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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?
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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