This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On Communist Supervillains, Cognitive Dissonance, and IQ.
1 . Communist Supervillains.
Somewhere on the motte I found a link to a 1983 Harvard debate between architects Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. The debate was shocking not only for its content, but for its clarity and its age. It made me do some thinking about communism, cognitive dissonance and IQ. Hence this post.
Alexander and Eisenman are/were eminent architects and professors of architecture. In the debate, Alexander explains his philosophy of architecture. Alexander focuses on harmony. He explains how important it is for the building to accomplish its purpose, for the persons who use the building to literally feel comfortable in whatever that purpose might be. Alexander also explains his process (iteration and full-scale mock up) of achieving that harmony. If the purpose of a square is to provide students a place to relax and feel free from distraction, the square must actually create that mental state. There must be harmony between these things.
Eisenman is a deconstructivist (socialist). Eisenman views the creation of disharmony as a moral imperative. Eisenman explains that architecture is meant to make people psychologically (and sometimes physically) uncomfortable. Buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain on the people who view and use the building, or it has failed its purpose. An architect has a moral imperative to create such pain among the populous.
This is real supervillain shit. Eisenman is an influential architect, part of a whole school of architecture, who spends his time, and his students time, and untold sums of money, refining their skill at creating buildings that are mathematically ugly, disharmonious, and cause psychological pain to those who view and occupy them. And he explains all of this in absolutely clear and calm language.
Now, for students of socialism, Eisenman's outlook is not noteworthy. Socialists of all stripes are notorious for compulsively committing their thoughts and plans to paper or speeches. However, for me, the Alexander v Eisenman debate highlights the absence of public backlash. At least, not enough to prevent them from making such buildings.
You would think that if an architect responded to a city's call for plans for a new middle school building and said 'my plan is to create this building, which I believe will maximize the amount of discomfort and pain felt by anyone who gazes upon or enters it,' that his plan would be immediately rejected and that he would probably suffer some sort of social consequences. Apparently, that is not the case. Apparently, you can successfully make that pitch without much trouble.
How is that possible?
2 . IQ
My first hypothesis is that a sufficient number of persons are literally incapable of comprehending these words and ideas, even when spoken plainly and directly. However, I am not familiar enough with the IQ literature to validate this hypothesis.
I am familiar with the basics of literacy levels. As you can see, the levels come with clear examples, and explain what a person at a given level can or cannot understand. If Eisenman's statements were written, then we could plug them into the levels, and determine who would understand.
However, I am interested in who could understand Eisenman's plain statements regardless of medium (written, spoken, etc.). What IQ would be necessary to understand the statement 'I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind.'? Does anyone have a source which equates IQ scores with conceptual understanding in a manner similar to the literacy levels?
3. Cognitive Dissonance
My second hypothesis is that sufficiently many people do understand what's going on when they encounter socialists like Eisenman extolling their plans to do evil, but that a majority of those people with an IQ sufficient to understand in theory, are in fact blinded by cognitive dissonance. That is to say, most people's minds will not let them take seriously the idea that whole departments of people believe that turning buildings into psychic weapons is a moral imperative. Even when the evil doers state their intentions plainly and have a decades (millennia) long history of success.
Edit: Adding a comment I made downthread. I rest my case.
@sansampersamp is an architect. Let's see what he has to say about 'where architecture has gone' since Eisenman.
Okay. What does Gage say?
There might be some youngsters or non-english speakers in the audience. Let's double check the essence of Lovecraft:
So architecture has moved on from Eisenman to getting as close to emparting "cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries" as they can.
No, no. They're not evil. They're just trying to create buildings that replicate the effect of an alien presence so profoundly dangerous that merely conceptualizing a infinitesimal part of it drives you to madness.
I think that most forms of culture war are specific extensions of the desire that most organisms have, to alter the environment so that they and others like them can more easily thrive. (I apologize that my comment is mostly tangential to the question you are asking...)
An example from nature: when two males fight over a female, it stresses out both of them, but so long as at least one male is confident that his survival benefits from that stress, there will always be a male willing to create this type of stress for other males.
-One of my theses in life is that most people are world-class at lying to themselves. (And then there's a separate group that aren't lying to themselves, but they are good at lying to others. But I think the first group is largest, partly because the people that are best at lying to themselves are often best at lying to others.)
I think it is fairly common that people are actually warring against others, trying to hurt them, but they are using a "noble" motive to rationalize (to themselves and to others) their harms towards other people. The desire to stress out others is usually subconscious, not conscious.
And precisely because they are harming others, their rationalization instinct is strongest.
-One general way to purposefully harm others is that if there is something which stresses someone out less than it stresses out other people, then it can make sense to try to increase that thing. They and their progeny will then be likely to gain a survival advantage relative to everyone else (but it must be a tolerable stress, if they don't survive the stress then it's not worth it).
But it helps to rationalize the harm they are doing, to protect their own self-concepts & to protect their social status. If you see yourself as the villain, and everyone else sees you as a villain, the strategy will usually backfire.
If people like Eisenman are fundamentally more comfortable with disharmony (ironically, they themselves being more in harmony with "disharmony"), then inflicting it on other people will give them a relative survival advantage over others. Eisenman might have rationalizations for why his architecture style is good for society on net, but I think it's entirely possible that it's just an unconscious self-preservation lie.
Some possible examples of the phenomenon of people stressing out others more than they themselves are stressed out:
-People that tolerate or enjoy graffiti might use graffiti to drive out the people that don't like graffiti.
-Online trolls tend to be comfortable with the overall trolling dynamic, so it can be a useful way to take over a community, as it drives off all of the people that aren't comfortable with the trolling dynamic.
-Using gunshot noises to reduce crowding and reduce rents (hopefully just apocryphal, but it would probably work in reality) https://www.quora.com/Can-I-lower-rent-in-my-neighborhood-by-shooting-blanks-and-playing-guttural-screams-from-loud-speakers-in-the-middle-of-the-night-at-least-3-times-a-week-The-rent-here-is-too-damn-high-please-I-am-desperate-for-more
-Using bureaucracy, red tape, and legalese to make life more difficult for most other people, but easier for you (if you are relatively better at dealing with such environments)
-Some people are just generally better at thriving in societies with an excess of laws and rules, and these people often have no real interest in helping other people to be free of excess regulations.
-Some people thrive in societies in which there are lots of vices present. They are relatively immune to the vices (gambling, alcohol, drugs, credit cards, etc), and can instead profit off of exploiting the more easily tempted nature of others.
-My general impression is that some of the people that care the least about environmental pollution are, for genetic reasons or lifestyle reasons, relatively more immune to the negative effects of pollution. Not totally immune, but more immune. And it seems like some of these pollution-resilient people end up being weirdly tolerant and even eager to increase pollution. It is hard for environmentalists to overcome this phenomenon.
-Some people are very good at self-censoring what they say. So even if they don't agree with the censorship, they may go along with it, since the censorship creates a more hostile environment for the competition. (I'm willing to bet that a decent chunk of men in academia are functionally misogynistic to some degree, but if they can reliably censor that, they might be supportive of rules and norms which drive out the men that are bad at self-censorship, since that leaves more women & jobs for the men that are good at self-censorship.)
I appreciate your comment a great deal. I considered this angle as well. Eisenman speaks to it in the talk. He does not say that he seeks a harmony which happens to be diametrically opposed to Alexander's view of harmony. Eisenman makes clear that he specifically seeks disharmony. The buildings he designs are not beautiful and useful, but only to socialists. They are equally horrible and dysfunctional and painful to socialists as well.
I think this is the reason that Shafarevich concludes socialism is ultimately a sort of complex behavior of suicide. The goals they seek are ultimately terminal to themselves. Indeed, remaking man (in the literal physical, biological sense) such that he can only survive under socialist conditions has been a frequent goal of socialist groups. See 'new socialist man' or 'new soviet man.'
That said, I am out of my evolutionary-biological depth at this point. I suppose you could posit a selection mechanism that is selecting only for a group to pass on its genes, and those genes happen to be ones that derive pleasure from anti-harmony. But, I don't think group selection of this type is necessarily proven out; I think it is individual selection all the way down, with group selection as more of a second order phenomenon. I think, But like I said, I'm out of my depth here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link