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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Zunger said it better, and like six years ago. Policy starvation's a bitch, ain't it?

What's policy starvation?

One of the observable mechanisms of social decay.

Long ago, I promised to write an effort post about this, but then I kinda lost the ability to write effort-posts. Here's the short version:

People want a thing. People clamor for the thing they want. Lots of different would-be leaders step forward offering to help organize the getting of the thing. These would-be leaders each have a different plan for how they'll get the thing. The plans tend to differ a lot their projections of how much effort and extremity will be required to get the thing.

As a rule, people don't want effort or extremity, so they tend to go with the plans that promise the easiest solutions first. When those don't work, they grudgingly accept the plans involving a little more pain and effort, and so on. Ideally, they reach a plan that gets them at least an approximation of what they want without too much pain and hardship. The people get what they want, the successful leaders are lauded for their excellent work, and everyone goes home happy.

But suppose people decide they want something that can't actually be gotten? The process above is carried out, starting with the easy plans, then the moderate plans, then the serious, hard-nosed plans. One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded, but the people are still unsatisfied. Failed plans might be tweaked, but after a number of attempts grow discredited, and people stop backing them. If the thing people want isn't achievable by the means available, and people won't stop wanting it, you get policy starvation: people gravitate to to solutions and the leaders proposing them that under better circumstances would never be given the time of day, but now amass credibility as the only people offering solutions that haven't already obviously failed, if only because they haven't been tried yet. In the same way that physical starvation drives people to the extremity of eating spoiled food, and ultimately grass, shoe-leather or human flesh in an attempt to satiate their physical need for sustenance, starvation of policy drives people to extreme political acts: insurrection, revolution, civil war, democide.

Look around you, and you'll see it everywhere, on both sides. In this case, troll or no, Liberalism's promise was that once we adopted its norms, everyone would just sorta chill out, everything would work out, reason would carry the day, mumble mumble you get the Federation from Star Trek. It hasn't worked out like that. His generation did not, in fact, get it right, and they were, in fact, making promises, promises they were powerless to fulfill. And so they gifted us a world where people have lost confidence in the moderate Skokie solutions, and turn to Zunger's extremist zealotry instead.

What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though? You say people haven’t chilled out but then again we haven’t had a major war or civil unrest for decades.

Also we have done a decently good job of living together in a diverse society. It’s not perfect, but I doubt it ever was. Dissidents were just silenced in the past or didn’t make it into the history books. Now we’re letting that frustration out, which is on balance a good thing if we can figure out how to address it.

Other people have offered replies, and @gattsuru in particular brings the receipts as usual, but I wonder if this is something one really needs to see for themselves to appreciate. If you want to see it, you need to go back and really look at the things people were saying decades ago, the pictures they were painting about what the future world was supposed to look like, the promises they were selling to people about the concrete things their ideological proposals would achieve.

You also, probably, need to understand that your own experience doesn't generalize. I'd imagine just on general demographics that you're probably doing pretty okay, and so is most of your social circle. You have far less reason to notice or care that, say, every political speech on education in the last fifty years has effectively been the same speech on repeat, explaining how the things that never ever change are totally going to change this time. For you, I'd imagine, that lack of change isn't too bad. Other people's experience is different.

For a longer if not terribly adequate treatment of the issues, try this multipart comment, especially starting in the last paragraph of the first part. The problem your argument faces is that it doesn't convince the people it needs to convince, because it doesn't actually address their concerns. Hence BLM, hence Trump.

You are correct that dissidents have always been silenced. What you're missing is that a lot of our current society was built on the promise that there was a better way, that silencing dissidents wasn't necessary. That promise is now load-bearing, with the increasingly tenuous peace we enjoy depending on its maintenance: it allowed a great increase in the values-diversity of our society, to the point where it's no longer possible to get a workable agreement on who the dissidents are and how to suppress them. Consequently, censorship no longer functions to maintain social cohesion, but further erodes it.

Yeah, this comment was pretty out of touch, not gonna lie.

I dunno, it's the sort of reply I get pretty frequently on this point, actually. The social consensus slides freely between "change is long overdue, no more waiting, it's time to force the issue" when it's a change the consensus favors, and "what's the problem, everything's fine" when a change opposed to that consensus is proposed. Once you see this tendency once, you see it everywhere. it's completely endemic.

In my defense I was pretty drunk when I made this comment. As much as that's a defense.

I've personally shifted in the last couple of years from the 'everything is fine' camp to the 'change' camp, so perhaps it's just vestigial thought patterns rearing their head.

I will say that I was curious to see what the promises people came up with were, but probably shouldn't have defended liberalism so hard.