vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a political analogy to the idea that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'
I think you could tell a story of the last 400 years as a time of massive upheavals in traditional ways of life, as the rate at which societies had contact with wildly different societies rapidly increased, better instruments and math led to better understand of and dominion over the natural world, and society began to change at a more rapid pace than ever before.
Different human societies have always been changed by contact with one another. Just look at Ancient Rome, which saw Cato the Elder rejecting Greek philosophy as an anti-Roman thing that Rome had no need of, only for his great grandson Cato the Younger to become one of the most famous adherents of the Greek philosophical school of Stoicism and a sort of secular patron saint of lost causes complete with a pseudo-martyrdom narrative. If we use that as a measure, it took at most 4 generations for the "anti-Roman" Greek philosophy to be Romanized and assimilated by the Roman elites. That's a glacial pace of societal change compared to modernity.
In the modern day, you can be exposed to different ways of life in a thousand different ways. If you want to go deep on modern China or India as Westerner, you can do so. If you want to dive into everything the Western world knows about modern "primitive tribes" you can do so. You can read about the history of every great Empire and every historical time period and people we have records for. In a way, a modern person is constantly reliving Rome's first serious contact with the Hellenistic other. I think for most people, it is too much too fast. It is impossible to maintain a stable "Romanitas" in the face of all this information.
While I view it with as much suspicion as any of David Graeber's works, I think the book "The Dawn of Everything" made me realize the double-edged sword of the European Age of Sail. Sure, Catholic missionaries were being sent to what is now Quebec, and trying to convert the native Americans, but at the same time they were learning the languages and ways of life of these natives and sending reports back to the Old World which were read with great interest. I mean, just imagine that you're an educated Frenchman and you're suddenly hearing a ton about a bunch of cultural practices, governments, and religions that are unlike anything you've ever heard about. Even if you start out with a firm conviction that your way of life is superior, it would be hard to not update your view of human nature and what makes for a successful society even a little.
I think that there are two basic orientations a society can have: a rigid, fixed view like the Amish which is slow and deliberate about change, and a more open, changing view which tries to update and assimilate all new perspective which are put to it. The problem with the first view is that in many circumstances it might leave you vulnerable to outside invasion by a superior foe. In one sense, the Amish are lucky that people mostly admire their way of life and don't consider them disloyal or "foreign", because if the United States military wanted to take down the Amish it wouldn't even be a fight, it would be a slaughter.
I also think that in some ways "Progressiveness" or a Whig impulse is kind of inevitable over the last 400 years. In the United States in 1790 around 90% of people were involved in agriculture, whereas today less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. I don't think there's any set of societal values that would survive a transition like that. A modern American city calls for a different approach to society than what works in a 1790's farm society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply delusional. In 1790 there were no engines, no automated factories, no labor saving devices in the home, no video games, no internet. We didn't have modern antibiotics, automobiles, planes, mass surveillance, or a thousand other modern inventions. Frankly, it makes sense that society would change in response to those things.
I don't think we can start having a super viable "conservatism" again until the pace of technological progress slows down, and we artificially limit the number of "first contact" scenarios with very different cultures from our own, but I doubt that is going to happen. Instead, while we still haven't even ironed out all of the kinks of Modern Society + Smartphones and Social Media, we're adding Generative AI to the mix. We don't have time for healthy norms to develop, instead we just panic about the last problem while a new one starts rearing its head on the horizon.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."
There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.
I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.
A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.
vorpa-glavo
9d ago
Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.
I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.
I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.
The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.
Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.
But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.
Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.
Edit: Typo
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians)
While I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that women are less oppressed than is commonly claimed, I do take issue with your claim here. In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. I would argue that lack of access to credit in one's own name is a form of oppression, even if it could be counterbalanced by paternalistic or progressive benefits.
It is also worth pointing out that families and social expectations can function as "tiny tyrannies", even if people are theoretically free according to the law. My mom grew up in a fairly patriarchal household, and when my aunt got into the Air Force Academy her dad (my grandpa) said "no, you're staying right here with the family" and my aunt meekly accepted his word as final. On the other hand, my mom got into MIT and when my grandpa told her she couldn't go, she basically said, "I wasn't asking for permission, I'm going to MIT." My mom was also the most stubborn of her sibllings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she was the one that left the state they all grew up in and became an upper middle class engineer, while the rest stayed nearby like grandpa wanted and mostly didn't do as well (except for the one aunt who got into real estate and banking.)
Women are higher in the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, and I think that means that even in legal regimes that are relatively favorable to women, they can still get "stuck" in a tiny tyranny through mere social pressure alone. The women who escape are either unusually low in Agreeableness for a woman (like my mom), or autistic/weird enough that they naturally drift away when given the chance (like Aella.)
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.
This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.
The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.
Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."
Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.
I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.
I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."
vorpa-glavo
24d ago
I think it was around the time Lukas did his ‘why you should steal a woman’s photo to impersonate one online’ thread.
Could you please link to this thread? Sounds interesting.
I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.
The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.
I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.
I think there is something to a Stephen Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)
However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.
I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.
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