2rafa
44m ago
Happy and functional are two vastly different things. The same is true even within a family. There are terribly unhappy people with entire well structured family lives - a paid off mortgage, a marriage without fighting or much drama, three children, no financial troubles, and very happy people whose lives are far messier.
Scott presents several reasons why Finns and Danes might have high suicide rates even though they have well functioning societies: these include things like lack of daylight, boring and bland diets, etc. But what if lack of daylight actually does make you much less happy? Scott says that black Americans have lower rates of depression than white Americans. OK - my impression is indeed that black Americans are often happier than white Americans (there are even plausible Motte-friendly reasons why this might be the case)!
I don’t buy Scott’s last theory that suicide is just a function of societal development level or something like that. I think it most likely that after a certain development threshold where individuals don’t have to worry about daily survival and the prevailing society doesn’t consider suicide an extreme taboo, it’s mostly about sunlight hours experienced (this accounts for weird discrepancies between places that are sunnier but have fewer daylight hours, and for places that have fewer of both but where people spend more time outside during the day, albeit mediated for altitude (like in the ‘big sky’ states).
2rafa
5hr ago
Right, you hit on a very important distinction which is that birth rates only matter because of immigration.
If your society is 98% indigenous and tfr falls through the floor, and mass automation replaces most or all jobs, this isn’t really a problem. In fact, as long as consumption rises, which it easily can, everyone lives a better life, has more space, etc. This is not really a problem. The economics of population will change in an age of mass automation anyway. Koreans will still exist (assuming the stalemate with the north holds), there will just be fewer of them, which is fine. They will remain in control of their destiny.
If your society is diverse and divided, then you have to care, because these people are your neighbours and their children will be your children’s neighbours (and yours if you lead a long life), and they will have the same vote that you do, and they are probably having more kids than you.
2rafa
5hr ago
You know these polls always remind me of the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.
In the abstract, the rankings have some truth to them. They are broadly correlated with GDP. The countries with the lowest happiness rank are places like Congo and Yemen. The highest countries are - Costa Rica aside - all rich. But zoom in and some discrepancies become apparent. Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans. They laugh less, they smile less (no offence, but this is just something that one notices immediately in them).
I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns. The depressed alcoholic Finn whose cousin just committed suicide last month ticks ‘8’ on the happiness survey because - his temporary problems aside - he is pretty lucky, right? The Greek sits back on his terrace overlooking an azure sea, ouzo in hand, another day of pretending to work complete, and thinks doesn’t he read all the time about how corrupt Greece is, and how many problems it has, and how Greece is the basket case of Europe or something - and there was some struggle with the debt crisis 15 years ago etc etc? So he puts down ‘5’.
The reality and the survey are two different worlds. It’s not about how happy you are, it’s about how happy you feel you’re supposed to be. In the end, people believe what they’re told. How they act varies more.
2rafa
22hr ago
It was probably poorly worded. My point wasn’t that revenge is limited to autists, or that mob mentality around this kind of thing as in your last example isn’t real. It’s that there is a specifically autistic catharsis around someone who was perceived to be ‘getting away with it’ apparently no longer ‘getting away with it’. To the victim or even observer this may be indistinguishable from ‘you hurt me, I hurt you’ revenge but I think there is a distinction, it’s more about the rigidity of the underlying rules. This is why I think autists are drawn to clear cut extreme ideologies like corporatist fascism or communism that define enemy classes and establish strong rules for the in group and out group.
2rafa
22hr ago
I’ll tell you what’s not well this Wednesday: this website. Was what felt like a two+ hour outage until pretty recently.
Trudeau is a terrible politician and leader who, as you note, in may ways damned Canada by adopting the kind of harebrained immigration policy that even Angela Merkel might have balked at.
You’re also right that a lot of this dissident right reaction is cope and seethe. The reason is simple. Extremist politics is and has always been dominated by outsider groups, especially autistic men. Autistic people have a very strong concept of fairness, which is widely noted by psychologists. Autistic people find people “breaking the rules” more viscerally painful, annoying and unfair than neurotypical people. The fact that life is unfair, that many people do, in fact, “get away with it” and always have and always will, is more painful to them than it is to everyone else.
This manifests itself in two key ways. First, autists seethe about the political and social opponents (real or imagined) more than mentally normal people. This is expressed often in the desire for them to be “punished”. So according to these people Trump must be “punished”, Trudeau must be “punished”, Stacies must be “punished” as per Rodger etc. it’s not enough for them to be removed from power, they have to suffer because that is them repaying their debt to the rules they broke.
Secondly, autists*, who dominate most politically extreme movements, always prioritize “owning” the enemy over actual positive change that doesn’t necessarily directly (even if it may indirectly) hurt one’s enemies. The joy experienced at watching a fat blue haired liberal cry after being OWNED in a college debate is far greater than the joy of getting a promotion, a tax cut, a nice annual return on your investments. The joy of watching some Hispanic guy who used the OK sign FIRED for being a white nationalist, or of forcing some poor parents to accept unreservedly their child’s medical mutilation because the law says they can’t stop it far outweighs the boring mundanities of single payer healthcare.
The most psychologically healthy people I know (not me) often don’t think about this form of punitive, absolute, rules-based “justice” at all. Which isn’t to say they don’t care about unfairness or corruption or whatever, it’s just to say that they are able to acknowledge and live with the unfairness of the world, perhaps find it sad, but don’t let it guide their every emotion and value.
* political autists, of course. Those whose special interest is vintage stamps or taxidermy couldn’t care less
2rafa
5d ago
Yeah. To be fair, Ulbricht did do 11 years in jail. SBF will probably do similar, his parents seem to be quite well-connected and some EA autists from Silicon Valley will probably be in the next or next-next Dem administration.
You need men, you don’t need ethnic diversity. Lesbian separatism is a weird punchline, a trivia question, something from the ‘70s. Ethnic nationalism is real and has had many successful exclusionary movements execute substantial, genuine ethnic cleansing in the last century alone, if you look at tribal wars of extermination historically it’s even more common.
Women disliking men, really, is socially meaningless. What, is the kingdom of women going to enslave all men? Even legendary homosexual misogynist BAP thinks that some form of female control of men can only be achieved by way of complex psychological conditioning process called “the longhouse”, arguably a metaphor for civilization itself, not martially (obviously). Women love men and men love women, that’s biology. Patriarchy waxes and wanes as a function of technological development, primarily.
Biology has much less to say amount a society of diverse people who (at least initially) look very different getting along together forever. It doesn’t preclude it, but it doesn’t endorse it either. And the historic example suggests real, bloody conflict between ethnic groups is very much commonplace. That is why people take it more seriously, probably.
2rafa
6d ago
You’re making my point. The leaders of those countries are still nominally members of the state church (or indeed head of it).
Now imagine, say, the president of Germany announces he’s converting to the Anglican Church. That’s interesting. That’s unusual. That suggests a much more genuine belief than King Charles formally being an Anglican.
There are arguments for the UK warehouse worker doing better. British rents are cheaper in dollar terms. Grocery costs are lower. Low income neighborhoods in Britain have much lower crime rates than their American equivalents.
But even if we assume their QoL is merely the same, that’s incredible - America is twice as rich as Britain! British professionals make less than half of their American peers.
More options
Context Copy link