoken. They still believe 2+2 = 5.
You can easily see this by observing that the crazy conspiracy nut who is voting for Trump because he believes in Qtard nonsense is still ultimately making the correct choice, even if it is for reasons that you personally find to be insane. Meanwhile someone like Destiny who is going to vote for Kamala Harris is making the wrong choice despite all of his supposed intellect. And if you think the left is better than the right then the same thing simply applies in the reverse direction. Someone who is actually intelligent would be able to make this deduction correctly. If they end up choosing wrong, either they aren't really that smart or they have ulterior motives.
Guy who flips a coin to decide who to vote for is smarter than a person who is persuaded not to vote for Trump because they think people who try to overthrow the government should go to jail, but ONLY if the coin lands on "vote for Trump", got it.
It isn't a coinflip though. The Qtard will likely vote for the Republican in 2028 as well i.e. continue to make the correct choice. While Destiny is likely to keep making the wrong choice (although I acknowledge it's not impossible he might change his mind by 2028, but still--it isn't a pure coin flip).
The Qtard is completely disconnected from reality and only has the correct view (he doesn't) by chance, which is equivalent to a coinflip.
Even if we accept that premise, it means that pure chance has outperformed someone like destiny. It is therefore silly to act like destiny is some kind of intellectual heavyweight. He may be good at spergy internet debates but clearly this is not the same thing as an actual capacity to discern truth.
Right, but you think we should reelect a guy who attempted to overthrow the US government because you are a partisan moron.
I mean, I specified in my comment that if you think the left is the better side, everything I said simply applies in reverse—in that case it would mean that nutty SJW stereotypes are ultimately better at making political choices than the right-leaning Richard Hanania. Did you somehow miss that part, and if not, why do you think I’m interested in arguing about Donald Trump instead? I don’t care about your TDS.
It is incorrect that one side will necessarily be right.
You wrote "someone like Destiny who is going to vote for Kamala Harris is making the wrong choice"
You see him as wrong from your point of view, but there is no reason to believe that your view maps on to the "reality" that Benham is talking about any better than his view. Ultimately your view (and his) are subjective, based on your paradigms.
History is stuff that happens. The stuff itself is objective, but meaningless without some organizing principle that allows one to categorize things enough to reduce the complexity to something your brain can handle. The organizing principle (paradigm) is different for different people leading them to perceive different realities.
Yes, obviously that's part of the conflict at play here, conflicting paradigms; and odds are that one of those paradigms is right and the other(s) are wrong.
Parts of one's paradigm are not recognized by the holder, like the water fish swim in. Slavery for example. For people living in a slave society like the Roman Empire, slavery was in the water so to speak. Even the Son of God did not speak out against it. Yet today, it is blatantly obvious that slavery is deeply wrong, an abomination.
Another example, that Benham here deals with., is meat eating. About 45 years ago I read Singer's Animal Liberation. I concluded he was probably right, but I did not then become a vegetarian. I rationalized that I was a man of my time. Though I saw it as likely that 200 years in the future people will look back on meat eating people like me in the same way we look at slave-owning people like Tom Jefferson. But I was sufficiently self-aware to know that if I were a well-to-do young man in the American South in the 1770's I too would own slaves, even though I would suspect it was wrong (just as Tom Jefferson did). And I would pay no price for this because I would be long dead before "the water turned" on that issue.
And so it has played out. During the current CPP, the issue of animal rights is being raised by many, just as the issue of abolition was raised during the early 19th century CPP. In fifty years, I suspect eating meat will not be as acceptable as it is today. But I'll be long gone by then.
“Lives in reality.” Matt yglesias: the economy is doing better than ever, folks!
Interesting article despite the rhetoric and framing which i found exhausting
One way one can think about people in the [reality caucus] is that they are much more able/willing to decouple; more willing to be seen as disagreeble and empahize facts that might hurt people feelings; and less tribalistic (or more universally empathetic but less partisan to any one person)
There is another, parallel 'LIRC', whose omission from this essay is deafening. They do not read boring academic papers, they do not hold idiosyncratic ethical positions wrt animals, they do not aspire to coherent, systematic worldviews.
I am, of course, talking about the 'grillpilled', and I would venture that the quartet in the subtitle would enjoy the company of 'xitter extremists' more than that of the 'grillpilled LIRC', despite being perfectly civil when invited to July 4th BBQs (whereas 'xitter extremists' stereotypically find themselves ruining the vibe, though the very clever ones can control themselves).
From this frame, the threads that bind the enlightened center and the political extreme together are:
- they like to read/write/talk at a sophisticated level about Current Events
- they often have third-party literature written about them (wikis, substacks, subreddits, etc), as individuals or as collectives
- they think grilling is fine on occasion, but terribly dull as a way of life
The trouble with Reason is that humans aren't primarily reasonable in the first place. Is sex reasonable? Or the will to power? One would think wanting to have power over others is reasonable but the people who desire this never say so outright.
Therefore, they use euphemisms to exploit a feeling, like hope and change. Which in reality means race and sex quotas, which obfuscate the actual parasitic strategy of the agenda.
The system goes like this: the politicians establish a connection with a particular group that identifies itself as a victim of sex or race discrimination. Since everyone discriminates in this way the field is ripe for exploitation. Group X's Rights are being violiated! Thus, they have no agency. They are powerless and need a powerful group or individual to fight for their rights. In the process, the victim group becomes entitled to special treatment in order to acheive equity, inclusion and diversity, or whatever. This strategy evolved over the years to include any group unable to compete fairly against white men and Christians. After all, nobody is stopping them from starting their own religion or company. Instead, the parasitical strategy allows them to infiltrate the institutiojns created by white men and Christians. And when the victim group's will to power destroys the institution they parasitized they can claim that racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-this or that were the cause.
Pretty neat, and thank you.
Klein sure didn't seem to be on Team Lives in Reality when it came to his treatment of Sam Harris on Islam.
> A sure sign someone is a propagandist is if all of their political views are on the same side—they’re either a left-winger across the board or a right-winger across the board—and if they rarely think that contested political issues involve tradeoffs.
They may also understand that we have a democracy of competing coalitions of interest groups. What Posner (via Schumpeter?) calls "Concept 2 democracy" as against a deliberative, principled approach that he calls "Concept 1 democracy". There may not be an overlap between the interests of teachers unions and environmental groups, but those interest groups have aligned and if I have an interest in either I should support the coalition as a whole. There are no points for "purity".
Destiny alludes to this. He says that yes, you can criticise your party, but when push comes to shove or when election time draws, you should be an unapologetic propagandist for your party. That is not the time to show weakness or uncertainty in the side you chose.
It is, to him, a choice between imperfect Democrats and vile, unredeemable Republicans. So, try making Democrats less imperfect, but if the Democratic Party is framed next to the Republican party, you better believe I'm doing nothing but praise the Democratic party 24/7/365, no matter my personal minor gripes with them.
Eric Levitz, now at Vox, is another essential read from the Reality Caucus. His analysis is careful, precise and grounded in an ethic of inclusion and egalitarianism that I share.