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I'm a fan of a minor celebrity from Vancouver, a Twitch streamer Northernlion (NL). He goes on "arcs" and in a recent one he can't get a slide fixed in his neighbourhood. Long story short, he is fond of his memories as a kid, how he played on a playground with his friends. They had a slide and how much fun was had with that slide. Now, he also wants his daughter to have memories like this, but alas, the slide has been broken since 2019 (more? less? I refuse to rewatch the video). He calls up a local low-level bureaucrat to offer a solution: he can pay for the repairs.
A low-level bureaucrat gives him a run-around for weeks and after he alludes to being somewhat popular, the bureaucrat goes, "🤑🤑🤑" (NL is at the very least upper-upper-middle class, but he is no Mr. Beast), the fateful call is scheduled. The call goes roughly like this: if we accepted donations like the one you suggest, there would be an imbalance between neighbourhoods. Richer neighbourhoods would have better amenities and poorer neighbourhoods would remain slideless. But you can pay to install a bench with your name somewhere in who-the-fuck-knows-where. We'll take your money, but you can't tell us what to do with it.
NL then laments: the kid is already four, her "going down the slide" days are almost over as it is (unless she's going to smoke and drink there with friends when she's twelve. Although a broken slide would be suitable for that as is), so this whole slide thing is kinda urgent.
One chatter suggests that maybe one could FIX THE SLIDE, and I am elated, but a parry comes swiftly (don't we all have this second nature in common?): "I would be taking on the liability if someone hurts themselves". Suggestions in YouTube comment section involved calling up an elected official (a higher level bureaucrat).
As of today, I strongly suspect that the slide isn't fixed.
Remember those commercials, where it's a bright morning, a single house in the middle of a green field, mountains in background, dewdrops serenely resting on blades of grass and a beautiful girl swings a window open to let a fresh breeze into the domicile and the curtains soar like sails, everything's sparkling clean, then she presents you some cleaning product? Well, I can't remember such a commercial, but I can imagine it so vividly it feels real to me.
I can't be that girl for two reasons: firstly, I'm not a girl, secondly, my window can't open more than... care to take a guess? It's 10 cm/4 in. I can't open a window in my rental apartment because there's a window opening control device (WOCD) installed on it that prevents me from opening it wide open.
All new buildings in British Columbia are mandated to have those devices installed when the window is 90 cm/3 ft from the ground. When I learned about this, I started to suspect that there's a fenestration industry conspiracy: there's no reason that I can fathom other than profit, why those devices would be mandated. Did a shadow fenestrator cabal collude with the governments of Canada, the UK, Australia, Boston, NYC to implement such rules? Did they push the newfangled window devices in every single new build? Which led me to my current predicament?
It's much simpler, much more prosaic. I haven't seen any evidence of conspiracy (not ruling out anything, anonymous fenestrator tips are welcome): some kids fell out of the windows and thus, a new safety rule was born, added to the BC Building code at paragraph 9.8.8.1 "Required Guards". Its brilliant Sentence 4, reproduced here in full:
Isn't this wonderful? Now our kids are more safe! You can sleep tight: your toddler will not fall out of the window. By the way, how many kids did fall out? Oh, in the UK it's 2 per year.... Tragic? Yes. But...
I'm from Russia and in line with our, as the saying goes (I consider it a lie) "broad Russian soul" they also install windows that swing open broadly, all the way inside. Khruschevkas have them, new builds have them. So in Russia, I could be that cleaning product girl in almost any damn building, or at least I'm half way there - just need a way to become a girl. I could swing a window open and let a warm summer morning wash all over me.
Back in the day, I've seen news about people, sometimes even children falling out of windows, but somehow Russians (and most of the world) decided that the issue was related to parental negligence or indifference, rather than the design of the windows.
"Well, if you are so confident you are safe, take the WOCD off". Yup. Here's my thought process: I can't take them off because I would be accepting responsibility for anyone who falls out. I'd be liable in case something happens. Even to my own child perhaps. I wouldn't want her to fall out of the window, or any of her friends. Or my adult friends. And, anyway, let's say I take them off. Strata would instantly notice my tiny North American windows (there's not much to swing open anyway) swung open all the way. Like - it would be noticeable from the street, akin to a chad-virgin meme:
I don't really want to antagonize my strata's busybodies who will send a stupid email to my landlord, who will in turn forward it to me:
Ugh... Feels like I'm rubbing salt into my imaginary wound in my pride.
I said to my wife "I'm taking off the safety restrictors" and she had the exact same reaction:
What the hell is going on?
Let's quickly acknowledge something: both mine and NL's problems can be solved without anyone's involvement at all:
Neither of us have an insurmountable problem on our hands, I'd argue that the problems are pretty trivial and nobody cares if we make our lives a bit more comfortable, even if we circumvent all of the bureaucracy but the first thing both of us thought about was: there's a process, there are rules, there's a big brother who watches the safety in our society and it is paramount everybody's safe and I don't want to be liable for anything that happens. Ever.
This thought process that both of us went through is a far more interesting phenomenon to me than a default libertarian argument of "government should get its hands away from my business". It should, but if it does, there's no guarantee anything changes in our heads.
We teach kids to think like this: here The Last Psychiatrist describes how we deal with bullies at schools nowadays. In essence, in the name of safety, we inadvertently brainwash away all of the righteous, moral, community-oriented instincts before they can flourish. He vividly paints how a girl is instructed to stay away from a bully instead of standing up for your peers: do not speak up, stay in your lane so you don't get hurt. Someone else will deal with the bully.
Now, in what I described with NL's slide, with my window WOCD devices, we don't need the Watchers present. They're already in the back of my mind, telling me that this is done in the name of safety, that they'll get their way anyway. When the Watchers don't want to or can't do something due to a lack of money or staff, well, in this situation all of the parties are completely impotent. Slides sit there completely unfixed. Windows stay safely restricted by safety restrictors.
"We'll handle it" is everywhere:
the Watchersthe Science.Fundamentally, we have less opportunities to exercise agency anymore and that shapes one's mind in a weird way. It embeds the Watchers in the back of your mind when they are not there physically. I think how we bring up kids is partially at fault, but the bureaucratization of the society is equally damaging. School is Not Enough by Simon Sarris addresses the first part. The whole body of work of TLP addresses the second part. Maybe I'm coming around to some of the Hlynka's arguments.
How do we make kids have more agency?
How do we make adults with more agency?
How do we go back to the society Alexis de Tocquevillle's observed?
Self organized play. It is the sine qua non of childhood agency. Kids will, left to their own devices, self organize to achieve their goals, with those goals mostly being or rhyming with "fun." We know this from Herodotus, who tells us how to identify a high agency child who might become the Great King of Persia, and who is right about everything in the end:
What do we have here? Boys naturally play, they naturally choose the best and most noble of them as leader, they punish those who don't participate. They're learning to operate within the world according to their abilities, developing their leadership abilities, Cyrus is clearly a future leader. In a nobility based society, that must mean that he has noble blood and is meant for great things, because he has such strong agency.
We still recognize that young leaders will grow into great leaders, but we've Goodharted it into adult-organized school-sponsored clubs that don't really do much of anything but provide "Leadership Positions" for gunners to put in their college applications.
What we need to do instead is encourage entirely self-organized play for young kids, put them in a position where they both have the ability and the desire to self-organize to do things that interest them. To do this we need to do three things: Allow and accept reasonable limitations to abilities, allow and accept reasonable risks to safety, allow and accept reasonable suboptimal outcomes in tradeoff for more agency and creativity. As a toy example take Basketball, and you have three basic paradigms: Sandlot1 archetype of kids playing self-organized pick-up games every day on their own, the organized coached league archetype of youth basketball, and the Bowling Alone archetype of a kid practicing skills by himself in the driveway of his home.
Sandlot is a perfect mid-century American equivalent to the Cyrus story above: the boys self-organize to play out the stories and legends they see adults playing out, the best of them (Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez) is their natural leader and goes on to become a great man.
For the most part we can say for our toy example that a coached team in a league is going to produce the best outcomes in terms of developing basketball talent and minimal risk while giving almost no freedom and developing no agency for the players, pick up games develop agency but give a lower quality in basketball development, practicing skills alone in your driveway gives maximum freedom as to time and style to the kid while developing low quality skills and no organizational agency.
What we want is to develop kids who self-organize spontaneously to achieve their goals. We want kids to Sandlot themselves, to get together and decide to play, figure out the obstacles on their own, and play ball. That's agency. We don't want them to sit at home doing drills by themselves, that doesn't develop agency, and it also doesn't tend to help kids develop any skills. And we don't want to force them to only compete in organized leagues, where they are told what to do and when to do it, as that limits agency: instead of playing basketball as a fun activity they do on their own, they play basketball when mommy takes them to basketball practice and the coach tells them to play basketball.
Limitations are the core of creativity. If every kid has a basketball hoop in their driveway, there is no need to go to each other's houses to play, you can just stay home and play by yourself. Sure, if I have a basketball hoop then I can go out and practice free throws any time I want, but that keeps from doing the far better activity of playing with friends and prevents us all from learning to self-organize. Needing something from others creates the need to self-organize, to create a social grouping and do things together. If the basketball hoop is at Chris' house, then to shoot basketball I need to go to Chris' house and hang out with him. If we both have a basketball hoop in our driveways, then I don't need to cooperate with Chris. But the limitations have to be reasonable, we have to provide enough stuff to allow kids to play, but not so much stuff that they don't need to get creative or work together. I have to be allowed to do some things to get there, which requires accepting...
Risks have to be accepted in this process. I have to get to Chris' house, a couple miles away. That means I have to be allowed and trusted to walk there, ride a bike there, some accident might happen on the trip. I have to be there for some time by myself. I have to have the free time to do it. I have to be out of my parents' sight for that time. Chris and his older brother might beat me up. I might get hurt. My parents have to be willing to accept that, rather than requiring that I only play basketball in a league with coaches that keep me from getting bullied or beat up and have been SAFESPORT certified etc.
Suboptimal Outcomes The best youth athletes come out of coached programs optimized to teach kids skills properly, not out of spontaneous kids playing for fun. The more coaching the better. But that reduces agency. We have to be willing to accept that we're trading some degree of agency development for some degree of basketball skill development.
Now of course, the ideal is probably somewhere in the middle. Kids can be on a school team or in a once-a-week organized league while also playing pick-up after school every day, and a kid that really loves basketball might want to spend hours practicing free throws or dribbling drills on his own even when nobody else wants to. Leagues help to build skill and love for the game, encouraging kids to later move on to self-organizing.
We can apply this model to everything. When one kid had an xbox, everyone wanted to go to his house to play xbox. When every kid has an xbox, they all vegetate at home. When one kid has a car they all go on adventures, when every kid has a car or no one is allowed to drive anywhere, nothing happens. Kids need limitations to overcome, acceptance of risk in overcoming them, and acceptance that it might not be the absolute best use of their time in doing so.
This seems obviously correct to me. Using a kid you knew as inspiration is not defamation.
You and I remember school very differently. And this isn't just a gotcha, huge numbers of famous, successful people had terrible experiences with boys at school. It used to be taken for granted that allowing children to self-organise their societies produced character, but then many people found that instead it produced spoiled, self-satisfied bullies and their hangers-on.
What if it does both? What if you can't get one without the other? What if you can't have character building without risking some kids getting bullied?
Then I will reluctantly admit that contra BAP, I do not want to live in a society of barbarian warlords.
Personally, I am unconvinced that school bullies and the first XI football team are in fact the best and brightest of us. I see no evidence that this is so. If anything, the children who do well in later life seem to be the misfits who had to learn because nobody else was there to lean on. Even in earlier times, much British and American greatness (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt) came from aristocrats who were educated at home and did not go to school.
I accept that there is some modern propaganda also pointing that way, but it didn't come from nothing. That's not to say that the optimal level of bullying and hurtful comments is 0%, but leaving boys to self-organise society does not produce good society.
Cope. There is no positive correlation for misfits and genius or success, we just tell ourselves there is because it's a comfortable story to tell to losers. Some teenage misfits are smart, others are dumb. Some jocks are very successful. All studies on the topic show that varsity athletes do better than non-athletes across most life metrics.
Young Teddy was asthmatic and sickly as a child, but at 14 he got bullied by some older kids and he decided to do something about it. He took up exercise and boxing, and made himself better. He dedicated himself to The Strenuous Life to advance himself. His entire life is the proof of the character building thesis: the bullies who attacked him triggered the rise of the Rough Rider. If he had never met those bullies, he might never have become the man he was destined to be.
I'm not advocating for boys organizing the whole of society, I'm advocating for boys (and girls) being allowed to organize themselves in a limited setting.
I do want to object to the idea that athletes are necessarily jocks and not outcasts. As someone who did lots of sports growing up you get all sorts on the field and the asshole QB of 90s movies never really struck true in my experience.
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