I can’t really blog much when I have some 200 pages from his archive printed-out and stacked on my couch.
Worse, I found that the few days while I drive around and listen to public radio talk shows, I would laugh and yell out to voices of the guests…”Ha your a cryptocalvinist…so are you ! Hahahahahah!”.
What is cryptocalvinism? Unqualified Reservations says it four ideals are:
- Equality (the universal brotherhood of man)
- Peace (the futility of violence)
- Social Justice (the fair distribution of goods)
- Community (the leadership of benevolent public servants).
The “cryptocalvinist ultracalvinist hypothesis” is the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.
Note: I changed the above quote from ultracalvinist to cryptocalvinist to reflect that author’s later change in terminology.
I think you can think of cryptocalvinism as a set of memes (or memeplex) that has found out how to use 5GW techniques (e.g. secrecy, manipulation) to survive and flourish. How cool is that!
Anyways, go check out the site and enjoy it. There are also related discussions at TDAXP, Econlog and Dreaming 5GW.
Filed under: 5GW | Tagged: cryptocalvinism, Memes |
PurpleSlog - The Future Will Be Kludged 
Don’t forget the discussion at gnxp, which is where I heard of UR.
Thanks for the link. I finished going through the material. He has some interesting ideas (e.g. like his alternate plan for Iraq, his invented ideology Formalism).
The Four Ideals remind me of Barnett.
They do. Barnett’s stuff has always had elements of Marxist thought deep in the back. Plus he went to the University of Wisconsin – Madison (my school) – the cryptocalvinist reigned supreme. The Professors ranged from Liberal to hardcore Marxists with only handful of conservatives. I imagine Harvard was similar.
Mencius Moldbug has updated his cryptoCalvinism thesis and renamed it “Universalism”:
https://purpleslog.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/universalism/
That was a truly incredible piece