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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.

What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though?

Briefly? The same utopian outcome all reformers expect will happen: clear away the dead wood, take the heavy hand of the past and outmoded traditions from round the throat of present-day humanity, allow liberty to flourish and expand, and believe that humans are naturally good and it is only the existence of laws that make them criminals. Take away impediments, and we will all naturally be good, just, law-abiding, productive citizens who spend our spare time in being creative and doing works of charity.

Does that sound like modern-day humanity to you, in the mass? Many people are indeed nicer, more charitable, etc. But many more people have taken the liberties and now demand their 'rights' without feeling any corresponding sense of citizenship, duty or responsibility. I think some of the more stringent online types describe this, uncharitably, as gibs. I do think that is tarring everyone with the same brush, but on the other hand I have seen it for myself in a previous job where people looking for social benefits did parrot off a line about being denied what they felt they were entitled to as down to 'racism' (just to clarify, all parties here - the clients and the clerks administering the government schemes - were white). These young persons had clearly been taught this line of baloney in school about how if they didn't get all they wanted, well, racism sexism homophobia discrimination (fill out the rest of the bingo card yourself). That they should play their part in society as citizens and participate for the common good of all? What kind of crazy, bigoted, conservative, right-wing idea is that? Classic Liberalism, but now it's deemed wrongthink.