\n\n\n\n(Required reading: Siderea on Class)
\nIt\u2019s interesting to think about the (many) ways in which the modern \u201cbay-area rationalist techno-libertarian\u201d culture (i.e. Scott Alexander\u2019s Grey Tribe, and to a lesser extent all of STEM academia) is effectively an outgrowth not of the bourgeoisie \u201centrepreneurial\u201d class identified with the American upper-middle, but rather of the historical-and-present military officer class. Examples:
\n
- seeing things in terms of game-theory, negotiations, and logistics\u2014in est, in terms of strategy;
\n- breaking debates down into positive vs. normative subcomponents, and then setting out to solve the positive subcomponent; thus, technocratic politics;
\n- the default assumption of meritocracy, and the belief (against evidence) that organizations with many members from this class will naturally end up meritocratic;
\n- thinking in terms of capability rather than intent or policy, e.g. \u201cthe only thing stopping the state from seeing your data is encryption\u201d, or \u201cthe only thing stopping nuclear war is MAD\u201d;
\n- the whole notion that while the world is suboptimal on a macro-political level, this is fixable through strength of arms: directly through war, or indirectly through technological innovation. Culture is the thing presumed to be immutable and worked around\u2014an attitude foreign to most every other class, who think of culture as the first and only viable battleground for macro-political change;
\n- an enjoyment of futurism (i.e. speculative fiction, X-risk debates) but also Futurism (the aesthetic of early speculative fiction, of games like Portal and Bioshock, of clean elegant spaceships and \u201cfixed\u201d transhuman genomes.) This is the only class that sees nothing wrong with the concept of a \u201csupersoldier.\u201d (It assumes the advances will turn the crank of genomics tech, which will result in the positive macro-political shifts mentioned above);
\n- the ideal of Heinlein\u2019s competent man, completely autonomous, able to restart civilization from its bootstraps\u2014not quite a Nietzschean \u00fcbermensch, since the philosophy and beliefs of the \u201ccompetent man\u201d are mostly irrelevant\u2014it is instead the skill-set that matters, and its concentration all in one (or rather, every) individual;
\n- the drawing of a sharp division between \u201cofficer-quality\u201d and \u201cenlisted-quality\u201d people, where the distinction comes down not to acculturation into this officer class, but to potential: raw intelligence and willingness to learn, but not to labor (i.e. the ability to be the \u201ccompetent man\u201d, and then\u2014having gained the knowledge to do so\u2014the desire and analytical capacity to properly delegate to others who have a comparative advantage in those skills, rather than to do them oneself);
\n- for the above reason reason, the highest likelihood of any class to hire skilled laborers and tradesmen or pay for services, instead of attempting to do \u201camateur\u201d work themselves. The numerous profitable startups serving exclusively the \u201crich SV engineer who wants to automate something\u201d crowd can attest to this. (Though, as above, this class first seeks to understand the work that will be done, such that they can then observe and evaluate the performance of the contractor or service. This leads to many a tradesman being \u201ctold how to do their job\u201d by members of this class whenever they do something nonstandard);
\n- the scouting for un-acculturated members, with an explicit path to acculturate them, vis. officer training schools, or coding bootcamps. This is one of the few classes (the only?) that almost universally encourages, and attempts to facilitate entry into it. This class doesn\u2019t see people in the other classes as doing something inherently \u201cbad\u201d that must be corrected. Instead, it sees most people as being in their \u201cproper\u201d class, the one that fits them\u2014but sees the \u201cofficer-quality\u201d people who are in some other class as being in the \u201cwrong\u201d class, and assumes they will feel much better when \u201crescued\u201d by this class. (Which is at least sometimes true; many who were bullied in a differently-classed public school do feel \u201crescued\u201d when they enter a STEM program in university.)
\nRemember, Silicon Valley was a DARPA project center first, and the startups there are the diaspora. SV and Bay-area culture is military-officer culture.
\nIf you identify strongly with characters like Miles Vorkosigan and Ender Wiggin, it might do to ask yourself how much of that is a feeling of identification with a member of a class you didn\u2019t realize you were in.
\na point to be made this isn\u2019t an \u201cofficer class\u201d derived from the old aristocracy and bent under Prussian influence
this is specifically a British colonial officer class
Naval, too
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