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I'm writing this off the cuff after sitting through a particularly tedious lunch conversation and having the feeling that there's a culture war angle here.
The conversation was basically dominated by two people excitedly trading drawn out and inane stories from their personal lives while the rest of the group occasionally tried making little interjections. If one person told a story the other related to, the other person had to quickly follow with their almost exact same story from their own life, start to finish with the same inane outcome, instead of saying something like "that happened to me too" and letting someone else talk.
I think there's a missing personality trait that I thought was conscientiousness, but it turns out that means something different (being organized and careful). The trait I am thinking of is more like "conscious awareness of reality," which is like, can you tell how your behavior is interacting with the people around you, do you work with theories of mind, are you able to weigh your thoughts and feelings and choose what to say next, etc.
Maybe this all boils down to rising autism numbers but I feel like this is something that is supposed to be learned, and I would hope that if you haven't learned this by the time you are an adult there is something wrong with you. Instead it seems to be almost the default human condition to anxiously spit up each little itemized story you've accumulated that is interesting only to you, or seal-clap when others do so, when instead you could be doing something interesting like asking open ended questions to the group because I feel like I encounter this constantly.
My gut feeling on this is that it's not just a kind of autism style drug or biological induced disease, it's more a symptom of cultural decay, and seems more like we have bad values -> we get worse people type of movement over time. And I feel like it could be a generally self-reinforcing thing where people are getting less "nutrition" from their conversations with others, therefore they spend more time alone, conversational skills decay, etc.
So this is a bit of a rant but maybe someone here has thoughts to debate or add onto this?
I'll try a charitable steel man of the other side. Note, first, that I totally get what you're saying and 100% agree.
But, we also have to remember that the Motte is a community of Turbo Autists who like weird shit and want to talk about things. That's fucking fucked up, man.
But, anyways. The steelman that I can think of is something like the following; Small talk, which is most of conversation, isn't about the transmission of information at all. We already know this. But it is also not about the direct fellow feeling and a sense of connection. It is about the indirect conveyance that both parties "get" the other party and so can establish rapport, comfort, then trust and only after all of this will both parties maybe mutually agree to get into "deeper" conversations.
It's signalling all the way down, sure, but, recognizing this, it let's you be a better conversationalist.
Let's use an example. At one of my regular bars there's a woman, Lauren (not her real name). Lauren will give you a blow by blow of her day every time she sees you. She went to the store, gee prices are high!, in the parking lot, on the way out, a guy was driving aggressively and nearly slammed right into me! God, idiots in cars, right?!. I'll stop recounting the details here as I am sure this is already giving many people PTSD flashbacks to inescapable hour long conversations like this.
I don't care about Lauren's day. But I do care about Lauren. Through multiple interactions, I've come to find that Lauren is what I would call a basically good person (BGP). She hasn't ever thought deeply about a values system, metaphysics, or a general philosophy of life. But she takes care of her aging mother and is nice to people in that normie kind of way. Lauren's never going to be a close friend, but I wish her well.
So I make small talk with her. It's easy because I'm not really trying. When Lauren says, "Idiots in cars, right?!" I don't have to think of a Motte level reply. I say, "They seem to be everywhere" or "Imagine if everyone had to take driving tests once a year!" or, simply, "Oh, I know what you mean." (interestingly, a lot of the comments in this thread began with some version of that last one. Hmm).
And these little comments make Lauren "feel heard" as the kids say. Really, it means that Lauren feels like I care about her to some extent. Because I do. And I demonstrate that by following her flow of the conversation. If I didn't care about Lauren, I'd do something like adjust my fedora and state, "Akshually, the rate of accidents has been declining at 3.5% for two years now and ..." Which would demonstrate that I'm valuing pedantic "accuracy" above the early stages of casual, reciprocal comfort in a social setting. Or, I'd start replying with monosyllables and would reduce eye contact, and would shift my body position away from her, which would indicate I don't care about her at all.
But it's so hard to listen to! The inanity of it! Yes, I agree. So don't listen. Stop putting yourself through that. It's amazing how much people cue one another for reaction points. Big hang gestures and facial gestures, emphatic rises in volume, pregnant pauses and so forth. A lot of it is non-verbal, you just have to kind of watch their expression. And then there are, of course, the literal verbal cues; "Know what I am saying?", "Right?!" (appended anywhere), "Can you believe it?", "And I was like whhaaatt" and all of the unlimited rest of them. These are the weird conversational detritus that people accumulate over the years. They're space fillers, to be sure, but they're prompts; "This is the part, now, where I want you to emote with me so I can gauge if you "get" me." It is quite literally the same as waiting for the big green arrow to show up and click on it to acknowledge that the green arrow has shown up.
A quick side note: In one of my capital-N noticings, I've seen that one of the hallmarks of urban African-American language patterns is the near constant injection of "Know what I mean?" or, more colloquially, "Know what I'm saying" at the end of sentences. To me, this reflects a profound sense of interpersonal insecurity that can only be remedied by constantly checking in with the other person to re-confirm their general empathy.
Returning to the main topic, the failure mode of small talk isn't that it's uninteresting and boring. That's a feature, not a big. It's low effort for a reason, so that people can spend more time evaluating one another and signalling their reciprocal positive intent. When we get into those warm, sticky "deep conversations" (that definitely aren't mental masturbation) they flow so easily because we're actually 100% into them because it's safe to do so. We've already checked all of the comfort and safety boxes with the interlocutor so we don't have to spend that cognitive overload evaluating them. The structure of some of the best conversations I've had have been nothing more than these exact kind of dueling monologues you described. They just happened to occur with people I really trusted on topics that we shared a common interest in because we had discovered the shared interest via small talk.
So, all of this Steel manning is to say that I don't think what you saw is necessarily indicative of the Collapse Of Western Culture. I think it's people in a technology laden world doing their best to do what they've always done in conversation; fellow feeling, establish rapport, building relationships. That it is grating on you (and, frankly, most of us on the Motte) is to make a category error; you're looking for a conversation when, in fact, you're in the middle of a verbal game of Emote-With-Me.
I hear what you're saying, and yes I recognize irony in saying that given the capital-N noticing in the following paragraph. My Lauren is named Katie but it is the same vibe, the same relationship, and I do really wish her well.
As a contrast I would like to tell a story about someone I used to know, Alex (also not their real name). Alex was a good respectable kid, from a good respectable family, attending a very respectable school. We had a lot in common, similar interests, similar hobbies, we were both aspiring writers, and we were both studying the law. Naturally we became friends.
The story starts with Alex's childhood friend Ben (again not his real name) Like Alex, Ben was a good respectable kid, from a good respectable family, attending a very respectable school, and looking forward to a good respectable career. Both Alex and Ben were very active on sites like 4-chan, one of my first encounters with Ben was a discussion with him and Alex of a then ongoing psy-op to convince people that the "ok sign" was a white-nationalist dog whistle. The two of them thought it was hilarious that they had helped get some truck-driver fired over it. My response was to tell both of them that I thought it was kind of fucked-up that someone's livelihood was being disrupted because some college kids in another state thought it would be fun to do a bit of trolling. "Lighten up and grow a sense of humor" Ben told me. It was through this interaction and others like it that that I came to understand that Ben had a very "flexible" approach to morality, and as funny, charming, and well-read as he might be, he was also callous and cruel. He was not, as you put it, "a basically good person (BGP)".
Sometime after we had all graduated, Alex asked me if I would act as a reference for Ben. I declined In part because I did not think that Ben was a BGP and in part because I had plans to run for office was increasingly conscious of who I wanted my name to be associated with. I could tell that my refusal hurt Alex's feelings but they did not press the issue. Sometime later it came to pass that Ben was in some serious legal trouble. What had started a low-key investigation into allegations of professional misconduct had uncovered evidence of far more serious crimes.
Naturally this was a topic that Alex and I talked about, and something that Alex kept coming back to was how "unfortunate" it was that Ben had lost his job and was likely going to go to prison. This was a thread that I just could not help but tug at, leading to the following paraphrased conversation.
This took me aback. Someone who I quite liked, for whom I had a lot of respect seemed to be making a fully general argument against having any legal code at all.
I tried to argue that we can not have a safe high-trust society where rapists murders and thieves are free to rape murder and steal without consequence. For Alex's part, they argued from first principles. Harm and suffering were axiomatically bad. Ergo inflicting harm and suffering on another was always wrong regardless of the circumstances. I would ask things like "How is saying nobody should ever be punished for a specific crime, any different from saying that crime should be legal?". "Don't you have any sympathy for the accused?" and "Are you arguing that harm and suffering are good?" Alex would respond. And so we went in circles, and as we did the conversation became more vitriolic. It ended with Alex accusing me of being hateful, vindictive, and wanting to hurt Ben out of jealousy, and with me calling them an enabler and "a fucking sociopath". The next day I found that Alex had blocked me on social media and had blocked my number.
This happened a while ago but I have been thinking about it lately because I feel like my falling out with Alex illustrates a quintessential failure mode of the sort of polite liberalism espoused by commentators like David Roberts, Bill Kristol, and Scott Alexander. And I feel like I've been seeing the results this failure mode more and more of late across multiple stages and venues in my professional, personal, political, and online life.
Scott Alexander was wrong. The natural end state of liberal discourse is not "seven zillion Witches and three Principled Libertarians" it is "seven zillion Witches and zero Principled Libertarians" because all the libertarians have been shouted down, driven off, or banned, for refusing to compromise on one point or another.
I see all these people lamenting increasing polarization, lack of trust, and proliferation of "Stand Your Ground Laws", and the question I really want to ask all of them is; To what degree have you been the Jack Kerouac to someone else's Dean Moriarty?
I'm confused by this; are you in the role of polite libertarian here, or is Alex? Facially, this sounds like a bog-standard case of pampered sociopath twentysomethings happily bullying a weaker person for laughs, but feeling shocked and offended when any unpleasant consequences come for a Real Person of their class and social circle. Tale as old as time, surely? As Mel Brooks said: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
The only slight wrinkle here is that Alex had the cognitive capacity to build a bullshit ad-hoc argument around his visceral indignation at a system that would impose any suffering on him or his friends. But as you point out, the argument makes no sense, and presumably Alex himself would drop it immediately if someone ever committed a crime against him. What is the connection to Stand Your Ground laws?
Not a libertarian, more a principled anti-accelerationist and lets-stay-cilvilized-itarian,
I don't think the argument was post hoc, Alex seemed to be quite invested in it, and in hindsight a sincere belief to that effect would seem to explain some of their more idiosyncratic takes.
As for Stand Your Ground laws, the connection is in how "polite liberals" talk about them. There seems to be this presumption that a civilized person must always defer to the uncivilized. They ask questions like would you really shoot a man for attacking you on the street or trying to break into your house? as if it's some sort of got-cha and then are scandalized responds in the affirmative.
It's almost as if they don't see violent schizophrenics attacking people on the train, or rioters burning a neighborhood, as a problem to be solved because that's just what those sorts of people do. See Mayor Rawling-Blake's infamous line about giving people room. As Heath Ledger's Joker would say. "it's all part of the plan" and people will go along with a plan even when it's horrible because it makes them feel in control. I think this certain people seem to have such a visceral reaction to Stand Your Ground Laws and figures like Kyle Rittenhouse, while simultaneously extending infinite charity to figures like Decarlos Brown.
Doesn't this make some sense as a countersignaling performance of elite strength and nonchalance (what used to be called sprezzatura)? Realistically, the average PMC person faces little direct risk from random crime or violence, and less risk the wealthier/ better-connected they are. Simultaneously, the average middle-class person has lots to potentially gain from appearing impressively high-status, secure and confident to their PMC peers, including by showing that they don't need to fear the underclass, don't worry about job competition from foreign workers, etc.
Kyle Rittenhouse feels more cringe than anything else, and for middle-class status purposes it's often worse to be cringe than to be wrong.
Edit: to the original question about Alex, I think Chesterton points out that sometimes when people preach toleration and mercy, they actually just don't disapprove of the action in question. It's a shame you're no longer friends, because I'd be curious to learn whether they would endorse punishment for actions that are unsympathetically gauche rather than just immoral in a plebe way. (I'm not sure what would feel genuinely "gauche" for a well-pedigreed law student who's also a former edgelord/troll, but perhaps you can imagine something? Perhaps if a white, female fellow-student from Alabama, failing some key classes, were caught trying to bargain for grades by faking a rape accusation against a well-regarded male African-American professor - would Alex argue that she should not be expelled? That the professor shouldn't be able sue her for damages?)
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The correct answer to that question is "no, I wouldn't shoot a man for attacking you or breaking into your house; we don't owe you masculinity".
Feels? No, is. Those supporting rioters burning neighborhoods do that specifically because those rioters will never get close to theirs, and as such permitting and encouraging rioters is how they exercise control over everyone else. They're shock troopers, backed up by the rest of the army that is the judiciary, to perpetrate random violence on the rest of the citizenry because it's funny.
Just because the cruel king is now "a significant portion of the citizenry in general" and not "one man or a few men" as it was in times of old doesn't make them less of a cruel king, and even a king like that has supporters simply by virtue of being the king.
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