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Notes -
I. On Self Esteem, or How Do You Compare with Your Same Sex Parent?
A year or two ago, I watched a video that I found interesting. It said that one of the main factors of self esteem was how we compare ourselves to our same sex parent. (Which is to say, how a man compares himself to his father, or how a woman compares herself to her mother.) If someone is doing much better than their same sex parent, they are much more likely to have positive self esteem than if they are doing worse than their parent. I have thought about this a lot and I found it really insightful when looking at my own self esteem and that of other people I know in my life.
My father passed away at the end of 2021. He was kind, patient, funny, charming, and the sort of person who others are drawn to and liked to talk with. But he had some demons as well. He always hated his parents to a degree that I could never understand. My grandparents were always kind to me. As a child I once accidentally broke a door to one of their cabinets and I was terrified that my grandpa was going to hurt me because I knew my father hated him so much. But my grandfather simply fixed the cabinet door and forgave me. Why did my father hate his father so much? Well, I don’t think I’ll ever really know entirely since they’re both gone, and you can never really know everything about the people closest to you. But I imagine that my father resented the success of my grandfather compared to his own failings. Crucially, my father was the fifth and the last in his line of 5 generations in our family business. My grandfather sold the family business to a corporation in the 1980s. My father, in his anger, left the business at the time, resentful of my grandfather. I think this seriously affected the self esteem of my father and he spent several years not speaking with my grandparents- I did not see my grandparents for probably 6 or 7 years of my life, until my senior year of high school when they reached out to my mom (my parents divorced when I was young) who took me to see them. My father had other problems as well which affected me negatively.
When he died, I had to come to terms with the reality of who he was. I no longer had to lie to myself about the sort of person who he was, I became free to remember fondly the good parts of him and negatively about the bad. Early in the grieving process, when I finally let myself realize the bad parts of him, I was really annoyed with him, irritated that he couldn’t have been a better person and father to me and my brother. But since then I’ve grown to accept him for who he was and really see it as a blessing in disguise: I can always compare myself to him and see that I’m doing better than he was able to do.
II. France
France is the most beautiful place in the world. I have visited France more than any other country outside of my own (The US.) It is easily the most photogenic place: every time I see pictures I have taken of Mt. St. Michel or the chateaus of the Loire Valley I am shocked at how beautiful they are and that I have been there and that they’re still over there, just being gorgeous, as life marches on around them.
But France is also a strange place. All that beauty, but it’s all in the past. Stray a few streets outside any well preserved medieval village, or stunning baroque or rococo era neighborhood or city center, and suddenly you’re surrounded by some of the ugliest architecture in the world. One of the ugliest places I’ve ever been is a roadside hotel in Brittany. The new build exterior is a series of white and gray and fluorescent yellow rectangles with tiny square windows that barely open. The way this architecture stands in stark relief to the class, elegance, and beauty of the past is glaring.
So what went wrong in France? I put the height of French beauty and elegance around the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Versailles is an incredible monument to the capability of humans. How could Louis XV and Louis XVI compare to this? These were clearly men standing in the shadows of giants. The 19th century was tumultuous for the French, but they still managed to produce beaux-arts (itself mostly reproductions of baroque and Rococo style, but beautiful nonetheless.) The belle époque, and the art nouveau, of the late 1800s up until World War I was the last gasp of greatness of the French civilization. It would be so convenient for me to place the end of French greatness at the end of the Ancient Régime but really, the decline began decades before, and the French people managed some greatness after that.
But post WWI? There were some moments of glamour in the 1980s, but besides that, France today is living in the shadow of itself.
An aside. I briefly dated a very cute French guy in France. We were looking at the city from afar, and he said he wished he could tear down all the new buildings and just leave the old ones. This is probably a bourgeois and classist sort of opinion to have in France, but really I agree with him. Contrast this with someone I dated in Vienna. He was from Dresden, a city I’ve never visited but suffered greatly from WW2 and apparently is filled with rather utilitarian buildings now. We were visiting some beautiful baroque palace in Vienna, walking the gardens and enjoying all the splendor you’d expect from a baroque palace. Then he points at some medieval support wall, and tells me that he prefers the medieval support structure to the elegance of the palace. Uncharitably, this is the sort of opinion you adopt when you are looking for points for intellect. I preferred the French guy.
III. Japan
Growing up, Japan was the land of the future. Sci fi vistas of skyscrapers and neon lights, hyperfast bullet trains, they were already on Playstation 7 when America just got Playstation 2. It’s still like that today, right?
Sadly, no. Japan’s economy and culture exploded during the early 20th century, culminating finally in the bubble economy of the 1980s. The rapid wealth the Japanese amassed in such a short time is unparalleled to this day. For nearly a century, every Japanese generation greatly improved their standard of living from the one before it. Then the bubble burst and the country has faced stagnation since the 90s. The population is extremely old, and you feel it in the streets. Showa era cafes without a single change since the 60s are strangely common. These are charming, in a very surreal way. Crustless egg salad sandwiches eaten with melon soda floats are delicious but go against every food trend and nutritional guideline of the past 30 years at least. Really I’m glad they exist, and it’s very comforting to know that there’s a place in the world where tradition can be kept alive with such thoughtfulness and attention to detail. But there is also something that feels very wrong about these places.
Being in Japan today feels like witnessing the end of a civilization. It feels like it’s going through what France must have been going through a hundred years ago. Tokyo, only a few decades ago the center of East Asian youth culture, feels like a creaking behemoth. Shinjuku Station, one of the scariest places I’ve ever been, is an exercise in absurdity. Five separate train companies run trains through 53 platforms in the heart of a city of over 14 million people. You can imagine how this gets built in the chaos of the 20th century but it’s patently ridiculous with the technology and capabilities of the 21st century. Everything in the country feels like it was an exciting idea in the 20th century. The youthful energy of the Showa era is gone.
IV. Thailand and South Korea
Chiang Mai, a city of 1.2 million in northern Thailand, feels more vibrant and exciting than Tokyo today. They have 4 modern shopping malls with extremely good, extremely affordable food and shopping options, and countless day and night markets with even cheaper food and shopping. People are optimistic about the future and seem proud of their work and way of life. They still have some catching up to do in terms of health and building standards compared to the rich countries of the old world, but it feels like they’ll get there sooner rather than later. It seems like there’s more opportunity and willingness to hustle among the Thai people than the Japanese. And the highly functional economy of Thailand seems to spur innovation at a much higher degree than today’s Japan, Europe, or the US for that matter.
I am not nearly as well read about Korean history as I am about Japanese history. I have spent about 2 months in Seoul. The main difference that strikes me about South Korea compared with Japan is that South Korea seems to have modernized much more recently than Japan has. In Seoul, you will notice that older people above 50 or so are significantly shorter than younger people. It’s apparent that famine and food insecurity is within living memory for the South Koreans. But South Korea feels like the only country that is truly living in the 21st century. The food is plentiful and nutritious. Young people are healthy and attractive. Technology is cutting edge. Spaces are clean and well designed. People speak really good English. Shopping in Tokyo, you feel suffocated by outdated trends and ancient traditions. In Seoul, shopping feels like you’re touching the future. Apparently the population decline is bad and they have North Korea looming as a constant threat but if anything it gives the culture a fighting spirit that other rich countries have lacked since WWII.
V. The USA
France has already experienced decline. Japan is rapidly declining today. Thailand and South Korea are on their way up. Where does that leave the US? To put it shortly, I don’t know.
As an American it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly the US is at. I am from a rust belt town in the US. The town I am from peaked with oil money in the Victorian era. There are still glamorous mansions and downtown buildings built around the turn of the century, some of them in great shape, others not so much. Different cities in the rust belt have fared differently since the Victorian era- some of them boomed during the 60s, some of them have just declined, and others have recently been having a bit of a resurgence (especially from people leaving bigger neighboring cities. I suspect there’s been a white flight 2.0 since 2020 but I haven’t been able to find stats backing this up.)
But outside of the rust belt, how is America doing? Let’s look from West to East. Hawaii is beautiful. How sustainable is American power projection in Hawaii? I have been there only for a few weeks, but in that short time I gathered that native Hawaiians are broadly hostile to the American government. Downtown Honolulu was surprisingly sketchy to me (especially Chinatown.) I was there in 2022- huge swaths of tourist industries seem to have shut down around the time of Covid. (I suspect a lot of this was also a victim of the identity politics of the late 2010s- white tourists buying native Hawaiian culture isn’t very woke etc.) Besides that, Hawaii is a very expensive place- the cost disease of the American economy can’t be overlooked. I have broadly the same impression of California from my short time in LA as I do of Hawaii- both are beautiful places with great weather but with a possibly unsustainable culture whose most vital energy is in the past.
I spent a lot of time in New York from around 2010 to 2019. It was the closest megacity to where I grew up so it attracted me as a young and ambitious person. But the city begins to wear on you. It’s really degrading to witness so much filth and extremes of human behavior. It is such an outlier that I hesitate to draw any conclusions about the state of America from the city of New York, but I think the rot is broadly the same across all the major Northeastern cities of the US, from Cleveland and Erie to Baltimore and DC. If I had to put a pin on it, I would say that the Northeast is in decline, but seems to attract enough talent, money and innovation to keep things current.
The South is much more pleasant than the North. If you grew up in the North, you are raised to hate southerners and their culture, but basically this is because the north are haughty and arrogant. People in the south are polite and respectful in a way that the north has not been in decades, if ever.
Speaking of respect, this is the central issue of American culture that I am going to try to tease out. Respect has completely been lost in the realm of public life in the northern, eastern and midwestern US. People constantly interrupt each other. We do not listen to each other. People in the north act confused when I respond to the things they are saying rather than giving a short and flippant response. Being in France taught me the value of listening to others and having patience. There were times when I was in France, when I would go from having a strained but polite interaction, to suddenly having the interaction turn very rude. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I eventually realized that I was cutting them off, talking over them, which is very rude in French society. In turn I realized that this is very rude in every society, we just get used to it in some cultures. The Northeast is the absolute worst in terms of disrespecting other people and once you have been away from it it is shocking and demoralizing to witness again. Extreme displays of behavior from "Karens" may go viral but they're just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ambient level of rude interactions all the time in American culture today.
Circling back to the self esteem point I opened with. There are trends on civilizational scales that we can look at. Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things. Where does the US fall in this? The vibes are telling me we’re in the decline stage. The boomers in my life are poorer and less married and successful than my grandparents’ generation. My grandparents and great aunts and uncles all drove clean elegant cars and kept tidy homes. The generation of my parents and their siblings are still working well into their 60s, dress slovenly or like people much younger than they actually are, and seem to lack the confidence in themselves to rightfully command the respect that they imagine they deserve from those around them. The baby boom generation seems to be the first generation since the 1930s to be doing worse than their parents. Gen X and Millennials seem to be continuing the trend broadly. I anticipate decades of decline based on this trend alone.
I don't feel the US being in a declining era. I don't feel it around where I live or when I go home, or when I visit other parts of the country. The US is in something of a fragile position and I think it could easily go the way of Argentina if politics stays stupid, but this would be a wholly self-inflicted wound, not the product of generational decay. The vast majority of people I encounter who think America is washed are people with either chronic depression or severe racism.
The US has the premier scientific establishment, the most powerful economy in the world, a network of alliances that sprawls over the globe, and a culture that attracts immigrants without number. The question is not "has America lost its mojo?" It is "will America shoot itself in the head?"
Writing off Art Deco immediately causes me to question your taste. Of course, I find many elements of pre-modern fashion and architecture unbearably gaudy, so your mileage may vary.
Let me offer a perhaps controversial thesis (which I'll admit I don't really believe myself, at least as an explanatory factor): monumentalism is at odds with the interest of the common citizen. Louis XIV may been Great, but he did not exactly leave France in great shape for the French. The increasingly liberalized societies of developed countries have little patience for pouring vast sums to satisfy the vanity of kings (though they have their own pathologies). Ultimately, cities are for people to live in, not architectural museums to be admired by later generations. Forgetting this seems to be an egregious problem across most of western Europe.
Some of us grew up in the Midwest and learned to hate them from experience :V
I find it funny you say this, because this has been pretty much the opposite of my experience. Southerners are polite, but - especially for men - it is an extremely brittle courtesy that falls apart the moment you step outside their fairly rigid expectations. Being easily offended is not an admirable trait, and I have always been baffled by the characterization of Southerners as nice. Maybe Texans, but my experiences in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina did not leave me with a favorable impression of the locals. There's an undercurrent of meanness I don't encounter anywhere else in the US, including the rudest parts of the Northeast.
The South is an odd place in that the core South is largely a decaying husk. Georgia is propped up by the growth of Atlanta (housing theory of everything wins again!), but no one thinks Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee are going anywhere. The parts of the South that are doing well are on the periphery - Texas, Florida (though Florida has its own pile of ticking time bombs), and North Carolina - and are in many ways divergent from traditional southern culture.
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Ignoring the meat and substance of your post, I think you're right that we compare ourselves to our (grand)parents. Hedonistic treadmills seem to prove to me that all the things we care about like money, leisure, social status, are relative. And self-preservation instincts mean we'll put up with anything. We take our set-point from how (we think) the older generations lived.
"Livable wage" redditors who feel entitled to a certain amount of money and lifestyle are not thinking economically. "Everyone deserves a livable wage" is a moral statement, not an economic one. Their moral intuition is based what the older generations had. You could even call it envy (a pejorative for wanting fairness).
As a mid-20s single white male (what you'd expect from a Mottepoaster and early Scott reader), most of my worldview is driven by the realities of dating. The reason why I feel entitled to marrying a skinny woman is not because it is feasible for me from a (sexual) market perspective. It is a moral opinion first and foremost. I am comparing myself to the generations past. My grandparents could visit the beach without a torrent of obese women assaulting their eyes. I have no such luxury.
It is commonly said that the housing market is insane. Now I think money is boring and I don't know anything about the housing market. But the entire premise is a weird perversion of the is-ought distinction. It doesn't really matter if expensive houses are caused by illegal immigration, zoning laws, lizardmen in skinsuits, whatever. People are angry because they are comparing themselves to the older generations, not because they are thinking in economical or technical terms.
I can compare to my slightly younger self here because I bought a house over a decade ago, a condo about a decade ago, and I will soon almost certainly rent because housing costs have exploded, even though I am far wealthier than I was the last times I moved in the same metro area.
Lower success level, but same. The mid-late 2010s were genuinely easier. Rent was still cheap where I live and I was making stupid money for what I was doing ($50K a year mostly driving for a locally-owned food delivery company and my rent was a shade under $500/month). Post-covid inflation blew all that up and while I just got my big career change break spending a year making less than I did straight out of college driving for Papa John's really sucked compared to the non-stop party that was my late 20s.
Yes, but the Millennials were STILL complaining about how bad it was. That was the era in which occasionally one of them would post such nonsense and I'd go to FRED and pick graph after graph showing how each of the things they talked about was actually at an all-time good RIGHT NOW (i.e. at the time of the post)
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Mostly they are comparing themselves to imaginary versions of older generations. How many millennials or zoomers include the draft, stagflation and multiple recessions, and sky-high interest rates as part of their comparison?
They are comparing themselves to their parents' lives that they experienced. Millennials by definition aren't old enough to remember the malaise era, and the stereotypical ones with millennial parents who had them later in life don't remember their parents being broke 20-somethings. It's also worth remembering that the later part of the boomer cohort missed Vietnam/the draft, and your older boomer cohort's kids are more likely to belong to the tail end of Gen X. I see this a lot with my youngest (half) sister, an early Zoomer. Her material and class aspirations blow mine out of the water because she remembers being a kid during her father's peak earning years whereas I remember the time before that of perpetual financial crises and spent that period of time waiting for the other shoe to drop (It did.). My father has been successful and rebounded from the '08 recession fairly quickly, but I remember him being broke in his 20s.
It's easy to be tempted into envy, as my father has been more financially successful than I am, but the fact is that comparing is silly because we're very different people with different priorities. If I envy anything it's his lack of neuroticism and easy self-confidence, but there isn't a political solution to that (It turns out that I'm very much like my maternal grandfather, and I've had a vastly easier life than he did.). He's always been extremely career-oriented, willing to sacrifice personal/family life, has relocated every five years, etc. I work hard and do a good job, but I've always despised job hunting, didn't want to move, and stay in the same job so long as it's good enough. If anything, the worst thing that happened to me career-wise was lucking into a gig as an overpaid delivery driver in my mid 20s and staying with that company a few years too long. Objectively, if this new job (that I networked into from my time working a side gig at a bar) turns out the way I hope it will, I will have had my big career break a whole year later than my father did. Such horror! Really though, relative to what I've put into life I've been pretty lucky as an adult.
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The takeaway here really should be that the US is "too big to fail." Apparently the "laboratory of democracy" thing is working exactly as the founders intended-- no matter what an individual state does, there's going to be another state somewhere else doing the complete opposite thing. So even as particular regions of the country decline, other regions become good targets for immigration, able to scoop up all the people leaving the dysfunctional areas. That's the beauty of America's heterogenous geography and culture-- diversity is our strength. Bad federal policy can be a drag, sometimes... but the very nature of bad policy is that states are de-facto empowered by public opinion to circumvent or ignore it it. See: blue states with sanctuary cities, red states with de-facto abortion bans well before roe vs wade, and every state with legal marijuana currently. With tariffs, for example, if they manage to actually stick around whichever borders state figures out the most effective way to enable cross-border smuggling will get a competitive advantage over every other state.
Really? Where are the states that discriminate against women, non-whites, and promote heterosexuality to the same extent that progressive states discriminate against men, whites, and promote minority sexualities and gender identities?
Plenty of states tested exactly that until very recently and failed. Now some states are performing a replication test in the other direction and also failing. What more do you want out of a laboratory? It's enough to test"shooting people is bad for them" and "getting shot by people is bad for you" in separate studies, you don't need to check both hypothesis at the exact same time.
What exactly are you referring to? I don't recall any test followed by failure, I only recall a test that was stopped by the federal government through force.
I want it to work as advertised. We don't have some states doing one thing, and some doing the opposite. We have some states doing one thing, and the opposite being explicitly illegal.
Jim crow laws lead to massive out-migration and a loss of economic and therefore political power. Exactly the same as what's happening to california now. The fact that the feds stopped them by force is exactly the point-- it's the tangible proof that those states lost the ability to contest outside control over their cultures. Now the feds are targeting california discrimination with anti-DEI measures. Seeing the parallels yet?
Can you give an example of a system that's not a "laboratory of democracy" then? By that logic Soviet tanks rolling into Prague just shows how the Eastern Block was a "laboratory of democracy".
Not until they send in the 101st Airborne. But even that will only show the same rules are applied equally to both sides, not that the US is a laboratory of democracy. It will clearly disprove the latter point, in fact.
A laboratory allows for safety equipment and controlled experiments. An external force coming in and wrecking your shit, in contrast, is the law of the jungle. Both lab experiments and warfare let you discover interesting new things about governance, but there's a big difference between your PI coming in and telling you to quit being an incompetent waste of grant funding vs. getting invaded by soviet tanks.
So to be clear, since the deployment of the 101st Airborne wasn't just about a cut in federal funding, it clearly crossed the line into proving that the US is not a laboratory of democracy, right?
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Airborne troops dispersing unarmed, underage protestors with bayonets mounted to their rifles is... what? Is the crucial difference that they didn't use actual tanks? Is it that it didn't come to actual fighting (to my knowledge)?
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Well, according to the progressives, everywhere, including at least some of what you'd call the "progressive" states.
One screen, two completely different movies.
Sure, but they’re delusional. Where are the actual examples of pro-white, pro-traditional families discrimination? There aren’t any concrete examples, that’s what ‘systemic -ism’ means.
Tell that to the voters. There's nothing in a political system that magically protects it from supremacy movements and hysterics- white supremacy in the 1920s, black supremacy in the 2020s, androsupremacy in the 1800s, gynosupremacy in the 1900s, etc.
Yes, we have examples in living memory when the political system did in fact protect them against those things (because the ruling class was sufficiently virtuous), but they're dead now.
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It should be pretty trivial then to point to, say, men-only scholarships, pro-white "non-diversity statement" requirements for positions at universities, white only dorms, etc., etc...
It's there, it is just "systemic" or "unconscious" or some other manner of existing that is hard to specifically point at.
Or alternatively, they look at disparity of outcomes and work backwards to find the discrimination that necessarily must have caused it. But sure, of course they don't do that for fewer men graduating college than women since the 70s or fewer white guys in the NBA. It's a very selective analysis.
It doesn't count as some states doing the opposite of others, when one side is doing something explicitly, and the other subconsciously, imo.
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They're not saying it's true, only perceived. Which is reality for many people
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I have nothing but good things to say about my dad and grandpa. Well, not literally so, but any failings are rather minor in the grand scheme of things.
I was a somewhat sheltered child, so it took me until med school to realize that many people can't take the kind of functional, happy family life I had for granted.
I've done relatively well for myself, choosing between reference classes: Indian/Doctor. That being said, I don't think I could have done what my dad did, which was to hustle from being a refugee without a penny (or Indian paisa) to his name, to being modestly famous, and having set his kids up for success. Seriously, all I managed was to more or less not stagnate or back slide when it comes to socio-economic condition, whereas he took us from nothing to a very comfortable existence. He's hard working, to the point where it's taking its toll on his health, and tightened belts when not strictly needed so there'd be enough to go around on a rainy day.
My grandpa? The kindest man I know, and the best doctor to boot. He's at the age where he's finally becoming less than outright famous, but only because even his junior peers are dying of old age or going senile. There was a time when just mentioning that I was his grandson would open doors, he's 95 and there are still patients calling the smartphone he can barely use for medical advice or requesting surgery. Thankfully he's able to sign post them to his SIL, my dad. It breaks my heart to see senility, long averted, finally take him. He lived a ridiculously healthy, outright ascetic lifestyle, and as a consequence, lived well past 90 in good health and only recently took a turn for the worse.
It could be worse. He gets to live with my family, both because it's multi-generational, and because they couldn't bear to part with him. No care home for him, just the comfort of a house he built himself, with his daughters, son-in-laws and most of his grandkids doting on him.
My dad might be a better surgeon, but he'll never be as universally adored. Too stingy, by far. Back when I was in med school and sat in with my grandpa during his clinics, he'd waive fees more often than not when anything about his patient gave him the impression that they were anything but well off.
In contrast to them? I'm not nearly as hard working. On the flip side, I never had to be, having been spared, through the dint of their hard work, from every worrying where my next meal would come from. I've still done okay, but in a way, I side stepped direct comparisons of clinical competence by not taking up a gynecological or surgical field. Didn't like them, but I certainly felt easier knowing we won't be measured by the same benchmark.
Yet humans are (still) all too mortal and frail. The giants I looked up to now look up at me, and at times, I wonder if their pride in me is overly tinged by ties of blood. I tell myself I've done enough to be proud of, and sometimes, I believe it. I'd certainly be prouder than my heart could bear if my future kids looked at me the same way I look to them.
Since you pivoted into a comparative study of different cultures and places, I guess I can share my impressions of the UK/Scotland:
Slow decay.
Britain is a stagnant, often involuting place. Half the times I visit any but the largest cities in Scotland, I'm struck by the urban decay. I've never seen places with so many boarded up shops, hopeful cafes and hipster restaurants with only decaying shop decals to evidence that they ever existed. India might be dirtier, smellier and louder, but it always gives the impression of growth. There's just too much demand for entire buildings or prime real estate to sit empty and unlet. At the bare minimum, some entrepreneurial type would set up a food outlet or stall there.
Most of what appeals about the UK is old. Ancestral manors, cities and cobbled streets older than street cars. Even the NHS, considered a national treasure, is in slow motion collapse. Quick, free and high quality. Pick any two. By Indian standards, they picked the latter, but any good Indian private hospital will get you far more timely and attentive care than what the NHS can offer.
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I don't think I agree that the Boomers are worse off than previous generations, though this may be true for Boomers that got smacked by the decline of manufacturing as a solid career. But overall, Boomers got the sustained growth boom of the 90s.
Something like Gen X or Millenials, who broadly got their early careers hurt by the GFC, have been exposed to the runup in housing prices (accompanied in recent years by higher interest rates), and are stuck paying for the unsustainable elder care that Boomers have voted for themselves, would be the generations I might pick as likely to be more worse off.
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Uh oh. Chat am I cooked? My father and his father are genuinely some of the best people I know. Kind, reasonable, good fathers and husbands, charitable, and extremely hard working. Genuinely don't think I can measure up. Is my self esteem doomed?
My dad has visited all those countries (though Thailand the fewest times), and his experiences match up for sure. Said Japan was remarkably older than expected, but SK was extremely vibrant and modern feeling. But does architecture really reflect success? You know, during the United States' most successful century, a lot of cities were frankly total crap to live in for a good portion of the time. Smog and smoke everywhere, urban overcrowding, the occasional riot, etc. I'd say it's less about confidence or architecture or dynamism than it is if people care, on an individual level, strongly, about their fates. In that sense, as long as the structuralists don't stifle the individualists too much, we're probably OK, macro-scale. Individual welfare is another matter entirely.
There's one big point about the US I disagree with. West-coasters might be less traditionally polite, but are far more open about experiences than other parts of the country. My sister is in college in upstate NY and it was quite an adjustment even in the small things - people are far less likely to strike up conversations, no one responds genuinely to "how was your day" to strangers like they do back out West, and the casualness to which you treat others in some ways translates to a very egalitarian society, where someone rich might genuinely have similar mannerisms to someone poor, (though not in all areas). I would say rather than respect being lost, it's a different kind of respect.
My dad and grandpa are/were similarly, unattainably excellent people. I may make more money even if my overall morality score has some generational decay. So at least I've got that going for me, which is nice.
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I was reading along fine until your critique of Japan, which I found rather superficial. You may be right that Japan is in decline, at least according to your own metrics. But I don't feel the ways you suggest can be felt when you're eating the egg sandwiches and milling through Shinjuku station. But then I'm in Kansai. Nothing feels wrong to me about the old men in Mah Jong parlors or the Komeda Coffee chains that actually spell coffee in kanji (珈琲), at which point you know you're not in Starbucks. To me, these places are amazing. Old men in old men coffee shops, grandma playing ground golf in the fenced in area beside the rice paddy -- these are people living their lives--and, crucially, living their lives socially--not rotting in front of a mobile phone. Or at least not yet.
I've spent less time in France, but when I was there, in particular when I was in Paris, I had less of a transcendent experience than you seem to have had in other areas. And when I return to the US I find myself typically in a constant state of wonder and affection for almost everyone I speak to--generally interaction is the key. I can easily despise randos I never talk to.
Just a few thoughts. I enjoy effort posts almost always even when I disagree with the vibe.
I'm glad you shared your thoughts regarding Japan, thank you! I know you live there as I've read posts from you before. I don't doubt that you have a more intimate knowledge of the country and culture than I do (myself having spent only about 5 months in the country on three separate trips between 2007 and 2022). I probably came across as more harsh and critical than I meant to. I really like Japan a lot. The kissaten and mah jong parlors are amazing to me too, but undoubtedly signals of stagnation. It's actually deeply respectful and cool in a way- I wish the rust belt city I grew up in kept its own culture alive to with the same affection and attention to detail that Japan is doing.
And on the other hand, I don't actually always have a transcendent experience of France. I mentioned that I've been there more than any other country outside my own which is true but I don't really know why. The social mores are opaque and exhausting to me. Every time I leave the country I feel relief that I don't have to worry about pissing off a shopkeeper without understanding what I did. But all of that is true even while the positive things I said about it are also true.
Glad you enjoyed my post, thanks for engaging!
Por que no los dos? It's not mutually exclusive.
What about China, where you have greybeards playing majong in the shadows of 5-year old L.E.D.ed-out towers? There are a lot of old people in China, and despite the Cultural Revolution, plenty of old stuff and old vibes, even as there's a lot of optimism and striving forward. Yes, it's a harsh man-eat-man world, and the Lying Flat Movement might not feel irrational for many, but when I was there in the early 2010s, the mood seemed overall optimistic. I haven't returned since, and China changes so fast and is a big country so I don't know what the aggregate mood is... but I doubt it's the same sort of checked-out resignation I hear casually invoked on West Coast US. Not to jump on one little thing you said, but I think the critical aspects are the growth, and the feeling of personal agency. It seemed to me that Chinese people, while understanding the corruption etc, still believed that if they worked really, really, really fucking hard they could better their circumstances. Many Americans seem to feel resigned to a decline, but also don't really seem to have any specific idea of what that looks like, and can't articulate it beyond vibes.
America is inevitably going to decline because there’s nowhere else to go. Obviously America could keep growing. That’s possible. But it doesn’t feel that way because a lot of the growth recently looks fake. There aren’t more houses, because America grew by financial maneuvers the average person doesn’t understand. Not by building.
So Americans are just mind-broken? The US has everything it needs to build houses! Just because the recent "growth" has been a facade, there's no reason we can't get rid of bullshit jobs and teach them to weld. If Chinese can work round-the-clock to throw up twenty story tower blocks in just a couple years, there's no reason Americans can't other than unnecessary regulations. I'm not talking about safety standards, but stuff like nighttime construction noise ordinances and onerous environmental review. It seems that at every level there are entrenched institutions enforcing pay-to-play systems, rent-seeking and restricting access to the ability to do basically anything. We just need to get out of our own way! This goes for Canada too! Do we just need to wait for the boomers to die?
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LOLWUT? Also
About a million new privately-owned single family houses a year. Plus 600,000 other privately owned housing units.
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This was an interesting post, cheers. I wanted to push back a little on your thing with your dad and grandfather though - not to say that you are wrong, but there might be factors you didn't get to see - with an experience of my own. See my dad passed away not too long ago too and it was tough. He'd been on dialysis for half a decade, gone through one quadruple bypass and had a stent, so we weren't expecting him to last much longer, but I had looked after him (during which time we had grown very close and had a lot of hard but rewarding conversations about our issues with each other) and my youngest brother and sister adored him due to growing up with him after our parents divorced, so we were very broken up. But my other brother, the one closer in age to me, lived interstate and when he saw us at the funeral - particularly me - he was perplexed, because he loved our father, but also despised him for the way he'd treated us older kids growing up.
We grew up before the concept of child abuse really existed in the public consciousness and dad didn't think twice about using violence to poorly solve his problems - he felt it was part of his identity as a former soldier I think. He put my brother through a wall once for mouthing off at him, threw me down a flight of stairs when I swore on Jesus' name that I hadn't shoplifted something he was sure I had (I hadn't) and beat both of us with a bed post once when we didn't do washing he'd forgotten to ask us to do. Those are just a few of the more fucked up examples, I can keep at this all day because dad's violence was one of the defining aspects of my growing up - I still remember sitting in the lounge room watching the six o'clock news about one of the first cases where a parent was convicted of child abuse, and when mum went out of the room to get a cup of tea dad turned the TV down and quietly told my brother and I that if we ever even thought of doing that he would kill us and he wouldn't need 30 seconds to do it.
And I'd forgotten how much I resented looking after him when he first got sick - I certainly didn't want to do it, but he'd looked after me when I was sick so I felt I owed him. I spent a lot of time with him though and like I said, we had some difficult conversations, and I learned that he had genuinely grown since our childhood, and over time we grew to be each other's confidants - I still miss him every day. But my brother never got that and so his image of him was still those dead sharks eyes in the lounge room that night.
Tldr - your dad probably spent a lot of time with a very different person than the granddad you knew and loved, because they lived in a different time with very different standards of behaviour. I don't mean to denigrate your granddad, just saying violence used to be a lot more acceptable as a solution and even monsters can become decent people.
I find it interesting how siblings who by and large grew up in the same house can have radically differing opinions of their relatives (and with that, which relative they clearly take after; my half sister is very much like the women on her father's side of the family in spite of having spent very little time with them growing up, while I'm so much like my maternal grandfather that my father believed my mother when she told him that I'm not his kid. Funny enough, my stepmother disagrees and loves to point out the dumb little habits and traits that we share.).
My mom (a former Marine, FWIW; my parents met in the Corps) was something of a cartoon villain of a parent, most likely suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and the shrink I saw was adamant that she suffers from ASPD as well. My favorite story to tell about her is when she burned our house down for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and then doctor-shopped shrinks and had me diagnosed with OCD and put on Zoloft at the ripe old age of nine because I was sad about having lost everything (There are details that make this story funny.). There are stories I've learned not to tell. Millennials love to complain about their families/childhoods but it's a party foul to throw real trauma out there. Failure as a sibling and murdered pets are a mood-killer.
The confusing part about it is that her parents were flawed but relatively decent people whose kids (my mother and aunt in particular) turned out to be Hillbilly Elegy-tier fuckups (My aunt was very much like JD Vance's mom.), and having mentioned the book one of the problems I have with it is that it comes from the perspective of the youngest sibling in which he claims a position of unconditional victimhood. I'm the eldest son, so it's not that easy, and one of the hardest things about adulthood is realizing that I have no more power today to save my sisters from their godawful decisions than I did as a boy in the face of our mother's wrath.
At the same time, while I still consider my maternal grandparents to have been good people (My theory is that the crazy skipped a generation. Apparently my great grandmother was infamous for being an ill-tempered banshee.), I differ with my sisters in that I consider my mother's complaints about her parents to have been more or less accurate. Her father wasn't around much because they were poor and he was always at work (Cat's in the Cradle was a hit in the 70s because it resonated with a bunch of guilty Silent Gen consciences. Gen X was prone to helicopter parenting in compensation for having felt neglected as kids.) and her mother was depressed and withdrawn (Two of her six children didn't survive to adulthood and died within 18 months of each other. No shit she was depressed.). I grew up watching the toxic push-pull of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw. Mamaw meant well in her way, but was utterly smothering, controlling, treated my mother as an incompetent child, and had the gall to say that she raised me and is the reason I turned out alright, not mom. Mamaw was an astute enough critic, but utterly lacking in self-reflection such that she and her daughter were stuck in a perpetual fight where they were both right about each other but never willing to look in the mirror.
My little sister was chosen to speak in the commencement when she graduated from undergrad and gave a deeply moving speech about our grandfather, her hero (and mine). He really was a good man, kind and generous to a fault, and we were his little sidekicks as children. When the house burned down he took his shoes off and handed them to me, because he would be damned before he saw his grandkid go barefooted. We're so alike that I might as well be his walking clone. Thus, I say the following not out of iconoclasm, but self-reflection. He was a servant, but spineless. He was conflict-averse to a fault and didn't like exercising authority as the patriarch or dealing with drama and so rarely did, leaving his children feeling neglected and unprotected from their mother's maladies. Alzheimer's is an awful, but at times illuminating disease. I was fortunate in that I was able to catch him on a good day, tell him that he was the best grandfather I could've asked for (at which he perked up and asked, "Really?"), and promise to take care of Mom and the sisters for him. The sad truth is that he spent his life feeling like he'd never done good enough. When Mamaw died he woke up every morning thinking that she'd left him. I pray that being able to be the grandfather that he was gave him some peace for having been unable to be the father he wanted to be.
My mom? She'll never be much of a "mom", but she really did try to be better and to her credit is not a bad mom in the same way that her mom was bad to her. My little sister lives on the other side of the country and is still terrified of her in her mid-20s to the point that seeing someone who looks too much like her makes her freak out (Dear little sis, you have a Master's in psychology. Please see a fucking therapist for yourself because you don't have to live like that. Mom was the sort of awful that forced little sister's decorated Force Recon Marine combat veteran father into abject servility, but she isn't Agent Smith and is frankly far past her prime at this point. Sadly, for all his military chops her father is kind of a deadbeat and whatever differences I have with my father, I genuinely pity her for having a father best described as "useless".), but Mom is still a person. Inhumane at times, yes, but still human. I don't have the right to speak for my sisters, but speaking for myself if I have to be the only kid who talks to her, so be it. I'm not going to drown myself on her behalf (Mercifully, she's embraced "disabled veteran" as her latest identity, so she's mostly the VA's problem now.), but I do what I can. I won't cosign a loan for her because I know better than that, but I'll front her a down payment if I've got it. I'm the favorite kid, so she's usually good for paying it back. Having been the favorite and something of the sibling relations equivalent of a war criminal is what I have to deal with. Everyone has their cross to bear, I guess, and that one's mine. I deal with her so my sisters don't have to.
Yeah it took me a while to figure out that's the right way to do it - you know you can handle it, because you handled it as a kid. Maybe not perfectly, or even well, but better than all the people who couldn't. Borderline personality disorder's manipulative aspects make me see red, but it seems to me like they can't really stop themselves, it's a soul crushing irony that their abandonment issues drive almost everyone away. You're a good son for staying by her side though anyway, it might be your cross to bear but I know it can't be easy.
I guess the difference between my sisters and I is that they still demand some variety of justice, some "thing" that's going to make up for their suffering and make life happy ever after, or at least punish our mother, as if being pensioned off the by the VA in her mid 50s and facing the rest of her life alone isn't sad enough. For the middle sister it's always the next man, so she winds up in horrible relationship after horrible relationship (Refusing to address her severe obesity doesn't help here; it's an ugly thing to say, but she could get a higher caliber of man than the trash that she dates if she weren't pushing 400lbs. Ozempic exists! She makes good money so there's no reason that she couldn't afford it or at least one of the bootleg versions.). For the little sister it's the next degree, with a PhD being the holy grail, so she has two master's degrees, 250K in student loan debt, and a job that barely affords her living in an east-coast city with roommates.
Dealing with the manipulation is hard because I struggle to set boundaries or say "No.", but that, reflexive risk-aversion, and trying to buy feeling worthy/like a not bad person through overcommitment are things that have gotten me in more trouble in non-familial relationships than anything else. I spent my 20s being the "functional" one in my friend group and a few friendships in particular (One at least had the excuse of being a woman that I was love with.) wound up costing me around $30K between unpaid rent, a damaged car that I had to sell at a loss, and then god knows how much in unpaid mechanical labor. I'm good at avoiding the violent psycho variety of crazy but realizing that I'm not obligated to drown myself in service of someone who elicits my pity or that I like was a harder and more expensive lesson to learn. There's no amount of doing for others that's going to award you a "you're a good person and I love you" card. You'll just wind up broke and tired, and unless you address that compulsion you won't believe people when they tell you all those nice things anyway.
The way I put it now is that I have the right and obligation to defend myself and saying "No" is sometimes a necessary exercise in that.
How did you convince yourself you aren't being selfish though? Like you are standing there just having listened to someone explain that they feel like going postal and can you do them a huge favour and over-commit to some project that is frankly none of your business, and what am I going to do with that time? Nothing of value most likely. If I'm at work it's no drama, because work is work, but if they ask in my free time I don't know how to say "sorry, no, I just finished the second season of this puppet show I've been watching and I have to watch a movie now before I start season 3." Doesn't the "I have a right to defend myself" argument feel a bit hollow in the those circumstances?
Sometimes you are being selfish, and you have to realize that it's okay to have (or not have) wants and desires of your own. In pettier situations it does ring a bit hollow, but in my experience if you can't learn to say "No" to something that isn't really a big deal (and to be clear, you don't have to say "No" every time; doing favors can make for rewarding experiences), you'll get get stomped on when the big things do come up. You don't have to be specific, just "sorry man, I'm tired, have other stuff going on, or whatever it is". People aren't going to hate you for that just like I don't hate my friends/relatives for not answering the phone when I call them in the middle of a long drive because I'm bored and trying to kill time. Ask yourself, "Would I be really bent out of shape if someone said "No" to me concerning this?"
I had to kick out two roommates in the last year. One was a big contributor to that 30 grand I mentioned and the other one was an awful, sad story, the prompt of "I have the right to defend myself" as an argument (I'll admit that phrasing comes across as overly dramatic, but you'll see why.). Some spineless regular at the bar I worked at met her on a dating site, hooked up with her, and couldn't handle the crazy (I'm not one who goes around diagnosing every woman I don't like as suffering from BPD, but she's one of two or three I've met in my adult life who was a dead ringer for that malady.). She was homeless/living in extended stays, I had a spare room and could use some extra cash (she was employed), and she seemed nice enough, so I said "Why not?" and took her in. Note to self, Friday night at the bar is not the place to go shopping for roommates.
It was toxic. She's not a bad person and I wish her something better, but she was troubled in a way that I'm not qualified to fix. She was 36 and drank like I did at 22, blacked out every night and trauma dumping on anyone in earshot. Honestly, observing her behavior made me feel deeply embarrassed for myself and how I was at that time and understanding of why the 8th Step exists. During blackouts it wasn't just the mundane stuff about being sexually abused by her father and not believed by her family or being fucked over by every friend in her life, but hearing the most disturbing admission of animal cruelty/neglect that I've heard, being called while working at the bar and told that she'd been on the phone with the suicide hotline, her goading her boyfriend into dumping her because she liked me more (her words), having to reject multiple sexual advances, and her blowing up on me for neglecting her in favor of speaking with an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. All this happened within two weeks. It was a disaster waiting to happen and she had to go. I felt like a massive asshole as I endured tantrums, "Why do you hate me?/What did I do to you/I'm sorry!!!?", and so on with stone silence (precisely how I dealt with/deal with my mother's tantrums), knowing full well what I was exiling her to (where she was before). I did it though, because my only choice was to do the hard thing or get dragged down further into her Hell than I already was. I still think about her sometimes.
That's excellent advice, thanks man. I was going to ask further questions, but I stumbled on the answer myself - I need therapy lol.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. In my experience it takes a reasonable amount of education to be able to pick the right therapist, but you strike me as having a good grasp of the subject.
In my experience, therapy generally isn't a miracle worker (It actually kind of was in terms of acute anxiety symptoms I was experiencing.), but it can equip you with the tools to tolerate things going badly (It really does help to be able to say "This sucks, but I know that my emotional regulation is unusually poor at present. I am not insane and will get through this.) and, more broadly, to be your own therapist. I'd give the therapist that I saw for ~3 months an 8/10. The stuff he understood, he really understood, more than I was prepared to accept at the time (I felt like he was exaggerating the severity of my situation for the sake of being validating. In hindsight, I don't think he was.). The stuff I felt like he didn't, things could get pretty cringe.
If anything, I think the point of therapy is to speed run acquiring these tools and mantras instead of muddling through life never learning them or learning them the hard way and wasting irreplaceable time in the process. I am far from perfect or "fixed" (and at some point in the future may have to take advantage of the fact that my town's selection of therapists is vastly better than it was the last go around), and have generally erred toward learning things the hard way, but I am vastly better off than I was 10 years ago.
Best of luck!
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Very. US is inevitably going to decline in importance, you can't keep fucking up that long and that badly while barely doing anything about an ascending rival, but it's keeping Hawaii. It's simply too important from a strategic point of view as it allows controlling the seas in a huge distance around it.
It does seem possible that it could end up being the most westerly outpost of US if it loses a Pacific War against China.
They're not attracted to each other. It's a dead country. In my opinion all countries are mostly dead but Korea would be dead even if we had 'business as usual' conditions of AI not ever being a thing.
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Does the parents/self-esteem thing work for women too? I feel like it works for men, since men are so heirarchical and fighting for dominance. But I feel like women are more accepting that their daughter/mother is of different status. I dunno, that's my lazy pop psychology.
RE: Japan- most of the things you criticize are things I like about it! I feel like most of the rest of the world is accelerating into the same generic slop: apps for everything, no unique culture, bad english, generic "world" food, etc. Japan is a country that figured out a great way to live in the 80s/90s and just kinda stuck with it. It's like the shire at the end of Lord of the Rings reacted to Saruman and just said "Nope! We don't care about your high-tech economy, we'll just stick with our happy traditional life, thanks."
Also, for what its worth, I found them extremely stylish in fashion/food/music many other ways. I sometimes feel embarassed of how poorly dressed my fellow white people are in Tokyo.
I am not a woman, but I think that the same sex parent comparison works as well for women with their mothers as men with their fathers. They probably place very different weights on different categories- men probably care more about their careers and how hot their wives are, and women probably care more about how rich their husbands are, how successful or polite their children are, or how tidy their house is, but I think it still matters.
I don't know if the following refutes or reinforces the point I just tried to make, and I don't know how universal this is, but I have noticed that my mother seems to place a great deal of weight in her life on the opinion of her father- or what she imagines what it would have been even after he died. He was a teacher so she loved school and became a teacher herself, and one of her most emotional confessions to me was when she mentioned something about her dad poking fun at her growing up.
I am getting a lot of pushback on my Japanese section and I am sorry about that. I really do love the country, I've been there 3 times, I grew up a complete Japanophile. I stand by my assertions, and if they sounded harsh, I don't really mean them that way. I just try to maintain a balanced opinion on the country and see it in the context of everywhere I've been, rather than some shining other thing that stands outside the critiques of time and objectivity. I actually am 100% on board with Japan's weird "galapagos syndrome" thing they have going on and basically would be happy if they went full sakoku again for the next 300 years as the rest of the world laps them in some kind of Amish larp and prohibited me and everybody else who isn't Japanese from ever visiting again. I mean I like novelty so why not. But why is Japan not innovating in a Japanese way? Why are they stagnating in a boring stagnant way? Like do it with some flair, I guess. AI is poised to change everything in gaming in a year or two, but Switch 2 has no AI features that I'm aware of. They just rehashed Mario Kart and jacked the price up.
I could write an entire other post about your last paragraph. Japan is stylish. You're not wrong if your point of reference is Western culture. But the spark of energy in the youth culture scene, I would argue, ain't what it used to be.
One thing is perfectionism. Standards are very very high, especially for anything consumer facing.
Another thing is the steady loss of expertise. Japanese success was heavily based on little family factories and on one room ‘factories’ that were essentially sweatshops. The latter especially aren’t really legal now and the former are dying off. The big zaibatsu corps may acquire them but they aren’t able to hold onto a lot of the ‘tactile experience’ the smaller guys had.
Plus the big companies are clunky and slow moving; they try for Western style agility but it doesn’t come naturally so they hire lots of foreigners and spaff money everywhere without much to show for it. Look at SoftBank investments (Mr. Soft) or the absolute shitshow that is Toyota’s ‘Woven’ startups.
But Japan is certainly trying! Look at the new Kawasaki robot horse, for example.
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It seems like a lot of your criticism is just that it has a lot of old people? Which, yeah, not nearly as many young people as it once did. In part because the birth rate dropped, but also in part because they just live a long time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
SEA and Africa is where the "youth" energy is at these days. Especially Africa... I've never been there though.
Does Israel have youth energy? Utah? Both have very young populations for developed countries.
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Thanks for this post - it's an interesting collection of observations/opinions, though having experienced almost all the places on your list I do not agree with some of them. Regarding your Dresden guy, it seems very natural to me how he would end up with that preference. If you live in Dresden, you spend approximately your whole life having European baroque built at any possible budget, preserved in any state of (dis)repair, and restored anywhere on the spectrum from convincing to cheap China/Las Vegas themeparkery shoved down your throat.
To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context - if he wanted to score those points, by his background he would in fact more likely have been dissecting the details of whatever Rococo creamcake topping stucco you were marvelling at. Are you sure you weren't inadvertently rating him according to an American scorecard? I recall noticing that at my grad school (NE US), there was a clique of locals who were frequent renaissance faire/medieval reenactment festival goers and this slotted into a wider strategy of signalling sophistication to each other, while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.
That is really interesting about Dresden, I have spent very little time in Germany so I didn't understand that context. I have spent about 2 weeks in Berlin and a few months in Austria and Switzerland, so most of my understanding of German culture comes from that, 3 years of German in highschool and having Swiss and German ancestors. My impression of Germany today is that they are less interested in preserving their heritage than the French and Italians (for example) and are more eager to forget their recent past. I was imagining that much of Germany must be filled with new builds today, like what I saw in Berlin. As a crass American I'm less unimpressed by budget baroque than some aluminum siding, even if it's Vegas quality.
It was not that it was medieval, it was that it was a rather ugly brown brick wall that lacked any kind of harmony or beauty or refinement which the neighboring baroque structures exuded. He wasn't trying to score points by liking the middle ages, he was trying to score points by telling me how akshually, the poor and undignified structure keeping the whole thing together is more fascinating than all that crass glitz and glamour next door. I know what he's doing! Everyone in academia does this, all the time. My art history professors in college in 2010 all treated the rococo with disdain. The rococo is my favorite era of art history. It is the most beautiful. What you are saying when you try to place some ugly thing above it, is that I uniquely am pure of heart enough to lift up the poor and the ugly, while you, crass plebeian, shamelessly love what's beautiful. In my mind this is cope. But in fact I do empathize with the impulse. I am more attracted to hairy fat men than I am to modelesque elegant men. But that says more about me than it does about anyone else. If I dated a tall blond Chad, I'll just look bad next to him. If I date a chubby short guy, I get to feel better about myself. If you point to a dirty brown wall and tell me it's more interesting, you're intimating to me that you don't see yourself as equal or worthy of the beauty of something beautiful. Which is fine, but don't pretend like you're setting yourself apart by taking a more intellectual viewpoint that hides your insecurity, and then tell me you're doing it righteously.
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I think there are a few examples like this where "Euro" things are high-status in the US, but in actual Europe they're working-class signifiers. US soccer fans are generally either Hispanic or upper-middle class, with the implied perception of looking down on "American" sports like football (US), baseball, and basketball. Cycling is, or at least used to be a few decades ago, I hear, similar: fancy road bikes are expensive status symbols in America, while in Europe it's often less gear-driven and professional cyclists are often from lower-class backgrounds more like basketball in America.
I think there is probably some general pattern of status versus foreign-ness: the lower classes aren't well-traveled enough to know what goes on in foreign countries, and the tourist class doesn't always grok the cultures they visit to understand the actual class dynamics at play there.
I have spent a lot of time in Europe and to this day I find European social class completely opaque and confusing. The "poor/sketchy" people in most of Europe dress more nicely than the "rich/respectable" people in America, for starters. There are so many specifics of etiquette that fly over my head as an American. That is why traveling in Asia is easier than in Europe in some ways- no one expects you to speak the language or know what's going on if you're white in Asia. If you're white in Europe they don't understand why you don't get the vibe/speak the language/whatever and you make them uncomfortable.
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As a broad historical pattern going back millennia, I should observe that upper classes almost always adopt technologies, cultures, and other aspects from foreign countries before the lower classes do, partly but not entirely due to increased exposure. I'd imagine there are some lower-class American things that seem high-class in Europe as well, but haven't been to Europe so don't know for sure.
Faux-gangsta was a hot trend amongst upper-class children when I was growing up.
Faux-gangsta(we would probably call it ‘thug’) codes as upper-middle class kids that would piss their pants/cry/run away in the event of an actual fight here, too. Obviously there’s people that are like that for real but the difference is so obvious that they’re not the same vibe.
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I don't really understand how you can characterize South Korea as being on the way up whereas Japan is rapidly declining. Japan is older at median age 49 vs South Korea's 45, but 45 is still pretty old. They both have similar economies with similar awful work cultures and similar face cultures. Spaces are clean and well designed in both. Technology is cutting edge in both. What outdated traditions are suffocating you in Japan? Are you sure that outdated traditions aren't suffocating you in South Korea? There are some things worse than outdated traditions, like shudder kpop...
Fun fact: Japan has almost 2x the tfr of korea. Japan has managed to stabilise and even reverse the trend somewhat while Korea breaks new records of low tfr every year.
I knew this intellectually but seeing it put like this… holy shit.
To tie into another one of the OP’s points, I have spoken to many ordinary, blue collar average joes- white, black, and Hispanic- who moved from California to Texas. There are entire real estate agencies specializing in facilitating such a move, by the way. A continuing theme, expressed differently from person to person, is ‘in Texas people give a shit, in California they don’t it’s all fake and they hate their lives’. I have gotten a similar impression from Korea vs Japan; Koreans don’t seem to like being Koreans, they don’t believe in Korea. The Japanese still believe in Japan, warts and all.
Maybe I’m wrong, it’s not something that can be objectively measured. But vibes are real.
I dunno, I actually have a very high regard for Koreans and their mindset. This is just an anecdote but I did visit South Korea a while back and left with a very positive opinion of the people there - in fact they're the loveliest people I've ever met in any country, the hospitality they showed us travellers was just overwhelming. So many of the locals there actually went out of their way to help us and make our experience better, I wasn't expecting it at all. They weren't too hung up on social propriety like the Japanese sometimes are and they didn't help in a way where they were just politely showing service to foreigners, they did so as if they actually wanted to make sure we were safe and comfortable. It may well be my fondest travel experience, and part of the reason why is that it just felt so genuinely welcoming.
Regarding the Japanese and their "belief in Japan", I'm not exactly sure this is a positive - I get the sense they do so by ignoring all the warts and all in their own country out of a sense of nationalism, somewhat similar to how Chinese nationalists do so. This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany. Koreans seem to be more self-critical and this is reflected in their media, but I think in some ways this is a good thing.
I assure you that out of two extremes, the Japanese have chose the healthier way of dealing with it.
The German way wasn't supposed to be healthy for the Germans, though.
Worked as intended, then.
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After seeing the kind of moral browbeating you get when you cannot let 150 year old sins go, I'm willing to say that Japan ignoring its multitude of war crimes is the next best thing after having not done them at all. I don't think they're likely to do it again, so I don't know what the purpose of such guilt would be.
Certainly, Western nations are unique in acknowledging their own crimes, but it seems that these acknowledgements have been put to effective use by anti establishment types who hate the country and want it to die, or at least want the ruling class to go away so that they can be in power.
I guess truth is a fleeting thing for me, sadly. If one side acknowledges it, and the other side acknowledges the other side's ugly truths and then totally ignores its own, then truth must be disregarded. "The first casualty of war is Truth" and all. Koreans are in an even riskier position because of their proximity to such a hostile regime.
"Weird fact, things actually stop being true once many dumb people believe them"
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I'm always stunned when I read that people say Japan ignores its war crimes. Like in what sense? Who are we imagining when we write this? There have been multiple official apologies, there's even a Wikipedia page dedicated to this. It's true there isn't the state mandated self-flagellation and officially mandated distancing (from Nazism) of the type you see in Germany, and it's also true that some deniers and apologists get airtime. But they're not the majority. And anyway what would be preferable? National self-hatred?
I mean, it’s definitely more normalised to the extent that APA hotels is owned by Nanjing Massacre deniers and IIRC put books regarding that in hotel rooms, and that Nippon Kaigi, well, exists. I don’t think either would be permissible in Germany (let alone be able to have members in such high positions as in Nippon Kaigi).
My impression is that many people in Japan don’t know many details about Japanese atrocities, to some extent due to the way history is taught (broadly as a list of facts covering a large span of history, rather than historical analysis).l, and — due both to concerted effort by early postwar governance and due to lack of exposure — people don’t really care.
In that sense it is a "nation that ignores its war crimes". I'm not sure it would be better otherwise, but it is somewhat ugly.
edit: a word
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I definitely wouldn't say they deserve to be constantly browbeaten and driven into self-hatred, and it's true they have issued official apologies over the years. I'm not the largest fan of inherited guilt myself, and wouldn't want to subject the Japanese to that. But it would kind of help their perceptions of sincerity if they didn't enshrine the Martyrs of Showa in Yasukuni Shrine, and if multiple heads of state and government officials didn't ceremonially visit it (granted, visitation is spotty, certain Japanese PMs have made efforts to distance themselves from it).
Consider if Germany had maintained an official shrine in which Nazi war-criminals were worshipped, and if large groups of members of the Bundestag had visited that shrine over the years. Would people have believed the original official apology to have been sincere under those circumstances? I'm aware the PM has no say in who the shrine venerates due to the separation of church and state in Japan, but when they're torn between their sense of nationalism vs. wanting to distance themselves from their actions in WW2, they're likely to select the former.
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Huh, I hadn't really thought about it, to be honest. I just accepted it as a fact through osmosis that Japan generally hadn't apologized for anything and that schools generally don't go over their past wickedness in detail.
I appreciate your Japan facts. I'm still learning Japanese, though my motivation has been wavering lately. I could probably hitch onto some family friends' plans to visit later this year, if I wanted to, but I don't know.
Japanese war crimes were certainly brutal. And I remember having a moment of "Is this cool?" about 20 years ago reading about a local man (since dead) who was remembering his time in Unit 731--like, not from jail, from his kotatsu table in his living room, talking to a reporter. That did seem odd. But I've seen odder here. The guy did express remorse and confusion, and clearly lived with at least the Japanese version of guilt for his past. I suppose that for me, at the time at least, having grown up in the states, I didn't feel this was sufficient punishment.
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Is there another Axis power you are comparing them to? I'll accept the overall premise of "Japan hasn't satisfactorily repented of its war crimes," but Germany is pretty much the only comparison here. Maybe Italy has some reflection, but I think the "and then we overthrew the terrible, no-good Mussolini" take is at least as common as the "we did bad things and supported even worse ones" take.
I haven't visited the more minor powers like Finland, Hungary, and Thailand, but I suspect the take there is closer to "it's complicated".
I don't think Italy committed all that many war crimes? They were certainly allied to Germany and Romania but Italy didn't really participate in most of the worst stuff.
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This is the kind of post that makes so many good, and big, observations that it's hard to respond to usefully, almost.
But at any rate, I've grown to be really, really interested in this topic, specifically on an internal-to-the-USA level. And part of that is that I grew up in the New South in the 80s and 90s, and then I moved to the Midwest, got to know more of the country, and have ended up in a Rust Belt city now, where I'm raising kids. But I still have family down in the New South, so I'm down there fairly often, and (because I grew up there, but only some of my family was from there) I only briefly had a burst of hicklib anti-southern idiocy in my late 20s before reality caught up with me.
But the reality, right now, is that where I am now, it absolutely feels old and gray and like its best days are well behind it, because that is clearly true. The rustbelt part of the country I'm in clearly once had a lot of money, and youth, and immigration, and energy. And now it's like a donut - a small hole of well educated tech and medical workers, and a much larger donut of older, less skilled workers who are kind of decaying in place (in very broad strokes - there are random suburb and exurb professionals too). And that's been roughly true when visiting my family in the Northeast. But where I'm from in the New South is clearly going from strength to strength right now. There are still the general problems that new money has - it still punches under its weight in broader cultural projection and influence on the academy and literary cultural and all the sorts of things that old money tends to be heavily over represented in. But when I go back down to visit my family, there is a sense of confidence, like everything is working right, and most people's best days are ahead of them, not behind them. I mean, this is a huge part of what makes the New South the New South - the older South saw its best days as long, long behind them. Where I live now, the school district has had a stable population for decades and is really strong, but many neighboring districts, if they are less shiny, have been dwindling for a while now. Meanwhile, the county I grew up in in the New South had two high schools when I was there in the early 90s. Now it has 5.
I saw some article a few days ago mentioning that in 2030, at current rates, New South states (and intermountain West) will, combined, get 10 more house seats, and New York, California, and other older Midwest blue states will collectively lose 10 house seats. Or, elsewhere - and this, I think, might be the most important set of statistics in the country - if you look at the enrollment statistics for American public schools by region of the country from the Department of Education, you can literally see the future of the country being written. Fully 40% of American public school children are in the South at this point. Only 15% are in the North East, with the remainder being 20% in the Midwest and 24% in the West. That entire table is worth poring over, because it does capture the slow but steady shift of where people are having kids at this point - there are a lot of regional micro-stories there. As a practical matter, this means that the fact American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil, the local Hitler, probably has a limited shelf life - as the economic and demographic reality of the South rising again becomes more and more unavoidable, and as tolerance to "Hide your strength, bide your time" gets exhausted, there's probably just going to have to be a reckoning with this tension, or so I suspect, and the process might not be pretty. I'm convinced this is an important undercurrent of current politics, in fact - just as the economic, industrial rise of China has proven to be an existential problem in a Thucydides trap kind of way for the existing Yankee built system, the rise of the South is likely not a process that can be easily absorbed by the existing power arrangements because of some deep assumptions in those power structures about the moral role of the South, and the tensions between those assumptions and reality.
Thanks for your kind words at the top! I appreciate it.
Your post is really interesting to me too. I've never encountered the term "New South" before and I tried googling it and only really found this wiki page about the Old South. So I assume the New South would be the states from Texas to Florida, excluding most of the East Coast states? Or is "New South" more of a cultural designation that encompasses rising areas of the entire south as contrasting with more stagnant areas of the entire south?
The population and enrollment statistics you call out are really interesting too. I knew there has been a migration into "the sun belt" out of the northeast but didn't realize it was so influential as to constitute 10 house seats switching hands. Only 15% of school children being in the north east is fascinating but makes sense.
This is really true and so crazy... I am from the midwest but let me try to empathize. I tried watching the movie Sarah Plain and Tall recently (we read the book in third or fourth grade) and was pretty shocked by how the entire plot is that an arrogant East Coast woman comes to the countryside and just tells everybody what to do like she's god's gift to the poor rural people. If she was doing it to Native American people the book would have been canceled a hundred years ago but the woman from the east can correct the behaviors of the poor white middle americans all she wants. I can imagine the arrogance toward the south from these people to be about a hundred times worse than this. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
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And it’s notable that southern culture gets more and more popular every year. Country tops the charts now. Southern food is popular in the north(often brought by black chefs). BBQ is everywhere. Pickup trucks outsell sedans these days.
Southern food being introduced into the north by blacks is nothing new, the only new thing is it being considered Southern instead of Black. Take the stereotype that black people like fried chicken. This is almost entirely a yankee stereotype. Rednecks love fried chicken, why would a group of people who all insist no one else's fried chicken is as good as what their momma used to make think it was a black thing? Same with collard greens, its a poor southern food not a black one.
But after the great migration of black people north in the early 20th century the only people yankees knew who ate fried chicken were black people so they considered it black culture, but it was really just that the blacks were the only southerners they knew so they coded southern culture as black.
There are stereotypically different dishes between white and black southerners and while actual deep redneck food like frog is not becoming popular(nor is actual black specific soul food like chitterlings or pokeweed), more white-coded foods like biscuits and gravy or flavored iced tea definitely are.
A lot of this is just historical class differences but some of it is definitely racial.
My poor white grandparents ate chitterlings (god what a spelling) but my parents used to make fun of them (the chitlins, not the grandparents). Who's eating the pickled pig's feet? I think that's deep country, and maybe also to a degree black-coded. Ironically my Japanese wife, herself brought up in the Kyushu countryside, really likes them, called here tonsoku /豚足.
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Also watermelon is incredibly popular across the South. My (white) family, especially the older generations, really enjoy it in-season.
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There are surprisingly few "sedan" models on the market regardless. Everyone wants hatchbacks, crossovers, or full SUV/trucks.
Obama-era regulation makes small cars almost important to sell on the market (due to sky-high efficiency requirements, relaxed for larger vehicles). The manufacturers are only offering hatchbacks etc.
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Then he points at some medieval support wall, and tells me that he prefers the medieval support structure to the elegance of the palace. Uncharitably, this is the sort of opinion you adopt when you are looking for points for intellect. I preferred the French guy.
Sorry, couldn't resist. I guess I emphasize with your guy from Dresden.
To your general point, imo people are generally sold a certain image of their own future already over the span of their childhood and early adulthood, and how happy they are later as an adult depends on how well reality compares to this deep-seated expectation. This can be the life situation of their own parents, but can be influenced heavily by other people or media as well. The general unhappiness in the west right now is due society selling an extremely unrealistic expectation of self-actualization, especially for the academically inclined. I have a few friends who have unimpressive parents, but got so convinced as students they are contenders for professorship, artists and similarly prestigious occupations that they are deeply unhappy adults now that it becomes clear they are not.
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I was in Chiang Mai, and it seemed dead but more alive than many places. I stayed next to Central Festival, the largest mall in North Thailand. Some places like Germany felt like a place frozen in the past, according to a friend who went there whilst China seems to be pushing towards the future, Saudi Arabia too in ways. We have a weird, global connected world where differences are not that hard to gauge. East Asia has a massive self-esteem problem, so passport bros go there. East Asia has a gutter tier tfr too beyond just low self esteem.
The world stopped being a place where the future feels bright to many. In Thailand, plenty of euros who could not hack it or got disillusioned find some solace. All the euros I met there would lament about things being way way worse. Whilst the locals would treat them better than other locals. The world even in the US is not as optimistic now, given demographic issues and the general unaffordability of real estate. Plenty of small towns are employed by one or two giant factories or industries, these people are at gods mercy if the owner packs up shop and leaves.
India is the same, the population is young but its mostly not smart, and people have accepted that the world is gonna get worse, hence the chad alpha phonk music edits of Ancient India. The breakdown of family, civil lives and places to these sterile multi-cultural grounds does not spark any joy. The story is the same in many places: the boomers sold the Canadians out, but they also sold us out. All we can do is pay for their retirements and hope that no one is that stupid. I wrote a comment in the thread about the same happening in India, you may find it helpful.
Quality comment op, very high effort!
Thanks for the kind words! Ah, Central Festival, I went there a few times- I stayed closer to some of the other malls but made the trip out to that one once in a while. Super fun. Small world!
I read your post about India when you posted it yesterday. I have very little knowledge of the country but the situation sounds pretty dire from your post. If I read correctly, it looks like the right wing Hindu party announced a census. Does this not benefit the right wing Hindu upper caste? If not, why did they agree to do a census? I think that you're opposed to the census because it will be used by the lower castes to demand reparations or better treatment from the right? (Sorry if I'm way off base with anything here)
Though I know very little about India, I do work in ecommerce and lots of people are eying India as an alternative manufacturing base post China tariff apocalypse, is this something that people in India are aware of? Would you see this as a benefit to your country, bringing in jobs and money, or not really because they are low paying jobs with long hours? (In my mind, the manufacturing is what built China from dirt poor to where they are today so I don't see it as a negative but feel free to tell me I'm wrong)
I didn't mention China in my original post at all because I haven't been there. But I believe they've grown massively in the past 2 or 3 decades. I imagine people feel great about themselves and their prospects. I'd love to have someone make an effortpost (or even a short post) about the way China would fit in with my analysis of things.
This is pretty true. The fates of entire cities in Ohio, Kentucky, Eastern PA etc definitely operate this way
So fascinated by this take! I found it super exciting and not dead at all. Then again I grew up in the midwestern rust belt so my standard for dead has to be way lower than someone from India.
Hindu upper caste is responsible for everything good in India and carries elevated levels of Aryan ancestry, thus being the least diluted descendants of the Indo Aryans. Due to the small size and historic overrepresentation, the underclass is extremely resentful, being dirt poor makes it worse. The Bjp is the Hindu or Upper Caste party the way Republicans are the white party, which is to say not all. They swindle Hindus and use Muslims as scapegoats but require more energy, a vision to get more votes.
India is 80 plus percent OBC or below, 20 percent isn't a large number. In reality upper castes lack a sense of identity strong enough to will the nation to acknowledge what's happening. All of the armed forces is made up of the same stock, yet people, bjps most ardent voters are upper castes who accept evil because the alternatives much worse.
The backwards are made up of three classifications, OBCs or shudras or peasant castes, SCs who are what you would call scheduled castes under which some were mistreated, also known as dalits. STs are the final which is a classification I could never make sense of as these are tribals. OBCs are the largest percentage share of the nation, followed by these two, Muslims and then Upper castes. Modi wants to win after all. They also took away land Vai redistribution, the state pays you 10k usd for marrying into another caste, you can barely get a job or a degree or get representation. How much more does one even need?
India can never industrialise properly, it's industrial base is a joke as the bureaucracy and politicians exist to only take kickbacks. Nothing of note will ever get made here the way it happens in China and it'll only get worse as automated customer care and 105 iq language models make junior Javascript devs obsolete. You just can't get things done here on scale, period. People know what's good, they just don't care, this includes upper caste elites unfortunately. They have one foot out the door already.
China is a fun place, it's got terrible demographics, lower tfr is bad because it means the people leave but I don't think China does anything super special, they just avoid stupid things liberal world loves. That's enough in this day and age.
Chiang mai felt dead to me personally. I was alone with my other ex co founder and it was a terrible time. I saw way too many passport bros and women, the local ones really like exotic men which felt unappealing to me, I don't like Asian women but there was something about it that felt kinda off. People led good lives, law and order was nice, hospitals worked, the roads were clean yet I never could relate to it as much. I did enjoy pai, the hippy village next to it a lot more since I'm young.
There are some places today like NY or SF and a few others that are epicentres of important things, the way Kashmir was to Shaivism a few centuries ago. But it felt dead to me because I'm not a local, it's pretty alive if you're one. Maya mall, nimman, the night markets, Zoe In Yellow, spicy, Chiang Mai Ram, the man made lake next to the law department were things that I still remember to this date. I'd visit this cafe called Vaana next to central festival. Though my time there was awful as I was on the mercy of my ex co founder, had zero money and was extremely stressed, I would love to visit again once I'm rich lol. It's a good place, I remember looking at the mountains from my apartment and the drive to pai. Feels like a lifetime ago.
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America thrived on a whale fall after WWII, but the bones are picked dry and the Baby Boomers were the ecosystem which thrived upon it. That’s my new metaphor.
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