CommittedToTheG
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User ID: 3371
What is the essence of Left and Right to you? I'm having trouble making sense of your model.
To me, political Left and Right, to the degree that they represent something coherent that can be applied across different historical contexts, are something like hierarchy (Right) vs. egalitarianism (Left). You could think of this in terms of their differing stances towards hierarchy, where the extreme rightist says that a hierarchy is good by virtue of its very existence, the extreme leftist says no hierarchy is good, it is always suspect and corrupt and should be abolished. The golden mean / enlightened centrist take on this spectrum is something like, "Hierarchies are inevitable, but we need hierarchies based on competence and virtue that have checks against oppression and corruption" (though the awareness of the inevitability of hierarchy is probably seen as somewhat Right wing in our Post-WWII narrative context).
Individualism (the classical liberalism you describe) vs. Communalism represents a separate political axis. Communists and Fascists are both communalists, but one represents the Left and the other the Right. Likewise, classically liberal individualism can totally work for someone who appreciates hierarchy. It allows the great to differentiate themselves. Elite Human Capital types are Right wing individualists.
I don't think these behaviors make sense when you model people as individuals who are trying to maximize fairness, but they do make sense when you think of people as members of groups that are in competition (whether they wish to be or not, we are all members of some recognizable group). Scott has a good post about these sorts of dynamics called Weak Men Are Superweapons.
I think most people exhibiting these behaviors (hypocrisy, unfairness) are using pre-rational heuristics, albeit heuristics that are rational when the goal is for you and your group to win.
CommittedToTheG
1mo ago
I feel like it should be standard in schools, starting from as soon as any sort of essays or argumentation is taught, to always use examples of correct arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers extremely evil or odious (i.e. fascism, racism, murder, rape, genocide, slavery) to always use examples of incorrect arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers good (i.e. democracy, equal rights, feeding babies).
This would be a fascinating experiment. There would still be strong societal influences from outside of school that would shape the students, but in general I would expect that this would make some of the "extremely evil or odious" things much less taboo to them. For most people, the ability to even voice a "correct" argument in favor of something means that it is within the Overton Window. I say this as someone who used to be a much lower decoupler and can still somewhat model my past self.
if I were a teacher, I'd try to make sure that the most popular high status kids are assigned to make arguments in favor of the most apparently evil things and the least popular low status kids are assigned the ones in favor of the most universally beloved and apparently good things.
I'm imagining a Hitler Youth of Chads and Stacys running things by the time the experiment reaches high school...
he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”
The fact that he is an Eagles fan is so jarring. I wonder if this detail is one of the only actually true things in the memoir, or if he (or his ghostwriter) just thought it was an appropriately dramatic choice? The idea of woke Black Britons listening to the Eagles gives me a strange worlds-collide sort of feeling.
CommittedToTheG
2mo ago
One of the best analyses of this phenomenon that I have read is this one by Johann Kurtz: Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
His main thesis:
I think that Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine. In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.
Some of these negative changes stand out in the normal datasets, while some do not, for reasons I will explain. In short, what has happened is that previous generations were able to take advantage of highly valuable and productive social capital as well as their exploding financial capital to move through each of these life stages in a fiscally efficient manner. (Don’t worry: I will define what I mean by social capital and back my argument with data).
Our current young, lacking access to this social capital, must engage in enormous outlays of purely financial capital in order to achieve the same levels of stability and accomplishment — capital that they do not have. We see this clearly in the data on schooling, homeownership, and family formation.
CommittedToTheG
4mo ago
Reminds me of The Sun Also Rises.
“Hello, Robert,” I said. “Did you come in to cheer me up?”
“Would you like to go to South America, Jake?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the South Americans you want in Paris anyway.”
“They’re not the real South Americans.”
“They look awfully real to me.”
I had a boat train to catch with a week’s mail stories, and only half of them written.
“Do you know any dirt?” I asked.
“No.”
“None of your exalted connections getting divorces?”
“No; listen, Jake. If I handled both our expenses, would you go to South America with me?”
“Why me?”
“You can talk Spanish. And it would be more fun with two of us.”
“No,” I said, “I like this town and I go to Spain in the summer-time.”
“All my life I’ve wanted to go on a trip like that,” Cohn said. He sat down. “I’ll be too old before I can ever do it.”
“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money.”
“I know. But I can’t get started.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”
But I felt sorry for him. He had it badly.
“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”
“I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life. I want to go back in the country in South America. We could have a great trip.”
“Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?”
“No, I wouldn’t like that.”
“I’d go there with you.”
“No; that doesn’t interest me.”
“That’s because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.”
“I want to go to South America.”
He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.
“Come on down-stairs and have a drink.”
“Aren’t you working?”
“No,” I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. “This is a good place,” he said.
“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.
“Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
“Yes, every once in a while.”
“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”
“What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell.”
“I’m serious.”
“It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.
“You ought to.”
“I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.”
“Well, I want to go to South America.”
“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
How seriously you take it probably depends on your jurisdiction and church culture, but I was always aware of it growing up. In part because I attended an Antiochian-run summer camp where they would serve us fasting food on Wednesdays, Fridays, and during the Apostles Fast. This year I will probably not fast very strictly since my wife is pregnant and we have a young child.
orthoxerox - if you don't mind me asking, what is your relationship to Orthodoxy? In my time lurking I think I have pieced together that you are a Russian who identifies as Orthodox in some sense and follows some of the practices, but that you are not really a believing Christian. Is this accurate?
(I realized I may have to ask the above question again later if I hope to get orthoxerox's attention, since the fast started today!)
CommittedToTheG
4mo ago
They were interested in what the Word of God was, not what the Word of God was.
Did you mean for the first "what" to be "who"?
Yeah, it's hard to successfully carry out the Fabian strategy when you are Carthage by analogy.
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