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Notes -
Some scattered thoughts on personal Agency.
A number of recent comments about consciousness, agency, neurological development, and Trump's first couple weeks in office have gotten me thinking...
When you first bring home a new baby they are functionally just a lump of flesh that converts milk into noise and feces. At some point in the first year they transition from a mostly inert lump to a small animal seemingly intent on ending itself. Like a moth beating itself against a light-bulb you can practically watch the random path Selection algorithm execute in real time. Over time though a transition occurs. Simple insect level algorithms give way to basic instincts (eat, sleep, squirrel!) which are in turn displaced by something else. What exactly that something is hard to characterize, but one day you wake up, look down there is suddenly a tiny person looking back at you. Someone with a personality, opinions, and a complete disregard for neither propriety nor posterity. They just do things.
My point with this tangent is that children (especially small children) are basically just little bundles of human agency. I make this observation to contrast it with a sentiment that I commonly see expressed here. The sentiment that "the voters", "the normies", "the plebs", or whatever you want to call the teaming masses of humanity, are "barely sentient" and "less developed" than those of us that post on theMotte and that "the normie" will inevitably believe/do whatever they are told to by their betters. In short, "the normies" are not agents in their own right. When I see such sentiments expressed, one of my first thoughts is often "this person has clearly never tried to wrangle a 4-year-old"
It seems to me that the minimization (if not outright dismissal) of the role human consciousness and agency plays has become a core belief of our intellectual/managerial class. Most of our existing intellectual and managerial norms seem to be oriented around deflecting and diffusing blame such that no one person ever has to make and, and more importantly own, a decision. It's not the individual who is responsible, it is society, it is the process, it is "structural" issues. The buck is passed from hand, to hand, to hand, until it is worn away to nothing.
Nobody feels responsible for anything and so everything just gets shittier.
I think that much the managerial class' collective freak-out over and antipathy towards Trump, Musk, and "MAGA" movement in general is rooted in the observation that "the normies" have demonstrated that they are not going to just believe/do whatever they are told. That they are agents in their own right.
"You can't just decide to not trust someone because they lied to you in the past, or because they might have an agenda" cries the priestly caste. "The fuck we can't" the normies respond. "Nobody elected Elon Musk" cries the priestly caste, "We elected the guy who said he would hire Musk to take a chainsaw to the federal budget. Also, who elected you?" the normies respond.
I am surprised that other people seem to be surprised by this. As Steven A Smith put it in his interview with Bill Maher, most of the complaints about Trump in the last 2-3 week boil down to "he did what he said he was going to do". That is not much of a criticism if you ask me, if anything it is an endorsement because who the fuck does that these days?
It's worth noting this goes both ways- the chapo trap house listener complaining about landlords and capitalists and the fourchan poster complaining about jews are, perhaps not literally the same person, but they differ mostly in their bogeyman of choice. Neither wants to consider that getting off his ass and doing things will solve his problems, or at least make them manageable.
Watch the twitter DR freak out about the suggestion that managing a panda express is a good job- it appears to be actually true! But exercising agency isn't what they want. They complain about DEI and affirmative action but they don't bother to consider that they can probably get that state flagship spot after two years of community college- the DEI admits will wash out and you can transfer in to take their place. They complain about high housing prices in growing metros, and it's not even that housing prices in growing metros aren't high, it's that these guys don't want to hear 'derelicts are still affordable, you can fix it up as money comes in'(and in the sun belt this is largely true). He complains about modern women but doesn't ask girls out. These people complain jobs are hard to come by because HR filters out candidates but don't want to hear 'call the hiring manager's extension and inquire'.
This stuff is just the inverse of the priestly class.
Seems like doing both that and addressing whatever seems to be a larger problem is possible, and in fact, laudible? Yes many people ignore their own problems too much while ineffectually preening about global problems, but I guess I'd also hate the world where no one had the impulse for public service. OTOH, now that I think about it, that might look like a libertarian paradise if there were still kickstarter-like coordination mechanisms.
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I dont think that means it "goes both ways" as much as it's just two different people who are both going the same way.
The Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs may each view the other as a bitter rival, but from a 10,000 foot view, both are NFL teams, both are playing in the superbowl, and both have (or had) a star player with the surname Kelce whos mother's name is Donna, so how different can they really be?
I posit that both lavors of freak-out (Chapo and 4chan) come from the same psychological space/impulse, because I think you are correct that, exercising agency is not what they want. Exercising agency is uncomfortable, it means accepting risks, and owning consequences. By the nature of the roles they play, the working caste and the merchant/buisiness caste are both forced to be intimately aware of risk and consequence. The priestly caste on the other hand...
I do not think that what you are describing is "the inverse of the priestly caste" so much as what happens to members (or prospective members) of the priestly caste who "wash-out" or otherwise can't keep up with the pack. At the risk of psychologizing my opponents i think that a lot of the ire directed towards the Elon Musks and Panda Express Managers of the world boils down class resentment. Both the Chapo-listener and the 4channer like to imagine themselves as being in a class above, and so when they see "a normie" or "a pleb" who is manifestly more successful and/or influential than they are, it pisses them off.
I think this aptly explains both "Trump Derangement Syndrome" and the much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding mis/disinformation. The priestly caste just can't handle the idea that more people are getting thier news from Joe Rogan than they are CNN or the New York Times.
To be clear, 4chan/brocialism was an analogy intended to illustrate a point clearly- I think the DR twitterati are the inverse of what you're calling the priestly class, not terminally online porn addicted NEETs.
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More I think it's 'he did what he said he was going to do and not only has it turned out to be exactly the disaster everyone predicted it would be it's all about a rounding error of US spending'. If Trump actually cared about excess spending he'd be focused on the three real items of US spending - medicare, medicaid and social security. Everything else is window dressing. This is why the cuts to USAID, NIH etc. are so galling - it's going to do quite a lot of damage all over the appearance of overspending, all totally orthogonal to the real issues behind the deficit.
They haven't demonstrated that. All they have demonstrated is that they are going to believe whatever they're told by someone else, but sadly this time someone both more stupid and malicious than anyone involved in the bureaucracy or mainstream media. Twitter is awash with absurd lies about USAID spending which people repeat but it lets them indulge the fantasy that they can meaningfully tackle spending without cutting things they care about or raising taxes. Americans - or at least about half of them - have simply decided they like being told they can have a free lunch.
What odds would you put on the deficit being lower than it is now when Trump leaves office?
Lower under what metric?
Under the metric of... the deficit. I don't understand the question.
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Has it though?
We are only three weeks in, the term is still young. Sure, all the very serious people at Politico are screaming about how terrible and disastrous it is that thier tax-payer funded sinecures are being threatened but why should we as tax-payers care?
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It will not do this. The actually useful parts of USAID are mostly still happening, just under state department purview, and we're better off without the NIH after its many and public lies about covid to push lockdowns.
Well sucks for the NIH. Lie constantly to push an agenda, you wind up with declining rates of childhood vaccination. Maybe they should try 'not lying to the public' and see if people trust them then.
They are? Do you have a link?
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So does their opposition; that's where the use of the term NPC in politics comes from.
Appealing to 4-year-olds doesn't help; it is quite possible that independent thought in adults is neoteny and not everyone retains it. Or that adults beat it out of most, once (and in some places still) literally and now figuratively through the Skinnerian incentives of the school system.
Well, no, they didn't. A large portion of the normies just keep trusting them over and over again. And most of the normies who don't... well, they're just trusting someone else.
No it doesn't, that is what so much of the recent wailing and gnashing of teeth from journalists, academics, and establishment politicians boils down to. "The normies" have gone off-script, they aren't listening. The merchant and working castes have gotten uppity, and are running the table on the priests. What a disaster.
It doesn't just "help", it is a necessity if you're going to get them to do anything. I can tell that you don't have kids.
Observation seems to indicate otherwise.
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I don’t deny human agency. There are three issues here that create the teeming masses as easily manipulated.
First, most people don’t know or understand politics. Not just in the third grade civics class stuff (although I would seriously doubt that the median voter has more than a vague idea of how the government is supposed to work), but the informal mechanisms that make the sausage. And so most people could probably give a better explanation of how American football works and tge strategic planning of plays in football than could do the same in American politics.
And the world in which the political system is being used is hugely complex on top of that. In the best of circumstances, politics should be the job of professional leaders who not only know the system inside and out, but understand how the complex systems that the political system works within. The people working on trade and international relations in MENA understand the players, they understand the religion and more than likely speak Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian well enough to read newspapers and get an idea of public sentiment. People working on the tax code generally have degrees in economic theory and management. They talk to the movers in big industries and know how that code affects them.
The average person has an unrelated job that takes up 50 hours a week, kids, and hobbies. He is unlikely to have the time to sit down and become well informed about dozens of issues in politics. That’s assuming he actually wants to. Which most people actually don’t. Normies don’t watch Washington like even we do. They’re interested in TV shows on Netflix, sports, and other similar topics.
Add in the literal firehose of propaganda beamed into every home, car and business all the time, and often with a singular message and purpose, and yes, normies are easily influenced to believe whatever they want to believe about their leaders and proper leadership of their country.
Yeah, I think this is basically correct. I think most people actually make pretty sensible decisions for themselves. But it is very hard to make sensible decisions for other people, and at the end of the day due to the complexity of our modern political system people are often at least in theory asked to do this.
At best, our republican system makes us a country full of hiring managers who get their idea of what the people they’re hiring actually do from a 3rd grade civics class they barely remember, and with an understanding of the issues that they glean from 30 minutes of heavily curated news be it newspapers, online news sources, or TV. The rest comes from Hollywood, through stories where certain people and certain acts are given hagiographic treatment, and certain other people are held up as villains and certain acts are considered evil. Or music celebrating causes, acts or ideas.
I don’t think it can work. It might work in the early industrial era when the world was small enough and simple enough that a person with basic literacy and numeracy could learn enough to let “common sense” be a good way to make decisions.
I think democratic government scales poorly. There's a reason that large countries tend to take on imperial tendencies. Humans have innate psychological difficulty scaling that I think comes into play here - people can only know around 200 - 400 people. As it grows, representative democracy can either be extremely unwieldy due to tremendous amounts of representatives in the government or its representatives can slowly become isolated from their constituents due to their sheer numbers.
True, but it’s also the problem that the system itself and the systems it touches are extremely complex. Democracy could work even with a decent sized population if the system is fairly simple and stable. 300,000,000 people could manage a simple tax code of five pages, or a transportation system that consists of horses, buggies, human feet, and boats powered by wind or oars. At this point, the American tax system is so complicated and has so many books of rules, it’s impossible to understand unless you are a specialist. The transportation system includes trains, busses, planes, boats, road maintenance, crossing points for trains and cars, management of the airspace for commercial traffic, rules for vehicle maintenance, traffic control and traffic laws, and probably dozens of other things im not aware of. Multiplying that by the number of things that the government does, and you have a system that nobody can understand with just a casual reading of the New York Times.
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🤔
Use your words, please.
Even saying "I think this is a ridiculous hyperbole" would save us from playing a game of charades. Bonus points if you also explain why.
All it did was make me think. Never landed at any conclusions.
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