E.G.

Compare and contrast: Curtis Yarvin and Elizabeth Anderson.

Yarvin's signature idea is that the United States should not be a democracy and should instead be a dictatorship. He thinks the country should be governed like a corporation, with the president as CEO.

Anderson's signature idea is that corporations (and workplaces generally) are fundamentally political organizations; political organizations should be democratically governed; therefore, corporations should be democratically governed.

So, in a certain way, Anderson and Yarvin are mirror images of each other. What they have in common is that they both seem to endorse a

Parity thesis: Corporations and the United States should be governed similarly.

The difference is that Anderson advocates democracy for both realms, whereas Yarvin advocates dictatorship for both realms.

Most philosophers are familiar with Anderson's ideas, whereas I would guess that most of us have never even heard of Yarvin. The MAGA world, by contrast, has been absorbing Yarvin's ideas for many years. JD Vance has quoted Yarvin approvingly. I doubt he's ever mentioned Anderson. I'd be curious to know whether he or other members of the Trump administration have ever mentioned any academic philosophers who are alive and working today.

Trump's presidency thus far strikes me as very Yarvin-ish. DOGE, for example, is a distinctly Yarvin-style idea.

There's a possible world where, instead of a Yarvin-esque national effort to turn America into something like a corporation, we have an Anderson-esque national effort to democratize corporations. I wonder how things are going over there in that world.

***

It is at least initially puzzling that America is moving, seemingly quickly, in a broadly Yarvin-ish direction. I would have thought that the idea of a dictatorship would be completely repulsive to most Americans, but at least half of voters seem to be fine with Trump's presentation of an image of himself as a king.

In America, there has never been any shortage of detailed ideas for radical change. There is a diverse selection of such ideas to choose from. Some of these ideas are attractive at a surface level but turn out to be bad upon careful inspection. Some of these ideas look bad at first glance, but turn out to be excellent when deeply considered.

Today we seem to be collectively pursuing a form of radical change that is bad in both ways, i.e., it not only looks bad on the surface but also turns out to be deeply bad in fact. That's puzzling and I don't know why that's happening.

Here's the question I'm thinking about: Why have Americans become so radical all of a sudden? Where have all the conservatives gone?

***

Imagine an island where everyone is blind. They've been this way for generations, or maybe forever. A Country of the Blind-type scenario. So they have strategies for sightless living. They know how to sightlessly grow and harvest crops, how to sightlessly build a house, how to sightlessly dance together, how to sightlessly raise a child, etc.

One day, the gods decide to take away everyone's ears, and give eyes to everyone. All of a sudden, nobody's blind anymore, but everyone's deaf now.

What happens next? To start with, everyone's going to have to re-learn how to do everything.

Also, there's going to be social disruption. After the Great Sensory Transformation, friends and family will now seem like strangers to one another. No one has ever seen anyone before, so everyone's visual appearance is completely unfamiliar to everyone. And no one can hear each other anymore, so they can't recognize one another by voice.

Even after everyone's figured out who's who, they'll need to get to know one another all over again. Many relationships will end. People who got along swimmingly in a world of sound might now discover that they can't stand one another in a world of sight. But also, many new relationships will form. People who didn't like one another, or didn't even know one another, when they were blind, might now discover that as deaf people they can be great friends, colleagues, romantic partners, etc.

***

It seems like the immediate aftermath of the Great Sensory Transformation is going to be one of the worst times for the people of this island society to decide to make dramatic social, politicial, or institutional changes. For example, if the island had previously been governed as a constitutional republic, this would be a bad time for them to change to a different system of government. Managing such a transition amidst all the other disruptions that are already going on is a recipe for disaster.

But also, the immediate aftermath of the Great Sensory Transformation might be a moment in which dramatic social, political, and institutional changes are highly likely, or even unavoidable, for the straightforward reason that there might be no way for people to go on running their society in the same way they did before.

***

It seems to me that from 2010 (to pick a year) to the present day, we've been experiencing something akin to a Great Sensory Transformation. Of course, we haven't lost any of our basic senses, or gained any new ones. But the internet has changed how we communicate with, relate to, live with, and experience one another.

On the one hand, the internet has given us new ways of perceiving one another and our world. On the other hand, the internet has taken away, or at least dulled, some of our old ways of perceiving, e.g., by occasioning various forms of separation from one another, so that people are deprived of all sorts of in-person signals. And our smartphones are rewiring our brains, they say.

I'm not sure that most of us fully grasp just how disruptive all of this is. I suppose the scale won't really be clear except in historical retrospect.

This transformative time seems precisely the wrong time for us to be undertaking dramatic institutional change. We still haven't even fully figured out how to communicate and understand each other in our new internet-saturated environment. Ideally, we'd attend to that acclimation process first, and would put plans for massive political upheaval on hold for a while.

But also, precisely because the internet is so transformative, dramatic institutional changes might be all but inevitable. Like the islanders after the Great Sensory Transformation, there might not be any way for us to go on governing ourselves in the same ways we've done in the past.

In short I think there is a kind of institutional conservatism that the internet has made both particularly desirable and impossible to sustain.

I don't think we should be fighting for that kind of institutional conservatism. It is a lost cause. I think that we should resign ourselves to the probability that cherished institutions are being torn apart.

The situation is scary because bad kinds of radical change that seemed impossible until recently are now on the horizon. But the situation is also hopeful because the possibilities for good kinds of radical change are probably also greatly expanded in this new environment.