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A new post then. Below @samiam linked to a National Review piece that mocks a recent article in The Atlantic titled "Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise".
The Atlantic is a center-left institution of American journalism. The not-magazine is capable of pushing certain signals over the hill into respectability status. This signal: it's okay to acknowledge left-wing violence as a problem, because we can remind ourselves the right's stochastic terror was successfully defeated, but not forgotten. How significant is it that a couple CSIS think tank goons can send this signal, and how much impact can they have?
In the previous paragraphs the authors set-up their prescription of "programs and expertise" only this time aimed leftward. They justify this by granting the Biden admin (and probably themselves) credit for throwing the book at Oath Keepers and Proud Boys following their January 6th doings. If memory serves the Proud Boys were a group of capital P-atriots who showed up to protests, dared their opposites to do the same, then engaged in fistfights. This is political violence and its escalation can be a concern, but it's not the same risk as a growing number of political assassinations. Assassinations seemingly perpetrated by culture warriors first, not ideologues.
The programs and expertise of think tank goons are unlikely to bring about an effective reversal in cultural trends. Disaffected radicals aren't in the habit of being persuaded by them. I offer two actionable alternatives:
Idea #1: Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools. Sell this one as renewed civic literacy and try not to pollute it too badly with culture war. Federally fund it as an opt-in for states to participate.
I suspect we do a piss poor job of teaching civics, politics, or anything in the shape of political philosophy in K-12. We do a poor enough job educating kids on subjects we care enough about to measure. We do not even attempt to teach kids to think about social fabric. Instead, we water it down to be meaningless or replace it with with diversity-isms and sin. Then we are surprised the kids go on to be demoralized by short-form videos which they accept as valid belief generators.
Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.
If the alternative of New Deal conscripts is instead waiting to figure out how to best Balkanize I say we give it a go. What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?
I don’t think civics courses by themselves are a good answer here. Turning down the temperature on this stuff requires that the discourse changes as well. Civics and required volunteering are good ideas, as I think is the habit in some Asian countries to require kids to join clubs in school to kinda force proper socialization. But having a kid learn civics and join the chess club isn’t going to do much as long as he’s immersed in an online world in which it’s common to see content dehumanizing people who disagree with you and an algorithm that rewards him for participating in that dehumanization of his supposed political or social enemies.
The best thing we could do to stop this is to bring back and enforce minimum standards of decorum in media or at least mainstream media including social media. It’s unacceptable in a civilized society to be calling the sitting president and his party “fascist”, “Nazi” and “authoritarian”, and you should not be equating winning the next election to “saving democracy”. You should not be celebrating the death of a political opponent. You should not be allowed to dehumanize other people online. What we have right now is a bifurcated hate box that pushes people to radicalize and rewards them for doing so. Then we’re wondering why people participating in the hate box are popping off and shooting each other. And unless we deal with this directly, it’s just going to get worse as the algorithms push people farther and further down these pipelines with more sophisticated algorithms that know exactly how to keep people scrolling through millions of messages highlighting all the bad stuff the “enemy” is doing while hiding his answers or anything positive about him.
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I am not sure it does work very well. Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.
This seems like a terrible idea. At its core, pressuring young people into service is fundamentally gerontocratic, democratic only in the "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" kind of way. I abhorred the draft when I was 16, and I am happy to say that I still abhor the idea decades later.
Besides, if you are worried about political violence, then the last thing you would want is to give a lot of people technical and psychological training in shooting other humans.
This is a vacuous claim. I am sure the PBs see themselves as ultra-patriotic. Of course, different people had very different ideas about what being an American was all about, from lofty ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual over an entity who protects their god-given right to own other humans to run of the mill nationalism you find in any nation. Some would see the J6 efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as quintessentially anti-American instead.
That's not what i've been told by various leftists, wasn't there a "hitler-jugend-like" school excercise one teacher ran and had to put the breaks to it because the kids were too much into it once? Perhaps it's not whom the information comes from but how it's presented. Zoomers would be marching and yes chadding if what they are doing is associated with power, influence and coolness to their peers and more importantly the zoomettes.
The Third Wave but that was in 1967.
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Not all propaganda efforts are effective or worthwhile. I don't feel compelled to stamp out teenage contrarianism, rebellion, or progressive resistance.
The mandated schooling already does some indoctrination. That indoctrination doesn't spit out perfect American optimists, no, but it doesn't try to do that. I don't think it needs to. Nations shape culture through education all over the world. Maybe my ideal program isn't more myth based story telling in history. The program could be physical, fun, and/or charity focused. I'm open to better ideas.
If we speak only of compulsory military service, then it's more accurate to say using bodies to achieve physical tasks is fundamentally a young man's game. I like the idea of a civil service that ships you around to travel, help with charity or maintenance work, and creates bonds with Americans. FEMA disaster relief that uses our college aged manpower 19 year old. The goal isn't to only reduce propensity for violence, but to increase our commonalities through exposure, shared experience, and civic duty. If achieved, these could do more than reduce a trend of support for political violence.
It doesn't seem we disagree too much. 'Capital W-ord' isn't a plain construction it's shaded with some irony. I don't consider their branding, self-image, or claim to 'patriot' as legitimate. I explain what I recall of their image in the following sentence and mentioned January 6th prior. "Real American Patriots®" might have been a stronger form. Perhaps a case of thinking myself clever.
This definitely reminds me of the communist student work camps, where they would do things like reforesting or minor construction. I'm not sure it's that bad of an idea, you get the teens together in a common work environment and the more aware of them get to score while being away form their parents.
Construction was very different from other student work, because you were paid. Paid by the output. Agricultural and forestry work were mandatory volunteering of the worst sort, made barely tolerable by the whole "camping out in a rural school gym" being a break from the usual monotony. And yes, scoring for the more aware.
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I’d say civil indoctrination isn’t wildly effective but it does provide a decent “anchoring” effect, where kids assume it as a baseline truth and adjust from there, rather than a first exposure be TikTok.
Also the point about mandatory service seems strange since many countries do it, and it doesn’t seem to have the same claimed impact. If anything, it often permanently disillusions young men who are experience a lot of the “sitting around bored” aspect, and witness corruption firsthand, at least in cases like Taiwan and South Korea. I assume you could figure out a better donated labor system - the Inca would have people build roads or otherwise build stuff in addition to military service and it worked well - but that would be a pretty broad change and difficult to implement well.
Outside of a major economic collapse, that is.
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Bringing back the civilian conservation corps would be cool
Good new deal program there that could get much broader support than only compulsory military service. Also would probably be a bigger benefit for the mental health of the youth, not to mention benefitting the country.
Even things like beautifying broken down or trashed areas, give people a way to serve the country that actually is visibly improving it.
I think both sides could agree on this sort of thing, but it’d be hard not to politicize it.
Periodic reminder that state and regional conservation corps exist all over the American West and possibly elsewhere (see e.g. http://ccc.ca.gov/, https://sccorps.org/, https://thegreatbasininstitute.org/nevada-conservation-corps/, https://www.rockymountainyouthcorps.org/cc-field-life) and are sometimes cool but generally a bad deal relative to entry-level land management jobs.
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The US was founded by people who used violence against the government and made it a constitutional right to bear arms. If you had asked the founding fathers about the NSA, the crazy levels of nepotism and corruption and how self-centred the American elite is, they wouldn't have called shooting them terrorism. What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?
The US was founded by people who rebelled against an overseas government they considered illegitimate (albeit for quite selfish reasons of their own). They were not against the very concept of government and notwithstanding that Thomas Jefferson quote everyone likes so much, they were not advocating regular revolts and coups.
The founders would be aghast and agog about many things in today's world. However, one thing you can definitely say about them is that they anticipated and expected that the future would be very different from their own time and they knew they could not anticipate or dictate to future generations what government they would choose. They set down guidelines and checks and balances they hoped would stand the test of time, but even in their era there were cracks showing, and there was violent disagreement over the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights.
There was also no shortage of nepotism and incompetence and self-centeredness among the elites, from the era of Virginia's dominance to Tammany Hall, and most certainly within the Confederacy.
The founders, if you took to the time to explain to them how institutions like the NSA came about, would eventually understand the concept of intelligence and national security, be concerned about privacy and individual rights, but would probably be a lot more upset about rise of federalism following the Civil War. (Though they would probably understand why and how the Civil War happened.)
Please put to rest this tired argument made by people like you and Kulak that "The Founding Fathers lived for violence and wanted regular bloodbaths, would be horrified that you have allowed (Thing I Don't Like), and cry from the grave for you to slaughter your political opponents." That is not who they were and it was not the world they sought.
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If you had explained that these were the product of a representative government, they might feel differently. The Founders were not of the opinion that one has the right never to lose an election.
The whole bit about violence against a government was about the fundamental lack of representation. That's what the DOI is all about. It's not an anarchist document that entitles anyone to pick up a gun because they don't like the NSA or the FTC or whatever else. Indeed, the DOI spends a lot of time explaining that very point.
The Anti-Federalists among the founders would not be particularly impressed, seeing as they insisted on that Bill of Rights.
Well, Aaron Burr was also a founder.
Well, yes, but the AF were largely outvoted at the Constitutional Convention.
Im also real sick of “the bill of rights mandates (whatever political platform I’m on today)”. When my side wins election, it’s a principle of democratic governance. When my side loses, it’s about minimum liberal rights. Even Scott succumbs to this in latest ACX.
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I am behind reinventing accountability for officials, functionaries, and politicians. Bring back competence while you're at it. The likelihood we bring back competence or accountability depends on what you mean by fighting back. If you mean random, indiscriminate killings of various public figures that increases in frequency over time I don't think this will end up constructive or constitutional. If you have some Washington-Cincinnatus figure in your back pocket to lead the cleansing fire of rebellion, then I say bring him forth let's just vote him in 3 or 4 times. It'll be easier.
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Here is the thing. The US is still, for all its flaws, democratic.
When people got fed up with the DC elites, they voted in Trump, who at least set a new baseline for corruption and nepotism.
If you have a good majority (say 60%) of the citizens behind you, then you do not need to shoot at the feds, you can simply elect one of your own as the next president.
If you do not have such a majority, then using violence to enforce your norms seems bad. I will give you a pass if your group is oppressed to the level of the Jews under the Nazis, but whatever the rules about trans people in gendered bathrooms your society has are, they are insufficient reason to start planting bombs.
If I endorsed a "constitutional right to fight back" for minority positions, then I would have to endorse proponents of mutually exclusive policy proposals to use violence to settle their difference, because saying that violence is only justified whenever I personally think that the advocated policy would be a good idea does not universalize.
Violence sucks very hard. It does not show who is right, only who is left. It can paralyze societies, and is a habit which is very hard to kick even after your side has won. The French and Russian revolution are both cautionary tales here. A democratic process, even as flawed as the US one (FPTP, EC, gerrymandering and so on) is much preferable to bombs and rifles.
Except I'd argue that the past decade and change serve to illustrate why that doesn't work, because the president isn't actually in charge of the Executive any more (see basically everything MacIntyre talks about here, or this from Jim). FBI JTTF goes after the "domestic terrorists" it wants to, not the ones the President directs them at — as we saw when Bush the younger tried to redirect them from chasing specters of the Klan to Muslim jihadis.
Our democracy is a sham. It's as fake as pro wrestling.
Funny, from where I stand, Trump is actually getting the executive to accomplish his goals. The national guard did occupy the cities he ordered occupied, and his ICE is busy deporting foreigners, just as his constituents wanted. His military is very willing to bomb Iran on his orders or blow up suspected drug smuggling ships.
Any bureaucracy created by a presidential edict can be destroyed by another. Any created by an act of congress can likewise be destroyed through an act of congress. Last time I checked, MAGA controlled both chambers of congress. He also has a supreme court which decided that he gets away with anything. If congress wanted to pass an act tomorrow which said that the EPA was shut down, all their guidelines void and all their employees fired, they could do that.
I mean, Trump is probably hampered by his lack of qualified personnel, with RFK just being an especially shocking case. But that is a skill issue.
I am not saying that the game is not rigged on some level. Most congress critter are likely beholden to some rich donors, and constrained with regard to what they can vote for without pissing them off. Likewise, the two-party system and party control over who gets the nomination make it hard for outsiders to win. And vast parts of the media landscape are in the hands of a few very rich people who use it to push views which are in their interests.
But the game is always going to be a bit rigged in favor of the status quo. This is why I said you might need 60% instead of merely 51%. Also, to the degree that liberal deep-state DC elites are a thing, they certainly did not prevent Trump getting elected, twice. And the media landscape is actually a lot more diverse than it ever was before the internet.
This is certainly a minority view. Now, you can of course claim that most people have been brainwashed, and if they saw reality as clearly as you do they would support the destruction of the system. In some countries, e.g. Russia, I think you would be right. But US citizens have all sorts of news sources at their fingertip, if they listen to ${EVIL_PROPAGANDA_MEDIUM}, that is by choice and not by coercion.
RFK specifically is in his job as coalition politics, rather than because Trump can't find anyone else.
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Note that most of your comments on Trump actually getting the executive branch to do what he wants are part of the Trump 2 administration, not Trump 1 when overt and covert acts of deviance were regularly reported. Trump 2, in turn, has been an administration with exceptional deliberate pre-planning on how to try and make politically unpopular changes over the objection / resistance over the minority party, particularly with the atypical advantage of a governing trifecta, and has been accompanied by explicit denunciations for Trump installing loyalists and opposing 'independent' agencies.
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It's simple. If the person fighting back is part of the in-group, they are based and understandable, if maybe a bit over the top.
If they're in the out group... They are horrible borderline terrorist individuals who are wholly representative of the entire out group, justifying why the out group sucks and must be crushed into impotence.
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Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.
We have protections from certain kinds of fully mandatory actions. But Semi-mandatory is protected from court challenges, and can really ride the line on "semi" hard enough to make it meaningless. Turning down someone for a job because they have a felony on their record is illegal (unless you are the FBI). But anyone doing background checks is generally turning down felons. Its possible to make something extremely adverse selection. Signing up for the draft at 18 is one of those things that already sort of rides the line. Its not been relevant for a long time, but it can cause trouble for men who don't do it. I was certainly tempted not to when I turned 18, mainly for ideological reasons. Practical concerns won out, and I signed up. I'm now out of draft age. My plan at the time if being drafted was to plead flat feet (I do have that, and all running sports are generally off limits to me).
Lean into sports and competition. E-sports is a growing area. Find more professional sports to elevate. I wouldn't mind my favored sport of underwater hockey achieving more widespread adoption. But realistically you could go for existing sports that already have international adoption. The Romans held their empire together for a couple extra centuries by just feeding everyone and providing "circuses".
I consider semi-mandatory as preferable to an amendment. The US is at least relatively accommodating for conscientious objectors, although that's more a necessity determines grace deal. The cost to living in a powerful nation that likes to wage war is sometimes you're a slave for dumb and unnecessary reasons. That's a fair enough thing to object to.
The US still has a relatively healthy recreational sports industry that still can create fads and innovate. Disc golf or pickleball as two examples that come to mind. Underwater hockey might yet take off for you. I'd prefer to subsidize getting the youth outside, but if video games are a reality then competition e-sports are of higher value. Team based games at least provide a way to develop teamwork, communication, and leadership ability. Might even be able to route around the Hitler Youth comparisons by promoting e-sports in addition to real ones.
Underwater hockey has a difficulty with the underwater part, which requires special equipment and access to a pool. I think 7s rugby is a good game, or maybe Aussie football.
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What is being taught in school today?
I went to public school in a liberal area during the 2000s/10s. Here are some things I learned:
The United States is a great nation, largely because of its Constitution. The amendments, Bill of Rights, and separation of powers (along with access to plenty of natural resources) has kept our nation alive for (by now) almost 250 years.
The first amendment is very important, and it grants true free speech which is a very good thing. The exceptions are specific and largely uncontroversial, like direct threats, leaking classified information, and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. The other amendments are also important, although we covered them less, but I do remember covering the second, fourth, fifth, and tenth.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, MLK Jr...these people were covered extensively and framed very positively. Even Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison were framed positively in elementary school, although later I learned they were immoral and fraudulent (Columbus was not the first person to discover America, and Edison ripped off Nikola Tesla).
Slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights era were covered very extensively. Fascism, communism, and Nazism were covered extensively. I remember socialism being described as maybe OK, but the way it was implemented in the USSR was catastrophic. "Jingoism", Japanese internment, and the Red Scare were shameful and immoral, although covered minimally. The Enlightenment era, factories, robber barons, unions, United Fruit, "The Jungle"...capitalism as a whole wasn't irredeemable, but certainly in need of regulation. The atomic bomb was...controversial, but it was effective and there wasn't a clear alternative. The US destabilized foreign countries' governments for profit and the Vietnam War was largely a failure. 9/11 was a tragedy, and the Taliban and terrorists are barbaric, but the GWOT was too recent to really judge.
History in the early years was almost entirely positive, but in high school I learned more and more of the unsavory details. However, I never got the impression that the US as a whole was bad, just imperfect. We still looked up to the founding fathers and the Constitution (I learned that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and had a child with one, but he was still portrayed as humane overall because "it was a different time"). We still learned about and looked up to the "great men" (and some women, we seemed to focus on individuals more than groups). We still celebrated the US's success, it's growth and eventual dominance, victories in World Wars I/II, and cultural influences ("the American Dream", the Wild West, Hollywood, Woodstock, 80s, 90s). I graduated with (and to this day have) pride and patriotism, albeit nuanced; our nation isn't without flaws, because no human, group, or nation is without flaws, and acknowledging your mistakes is how you overcome them and improve.
I did learn about other countries and history before 1776, but my lessons were very US-centric.
Granted, this is only some of what was covered, and of what I remember. It's (not intentionally but) certainly biased towards the lessons I felt were important and my interpretation of them. But when I hear what people in the US are saying and doing today, I wonder if they grew up learning something completely different. I've always thought the above is a general curriculum that exists in most schools, but maybe not so?
This one always sounded very weak to me, mostly because what if there actually is fire in a crowded theater? Apparently even the sentence itself is incorrect compared to the original which also included the word falsely. It is also interesting to see, that the same argument was used in 1919 against somebody protesting draft service in WW1 under enforcement of Espionage Act and his anti-draft speech was likened to falsely crying fire.
Not exactly a stellar argument either historically or even on its face.
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Thats about what I learned approximately five years later from your timeline.
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Catholic school, same time period-
Lot of emphasis on colonial history, very in depth on the runup to the revolutionary war. Lewis and Clark and the Louisiana purchase were triumphal statecraft. We kind of glossed over the civil war era. We learned about religious discrimination in 19th century America- the know nothings, the mormon pioneers, the need for the knights of columbus, the KKK.
Lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution. US intervention prevented the European colonizers from doing far worse things to China and Latin America than they wound up doing. Monroe doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, USA good. The AFL, Teddy Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt were all portrayed as good guys at the same time. Intervention in WWI was sadly necessary.
The depression was emphasized, but not as much as WWII. Oh gosh WWII ate the rest of the curriculum. Patton was a good guy, Macarthur was more conflicted, the new deal was a good thing but might not have worked as well as it's thought. Straightforwards USA and Britain good, Germany and Japan bad. The soviets were portrayed as bad, but maybe a lighter shade of black than the Germans and Japanese- but still very evil.
We learned about the cold war. Not a lot about anything in specific, but USA good-commie bad. JPII's role in ending the great evil of communism was very important. That's about where it ended.
For the world in general, we learned a lot about Rome, the renaissance, and the age of exploration. There wasn't a true global focus but we probably got a lot more latin american history, especially early latin american history, than a typical public school would have.
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Same time period. Blue state. I would say at least my middle and high school history had much more discussion of pre-American history than yours seems to have had, and also a much greater emphasis on slavery, civil rights, and the vietnam war once we get into the post 1776 era.
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This tracks with my experience in a roughly similar age bracket. I'd guess you were in accelerated tracks and likely took AP courses. This is the basic way we teach history: start with basic myths then add nuance as a child develops. Myth making has taken a backseat to nuance at earlier ages, but your mileage may vary. There's a lot of districts with a lot of different teachers and schools. If I had to guess, your experience with history is still the modal experience of American children that attend adequate schools.
Most kids don't get much out of history. Girls, especially, consider history boring and irrelevant. History is old and they are young. Which is why I think you deploy my brainwashing program in a national civics curriculum. That's my thought anyway.
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I feel compelled to point this out every time it comes up but this is not a true exception. It was briefly law as an example to justify banning handing out communist pamphlets but it was struck down as plainly unconstitutional.
IIRC they were anti-draft pamphlets.
Yes, anti-draft pamphlets handed out by the Socialist Party of America (motto: "Workers of the World, Unite!").
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I think you're of the age where your school experience was a "last chopper out of Saigon" situation.
Grievance politics is larger now, although I strongly suspect it's incredibly school and teacher dependant.
In "generic suburban highschool #42 outside of Boise, Ohio" I bet it's similar to what you wrote. In "MLK Jr highschool in Bushwick" I bet it's a lot more grievance-y
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That's... remarkably similar to what I was taught; same time period. And I moved around the country and went to both public and private schools, so it wasn't just localized.
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Unironically ~all of this is downstream of broken dating/relationship-formation norms and scripts among young people. The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and I am extremely blackpilled and pessimistic about our odds of putting that particular genie back in the bottle whence it came.
Any worldview of the current era which does not factor in the internet- tiktok and phone apps, specifically, is particularly worthless.
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There was more political violence in the 1960s and 1970s than there is today, and the young leftists who were driving much of it were not having substantial problems having sex or forming romantic relationships, from what I understand based on what I have read of the time period. To whatever extent they were driven by misery and cultural malaise, I don't think dating and relationship problems were a significant factor. And they weren't just indulging in the kind of casual sex or short term relationships that you might find empty. Plenty of them were getting into long term relationships or getting married all while continuing to pursue militant politics.
So while it's possible that today's political violence is significantly driven by problems in dating/relationship-formation, we have plenty of historical examples of violent political militants who do not seem likely to have been motivated by such problems.
That said, I do think that reducing sexual and romantic frustration among young men would do something to reduce the level of political violence. I just don't think that unwinding the sexual revolution is any sort of fundamental recipe for making politics calmer. There is no sign that the average level of political militancy and violence within Western societies was any lower before the sexual revolution than after it. Indeed, it is pretty clear to me that it was much higher, although I don't believe the level of violence has decreased mainly because of the sexual revolution.
Political violence, militancy, malaise among the young, and revolutions of all kinds have been a staple of the history of the West just as they have been a staple of the history of all societies. There is no reason to believe that the sexual revolution has made things worse in that regard.
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I am sure this has been asked before, but why is it that these purported consequences of the 1970s sexual revolution have not shown up until the past 10-15 years? It really took 50 years to come to a head?
While I agree with Tractatus' reply as well, I've also had a recent post on a very related topic, namely the dissolution of marriage. Social changes are rarely actually instant; They are spreading & compounding. Just because something became legal, doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Usually it's only a small community really taking advantage of the most recent change, while the majority just mostly carries on with what they grew up with, unless they have a very good reason.
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If you think the consequences only showed up in the last 10-15 years, you are necessarily insisting that the sky-high divorce rates of the 60s-80s, the latchkey kids of the 80s-90s, raised on "the electric babysitter" and Nintendo (who emphatically did not turn out "ok"), the rise of hookup culture and dating apps, and so on, were actually Good Things. I don't know what to tell you, other than that you're being incredibly myopic. Great evidence for Chesterton's quip about the whole world being nothing but Progressives who go about ruining the world, and Conservatives who insist you cannot undo what the Progressives have done, because they have already adopted those changes as "tradition," as being Gospel truth.
The modern buzzword du joure "Parasocial Relationship" was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use (which is just describing a dysfunctional form of propinquity; if I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the definitional drift was deliberate), it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends. The standard description was "newlywed leaves her family ties, moves out to the suburbs, doesn't really gel with the neighbors, and, with entirely too much time on her hands due to kids and school, along with modern conveniences making housework take up much less of her day, vegs out in front of the boob tube and goes haywire." This was not treated seriously because this extreme was so rare, and the solution was to get the women involved in the community; after all, it was the 1950's, everyone was having 2.5 kids and making good money, so it could not possibly be the case that cookouts with the HOA, bowling leagues, Avon parties, et al, were actually not viable long-term replacements for blood-and-soil family ties. In fact, other than Christopher Lasch, I don't know anyone that even thought to connect the dots.
This new paradigm, that you must leave behind your family, you must "find someone that's right for you" (no-one ever seems to notice the narcissism inherent in such a statement), that the friends you choose are more important than the family you had no say in, these all moulded the Baby Boomers; it should be no shock to us when the Boomers had half the kids their parents did; that they slapped bumper stickers on their overpriced RVs, proudly proclaiming how they weren't going to leave a dime to their kids, spending it all on themselves, and eagerly consumed media praising them for this choice ("It will teach them to earn it on their own, like I did!" >conveniently forgets all the bailouts his parents and/or grandparents gave the Boomer after every fuck-up); nor should it be any shock to us that they would ultimately decide that "find someone that's right for you" necessirly implies "and if this person no longer feels right for you, or if you meet someone new who feels "more right" for you, well, it's time to blow up the marriage. It'll be hard on the kids, sure, but if they loved you, they would want you to be happy."
No, inceldom is not some wholely new phenomenon that can only be attributed to technological changes, it is just the next stop on the slippery slope of the radical change to the family that has been ongoing such Industrialization. It isn't even new; mass societies destroying families is so common across history that Spengler includes it - in the form of his comparison of the City versus the Country - in The Decline of the West and that was published in 1917, long before Tiktok, Youtube brainrot, and AI slop was even a twinkle in anyone's eye
Hell, Cesare Beccaria described something like this in 1768!
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The problem you get with an argument that goes that far back to claim that actually people were already unhappy and things were bad is that in order to actually make your case to RETVRN to something, you now need to make the argument that things were better and people were happier before that.
You've just implicitly accused a lot of people of being naive and unable to see the unhappiness and rot in the Boomers' generation. Granting this for the sake of argument, would this not be a strong argument that it is surprisingly easy to be naive in this way about a relatively distant time? Accepting that, would any ideas that you may have about things being better once upon the time, before the boomers with their individualism, television and love marriages came along, not be subject to the same concern, turned back at yourself? How sure can you (and we) be of any impression that the Victorians or Edwardians were happy, when we just saw so many people erroneously believing that the Boomers were? Given that we know even less about those generations, they are more strange to us and have left behind fewer records, misunderstanding their lives would be even easier. At some point you might just wind up believing a nonstandard version of the noble-savage trope that involves your ancestors.
Couldn’t you answer the question by looking at communities that didn’t go down those roads. Off the top of my head, any form of Anabaptist community, Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Jews, or similar groups that chose not to go modern.
No, because they are heavily confounded in both directions. The people who choose to remain in such communities against the backdrop of modernity are bound to be ones that are relatively happy to do so, and the sight of modern living is bound to induce some jealousy. It would in many ways be like trying to make inferences about cavemen from the San Francisco homeless.
No model is perfect, and im not aware of any uncontacted tribes that would answer for the control group. Maybe isolated villages in Bhutan or Nepal or something. Even then, they know modern civilization exists. Even going back to early psychology is difficult because psychology itself is a modern concept— it started as a field in 1900 Or thereabouts, and we don’t have much before then except maybe someone occasionally notices people acting weird and records it or reports on it. There’s not any clean data to be had, but I don’t think that means you can’t find hints by comparing different subcultures and the pathologies they tend to have or not have.
If “modern approaches to community” are causing unhappiness or causing relationships to break up, cultures that do otherwise are less likely to have those issues. If the concept of “love marriages” breed narcissism and divorces, then there are other cultures that have arranged marriages (Orthdox Jews do, so do Hindus). If there’s a positive effect in arranged marriages, it should show up. If TV and screens cause short attention spans, we have plenty of places on earth that don’t have them. Comparing those differences correcting for other confounding variables should give us hints about this kind of thing.
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There were two sexual revolutions and they both had major social instability coming in about forty years later. Can I explain it entirely? Not really. But the 2010's social chaos occurred roughly the same timeframe after the sixties/seventies sexual revolution as the sixties/seventies social chaos occurred after the 20's/30's sexual revolution. Perhaps we'll see in the 2050's some chaotic results of something LGBTQ related, history rhymes.
As for the forty years timeframe, I would suggest that it's when children who grew up entirely under the new paradigm are reaching the age to start making bad decisions. Social change is slow even if at the surface level it looks like lightning.
But children of the 90s are like 40 now and would have also grown up entirely under the post-1970s paradigm, while the rise of incel culture (and various other apparent symptoms of dysfunctional romance) seems like a phenomenom of the past 10-15 years. I am having a hard time ascribing this to the 1970s rather than technology shifts (Tinder, etc), high pace of housing inflation (which reduces incentives for household formation and makes it much harder to not rely on also-expensive daycare, aka the two-income trap), or the transition of church and religion out of mainstream (which I would argue began to rapidly occur during Bush 2 and was basically complete mid-Obama).
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My understanding of the data we have on sex and partner count is that you had the sexual revolution in the 60s, which took until the ~late 1970s/early 1980s to filter down into mainstream society. From that point (ie the youth of Gen X) everyone has been having pretty similar amounts of sex. Millennials weren’t much more promiscuous than GenXers, and Zoomers are as or less promiscuous than millennials.
The emergence of apps, online dating, social media, none of these seem to have substantially affected population-level promiscuity, only shifted it. The (heterosexual) people hooking up with dozens of people on the apps are the kind of people who would hang around dive bars and clubs until closing time to pick up the best option left had they been born twenty years earlier.
I think it may be different for gay men, although large parts of that are surely increased social acceptability and the fact that HIV is no longer a death sentence, but even then, my guess is many people racking up 4-digit grindr body counts would have been anonymous bathhouse regulars back in 1977 too.
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10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.
And yet everyone is having significantly less sex today than 10 years ago.
Are you saying this contradicts the original theory? I can understand being surprised by this, but it isn't even that strange when you think about it for a moment.
I absolutely am saying that it contradicts the original theory. And it is strange if you think about it. Intuitively. it makes sense that easier access to sex through dating apps should make it more widespread.
It would make sense if men and women were looking for sex for the sake of sex with the same frequency, intensity, etc, and the only thing stopping them from getting it in the past, were those evil traditional sexual mores. This is the case with gay hookups, and you indeed see amounts of sex orders of magnitude beyond what straights can achieve. However, in the case of relations between men and women, the sexual mores performed a regulatory function (rather than a purely restrictive one), attempting to give the most amount of people at least some of what they want. But because men and women have different preferences, and are looking for different things, by abolishing the sexual mores, instead of "lifting restrictions on sex" all we accomplished was locking men and women into a defect-defect spiral, which resulted in less sex for everybody.
Describe this defect-defect spiral. Because to tell you the truth, I don't see it in my experiences, and it seems to be a post-hoc explanation for an unexpected outcome.
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People laughed at Rudyard Lynch's incel revolution predictions but historical trends don't lie: having a lot of disaffected men with nothing but violence to turn to is massively destabilizing.
Robinson had a partner but threw his life away anyway. I mean, technically. Presumably they were intimate.
Yeah but the rise of absurd Trans polycules and whatnot is downstream of all these guys being unable to participate in standard heterosexual relationships and gooning themselves into psychosis
Many male porn addicts seem to be in sexually active relationships though. Besides, I don’t think it’s clear that men with trans ‘girlfriends’ couldn’t find female partners, that seems spurious.
Dude was a medium autistic edgelord living in bumfuck nowhere Utah. I don't think he was prime steer in that heterosexual dating market.
He wasn't a school dropout, he wasn't (previously) in trouble, and he wasn't ugly. Guy who's doing an apprenticeship, is reasonably smart and averagely good-looking can find a girlfriend (I would say "particularly in bumfuck nowhere Utah") if he wanted a girlfriend. No, he's not going to get hot liberal college chick, but "conventional Mormon girl from lower middle-class background" is not out of his range.
If he was living with a boyfriend-turned-transitioning male to female, then he's gay or bi and not looking for a (cis) het girl.
The rural western US generally has a male slant in the population. Entirely possible he just wasn't going to be able to find a girlfriend- and the trades are not high status among mormons, who push college very strongly(in fairness, their college is free).
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I'm not sure "prime steer" and "heterosexual dating market" belong in the same sentence, considering a steer is definitionally castrated.
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His partner was a man in a dress, though
Yeah. Most of that divergent stuff has come from people having too much access to weird porn and finding it hard to accomplish the proverbial 'get a girlfriend'. Whilst I'm sure there's some small % of the Queer population that'd lean that way regardless, but there's a pretty heavy social contagion that's only been exacerbated by systematic dysfunction in normal hetero relationship formation.
I think the opposite explanation is far more likely, until recently the pressure to be in a hetero relation was extremely strong and any “divergent” behaviour was kept tightly under wraps. The Kinsey reports from the 1940s found 37% of males had at least one homosexual experience, 11.6% were about equally bisexual and 10% were more-or-less exclusively homosexual.
I’ve known plenty of gay and bisexual men and none fit the profile of “watched too much porn, couldn’t get a girlfriend”. Gay men just have completely different innate sexual appetites, and lots of bi men are closeted and cheating on their girlfriends and wives. The closest thing to what you’re describing would be bisexual men choosing to hook up with men because it takes less effort to organise than ordering from DoorDash, or men dating trans women because they’re more “chill”, but I can’t believe being an incel for long enough will make you want to shove a penis into your mouth with as much enthusiasm as these guys had.
The Kinsey report is not credible. The methodology was very flawed
It’s flawed for sure, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the percentage of men willing to engage in homosexual activity, especially in substantially or entirely male communities (men at war, men in prison, all-male boarding schools, male-only religious institutions) is probably higher than the 3-5% estimates of gay men.
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I've had a few friends kinda dabble in furry/gay/whatever culture whilst effectively 'incels' during University which generally went away as soon as they managed to somehow find a girlfriend. I also think that the whole transfetishist movement is a tad bit different to homosexual inclinations on part of a decent chunk of society, or atleast there's a feedback loop that's emphasizing it at present.
I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.
I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.
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I mean, it's family - children, specifically - that has historically been the fundamental anchor of the social unit. Relationships that can't or won't bear children are fundamentally different than those that will.
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