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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Where does power, or the personal perception of power, come into all this? It seems to me like what you call out as hypocrisy could just as easily be explained by a belief that in one's own power/helplessness to implement one's beliefs. That the people you identify as either not holding beliefs, or as hypocrites, are instead rationally biding their time until they can implement their ideas en masse to greater benefit.

The inspiration for this came about partly through conversations I've had with friends and family members, and I've noticed that people sincerely say and profess to believe shit all the time while simultaneously failing to exhibit most or all of the conventional features we'd expect in cases of genuine belief. Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about. Or consider me, who claims to believe that AI risk is a deep existential threat to humanity, yet gets very excited and happy whenever a shiny new AI model is released.

I'd like to take a moment to appreciate that you provided one Blue Tribe, one Red Tribe, and one Grey Tribe example; so that we all will tend to see one "moral" take, one "immoral" take, and one neutral-weird one.

The unifying factor across these beliefs doesn't seem to be hypocrisy, but a perception of a lack of power to implement change. Your sister sees no point in limiting her own consumption of carbon-intensive goods/services when her individual actions will mean little without regulatory change to enforce mass movement towards those goals.* The real win is governments implementing industrial carbon limits, not limiting your own flights to achieve nothing. Your father might see no point in being cruel to Muslims who are here and who he has no power to expel, but if I were a Muslim I certainly wouldn't count on his good will. I would imagine that he might choose to ban Muslim immigration or deport already present Muslims given the power to do so, even though he functions the way he does when lacking power. There's no benefit to him from excluding Muslims personally or being mean, there might be a benefit from ultimately removing all Muslims or Islam from the world.**

Thus a lot of what you identify as hypocrisy, is better seen as a rejection of the Guidance Counselor Office Poster advice about "Be The Change You Wish to See in the World." Instead, they might hold a belief closer to Big Yud's "Be Nice, Until You Can Coordinate Meanness." Perhaps "Be selfish in the circumstances you find yourself, but be willing to advocate for coordinated actions that might go against your selfish goals; don't be selfless unilaterally." This is a fairly common set of circumstances, a liberal billionaire might advocate higher taxes on himself politically, while also not overpaying the taxes he owes; Reagan believed strongly in Nuclear disarmament while also continuing to invest in and maintain the USA's nuclear arsenal to protect MAD and pressure the Soviets; or one might believe a gun-free society would be superior, but own a gun because you want to defend yourself against others with guns who you have no power to disarm.

Another example, a lot of people who conspicuously complain about the modern dating/romance/marriage/sex scene still participate in it for their own selfish gain, but if we had a big Constitutional Convention of Sex to decide how we were going to do things going forward they might choose a different system altogether. Saying that one can't date if one doesn't approve of the entire social system veers dangerously close to the meme about "Oh you critique society while participating in society!" One must do what one must do to live in society, and then seek to implement change by obtaining and exercising power over the collective. Your system requires all dissidents to Benedict Option themselves (at a minimum!) or be called hypocrites or non-believers.

Friedman feels relevant here, to view it in a more systematic way:

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

So I might hold a genuine belief, but have no interest in marginalizing myself by advocating it or implementing it in a useless way, while having an ultimate interest in implementing the idea in an effective way.

That feels much less organized than I'd like, maybe I need to chew on this idea more.

*For what it is worth, I tend to believe that most climate change activists seem to operate based on banning things they didn't like anyway. Climate change is at core about restricting people, and obviously some things will be justifiable and some things will not be justifiable under a carbon framework. People who get woke to the climate issues tend to restrict things that they/their class didn't want to do anyway: drive pickup trucks, run industrial concerns, have American children. They tend to ignore or justify the climate impacts of things that they did want to do anyway: fly to foreign countries, import fancy food from abroad, living/allowing people to live in places that are more carbon intensive. Right wing malthusian overpopulation types similarly tend to be most conspicuously concerned about preventing the birth of too many of the kinds of people they didn't like to begin with.

**I feel like your AI thing can be mapped to that as well, but it didn't write out well so I omitted it. But there are reasons for a grey-tribe individual to be selfishly excited at each new AI advancement even if they are frightened of AGI apocalypse. Empowering tech people, or confirming beliefs so people will take them seriously, or just the joy of saying I Told You So. Idk, I'm not one of y'all.