Below are some half-baked reflections on two articles I read this week.
Early in the Ukraine conflict, the message from more respected members of the western diplomatic community was that we should not blame Russia but rather Putin for the conflict. This messaging was carried forward in early op-eds.[i] The approach is consistent with our civil religion because it projects moral responsibility onto an individual with a defective character and avoids sweeping stereotypes that condemn people on the basis of their ethnic ancestry or citizenship. This was also diplomatically prudent because it left the Russian people with a path to redemption through revolution or coup.
I didn’t expect such messaging to persist because Russia has far too many historic group enemies, and because every western value is ultimately subordinate to foreign policy realism. I expected instead the triumph of ethnic group narcissism, which conceives of politics in terms of existential clashes between primitive omnipotent forces like ethnic groups. This became apparent at first in op-eds[ii], and then in policy statements made by policymakers. A recent interview with former NATO military committee member and Czech presidential candidate Petr Pavel revealed the pervasiveness of the paranoia.[iii]
Pavel sets the tone by lamenting that the west has been PSYOPPED by omnipotent Russian information war technology into mistrust of politicians and the media:
“I think Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are clear examples of Russia’s hybrid warfare succeeding, making the population disbelieve all the pillars of power — including politicians and the media.”
This same omnipotent control over information has indoctrinated all Russians and rendered a pro-western revolution coup highly unlikely. It follows from the “mentality of many Russians” that none of the 300,000 Russian refugees of Putin’s conscription order should be trusted.
“The young men trying to leave the country are worried about their own lives — that doesn’t mean they’re against the war. I’m sure that many of them will continue to support Putin’s nationalist policies,” he added.
Pavel continues:
“Can you imagine a country like ours, which already has a strong Russian ‘fifth column,’ accepting another 40,000 or 50,000 Russian men?” he asks. “Men who wouldn’t support democratic regimes, who wouldn’t be grateful to the Czech Republic as a democratic country, who would stay within their nationalist positions? This would be a risk to our internal security.”
Pavel’s attempt to invoke populist arguments against welcoming Russian refugees is interesting. Unfortunately for Pavel, as we’ve learned in the west, it’s not possible for a refugee to bring negative aspects of their homeland and culture into the west, and if they do, it’s actually the west’s fault.
Pavel seems to be regretfully acknowledging what Russians with Attitude have been suggesting for a while, which is that Putin is comparatively moderate and generally viewed as being too dilatory in his responses to Ukraine’s emergence as a western client state.
STOCHASTIC TERRORISM
The prospect of a huge tranche of Russian bodies seeking refuge in the west and setting up a hostile fifth column brings us to our second article: an excellent piece from Revolver on a new social-scientific concept from moderate centrist experts, which goes by the label “Stochastic Terrorism”.
The concept was recently raised in a bizarre letter from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Children’s Hospital Association demanding that the DOJ prosecute media personalities responsible for spreading “disinformation” about gender-affirming care practices.
Revolver quotes a centrist blogger on the concept of stochastic terrorism:
Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.
This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.
This is also the term for what Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, and others do.
The failure of the center-extreme model
The AMA’s use of “stochastic terror” is a good example of how even moderate, well-adjusted normies can cling to theories in the presence of evidence that such theories are inaccurate. I’ve raised Ptolemaic epicycles in the past as a useful analogy for understanding distorted, inverted reasoning patterns. The story goes that some astronomers attempted to preserve Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe in the face of evidence of the retrogression of planets by constructing epicycles. In other words, the astronomers started from the assumption that the geocentric model of the solar system was correct and developed a model to account for the conflicting evidence of planetary retrogression.
In the case of moderate centrist America, their geocentric model is a broad understanding that political convictions range from extreme to normal, with the normal being found in the center. A corollary of this belief is that extreme beliefs are accompanied by extreme behavior like terrorism. Another corollary is that extreme behavior like terrorism implies that the beliefs animating the terroristic action are extreme. In the present case, the center has encountered beliefs they believe to be extreme but has not encountered corresponding extremist political behavior.
This means in the context of transgender ideology, first, that the center believes people can be born into the wrong gender and should be able to use surgery and hormonal treatments to change their identity. Second, it means that the center believes rational and well-informed hostility to transgender ideology is extreme. However, instead of extremist behavior like terrorism resulting from hostility to transgender ideology, the center has encountered traditional forms of local and legislative activism. (The most persuasive complaint raised by the letter is that the media’s highlighting publicly available information about transgender ideology advocates amounts to harassment.)
To preserve the center-extreme model here, centrists must find extremist behavior linked to transgender skepticism by developing a new theory explaining the lack of extreme action among the majority of transgender skeptics. This is the function performed by stochastic terror. While we can’t predict from the content of transgender skepticism what any individual adherent to transgender skepticism will do, we can predict that at least someone will eventually do something that superficially validates the conviction that transgender skepticism is extreme.
The Revolver piece does a good job of showing how stochastic terror satisfies the cynical goals of an establishment that is increasingly detached from the values it espouses. Reclassifying transgender skepticism as stochastic terror satisfies the center’s paranoid goal of censorship. The Revolver article additionally succeeds in reducing the concept to absurdity by applying it to situations the establishment has declined to call terrorism. For example, if Martin Luther King Jr. says violence is the voice of the unheard, and people interpret that statement to justify widespread street violence, then Martin Luther King Jr. is a stochastic terrorist.
The center-extreme model is simply wrong. The center can tolerate extremist ideas and people can adopt extreme ideas without engaging in terrorism. We know that the holy books of America’s three dominant religions are suffused with justifications for ethnic hatred and violence and other forms of extremism, and yet we do not hear mainstream apolitical organizations like the AMA complaining of the stochastic terrorism inherent to monotheistic scripture. This isn’t because these holy texts don’t inspire extremists or that they’re validated by “medical science” like transgender ideology. It’s because the AMA are obligated to accept the public legitimacy of those religious texts under our civil religion and Constitution.
The decline in political predictability and the end of liberalism
Both the use of “stochastic terror” described in the Revolver article and Pavel’s cautionary analysis of Russian refugees reflect a decline in our ability to predict individual political behavior from evidence of an individual’s public behavior or identity. I think this could be a result of the rise of indirect power projection as the primary method of political power projection.
Consider first the context of great power conflicts. In the absence of outlets for legally-bounded conflicts over convictions we concede are fundamentally relative and irreconcilable, such as legislative debates, court proceedings, or duels, power projection is diverted away from direct, honest confrontation. There is no global government through which Russia or the U.S. could make a case against the other, and from which binding legal decisions or legislation could issue.
Further, the nature of modern warfare is based on a concept of just war and is total and existential (there is no limit to the destruction a modern just war can cause), meaning there is little incentive for Russians to test their case in a duel with the U.S., which has far more resources and is all but guaranteed victory. Russia is better served by engaging in indirect power projection against the U.S. The U.S. has a reciprocal incentive to use indirect power to entice Russia into an aggressive or unjust war, or fabricate some other casus belli, because the U.S. would not be justified in launching an unprovoked attack against Russia.
Both sides consequently direct enormous resources and energy toward convincing people of the justice of their national goals, meaning power projection is diverted into the efforts of historical revisionism, casuistry, legal legerdemain, and so forth. Additionally, there is a strong incentive to engage in indirect conflict through the promotion of domestic extremism and terrorism while retaining plausible deniability (for instance, Russia promoting Black Lives Matter and the U.S. promoting Azov). Thus there are multiple incentives for both the U.S. and Russia to engage in indirect power projection through dissimulation.
But this makes individual political behavior less predictable. The increase in indirect power projection through dissimulation increases the relevance of such questions as, does an individual or group really believe what they’re saying, are they being manipulated through a PYSOP, or are they foreign subversives? Further is a public dissident being honest in the concerns they voice and are they willing to observe the legal boundaries of political conflict in their nation, meaning are they raising a genuinely pressing issue for the country and are they committed to avoiding illegal activity in promoting their interests? How can you welcome giant refugee populations on the basis of abstract values when these questions are salient?
In the context of domestic dissent, the decline in the establishment’s openness to discussion and compromise on certain important issues, and the rise in punitive action from the private sector against political dissent, is driving individual westerners toward indirect political power projection.
Consider an analogy to a transformation in warfare that happened between the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Napoleonic era, soldiers wore colorful uniforms that allowed commanders to identify individual soldier allegiance and predict individual battlefield behavior. The shift toward partisan warfare facilitated by absolutist ideologies like Maoism, more sophisticated ballistic and communications technologies, and global migratory mobility meant that the predictive power and use of distinctive uniforms in warfare declined.
If we understand ostentatious demonstrations of political affiliation which announce an individual’s actual beliefs, such as third party membership and participation in public political demonstrations, to be analogous to the public implications of Napoleonic uniforms in war – meaning such demonstrations permit a certain level of predictability in political behavior by publicly identifying an individual with an opinion – and we understand that the shift to anonymous and pseudonymous coordination and self-expression presents a quandary similar to the transition to partisan warfare and terrorism, then we can understand at least one motivation for the paranoia evidenced by ideas like “stochastic terror” and All Russians Are Bastards (ARAB).
The best the center can do is predict that someone somewhere who believes in an “extreme” ideology will do something extreme, like an act of terror. Their primary recourse in the face of this unpredictability is: first, to censor “extreme” ideas by unpersuasively blaming public persons espousing such ideas, like Tucker Carlson, for “stochastic terrorism”, just as Russia and China are increasingly blamed for the popularity of political positions with which the western center disagrees; and second, to engage in more stringent efforts to strip the ring of Gyges from individuals through invasions of privacy to be certain of their loyalties and convictions.
[i] https://thehill.com/opinion/international/599715-the-west-is-not-to-blame-in-ukraine-putin-alone-is-wrong/; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/03/14/dont-blame-every-russian-putins-barbaric-invasion/
[ii] https://kyivindependent.com/opinion/victor-tregubov-blame-russia-not-just-putin; https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-analysis-ukraine-inozemtsev-collective-guilt/31859680.html
[iii] https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-revanchism-deeper-vladimir-putin-war-ukraine/