Mark Zuckerberg: a Modern-day Progressive

Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg’s manifesto was panned by everyone.

Zuckerberg Gives Public an Indication How He Lives in an Alternative Reality

Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

But also, people don’t like being reduced to props and ‘extras’ for the screenplay that is Zuck’s ‘new world order’, except that instead of being a movie it’s real life.

Furthermore, as the saying goes, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. When powerful, ambitious people think they are on the side of ‘good’ or try to ‘play god’, there is a natural tendency to be wary.

To others, the manifesto was self-serving and self-absorbed, as a sort of thinly veiled pr for Facebook.

And the hypocrisy of elites preaching ‘unity’ yet spending millions of dollars to isolate themselves (luxury doomsday bomb shelters, New Zealand citizenship, private islands, walled residential complexes, etc.) from the very people whose interests they claim to support but otherwise want nothing to do with.

Zuckerberg is essentially a modern day Progressive, related to reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century who supported sweeping social initiatives to carry out the ‘will of God’, although Zuck’s progressiveness is obviously more secular but still keeping in the tradition of optimism of science and technology and the power of ‘social reform’, with Zuck as the self-ordained minister of the contrived religion that is ‘one-worldism’.

Progressivism in America continues where the Age of Enlightenment in Europe leaves off.

Progressivism is a philosophy based on the Idea of Progress, which asserts that advancements in science, technology, economic development, and social organization are vital to the improvement of the human condition. Progressivism became highly significant during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, out of the belief that Europe was demonstrating that societies could progress in civility from barbaric conditions to civilization through strengthening the basis of empirical knowledge as the foundation of society.[1] Figures of the Enlightenment believed that progress had universal application to all societies and that these ideas would spread across the world from Europe.[1] Sociologist Robert Nisbet defines five “crucial premises” of the Idea of Progress as being: value of the past; nobility of Western civilization; worth of economic/technological growth; scientific/scholarly knowledge obtained through reason over faith; the intrinsic importance and worth of life on Earth.[2] Beyond this, the meanings of progressivism have varied over time and from different perspectives.

-late 19th century, early of 20th century (ended in 1920)
-modern progrressives (or what we simply call ‘liberals’) differ from forebears (imho, modern, secular progressives are actually worse)
-substantial social reforms
-experimented with eugenics
-in the spirit of John Stuart Mill: ‘reason’ and utilitarian-based policy.
-some social Darwinism
-supported minimum wage, opposed free markets, supported regulation and state intervention.
-administrative state, borrowed from Germany
-‘the state’ > individual (the state as analogous to an organism whereby the ‘whole’ is greater than the parts it is composed of). This differs from classical liberalism, in which individual liberty and rights (natural law) are paramount.
-Protestant reformers who felt they were carrying out the ‘Will of God’.
-economists such as Irving Fischer and Richard T. Ely
-President Woodrow Wilson
-elitist, paternalist, expanded role of state, (a society run by intellectuals and experts…the epitome of ‘expert culture’, put the ‘best and brightest’ in charge to maximize economic growth)

Zuckerberg’s manifesto was panned because modern day liberals, who tend to have a very negative world view, don’t want to reform the system using ‘science’ and ‘reason’; rather, like modern day barbarians that they are, the left seeks destroy society (as the revolutionaries did to Russia in 1918); and second, the left doesn’t like how Zuckerberg is so rich and doesn’t spread his wealth more.

Although Zuckerberg’s politics are unadulterated paternalist liberal elitism, there is a silver lining which is is that Zuck’s approach, in the NRX-sense, is counter-revolutionary, emphasizing ‘restoration’ instead of ‘revolution’. Thiel and Silicon Valley neo reactionaries understand this distinction.