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Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"
Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.
This makes a lot of sense, but I know a number of residents of SF, Oakland and other places like that, who aren't in any way rich enough to avoid the effects of the luxury beliefs, and they still largely support the policies that led to them. I mean, they're certainly not happy about people pooping on the streets or open drug markets, not to mention unending car breakins and other criminality, but somehow they never make the conclusion the policies they support are responsible for it. They just think it's "wrong Socialism" and as soon as they figure out how to make "true Socialism, that has never been tried" - which is right around the corner, we only need to tweak a couple of things and spend a couple of billions more - and it all will be fixed.
I guess my question is where do these magical beliefs come from? They seem to be ubiquitous among Reddit users but also white collar progressives in general. I'd like to blame midwit tier intelligence, but I don't think that's it. In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated.
Why is socialist worldview so appealing, even when (or especially when) it fails time and time again? And why is the more practical worldview (that people respond to incentives) so looked down upon?
The denial of HBD.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
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This is interesting to me. I’d always assumed redditors were mostly students and NEET’s, like 4chan, and that their political views were a consequence of that. Most blue collar people, even fairly progressive ones who are big supporters of eg marijuana legalization and think police brutality is a major issue, see that worldview as obviously stupid, and it’s astounding to me that it has a hold outside of college kids that have no experience with the real world and some wealthy people insulated enough from it to think ‘yoga teacher’ is a real job.
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It's because luxury beliefs are also aspirational beliefs for people who want to see themselves as being in the luxury belief class.
For example, I have a friend who works in NYC. He doesn't make much money but his partner and many of his friends and family are rich. Many of them espouse anti cop beliefs so he tends to espouse these beliefs as well, even though they live in much more expensive parts of NYC than he does. He doesn't want to have to lose face by admitting that the cops protect him in his high crime neighborhood so he acts like he dislikes them, like his richer peers who are more shielded from the consequences do. That's just one mechanism for where these "magical beliefs" come from. He doesn't want to engage with the reality that he should be afraid of criminals rather than the police because it would mean engaging with the reality that he's of a lower economic status than his peers.
It's irritating and low class to admit that you have material practical concerns. We like to imagine the rich just walk around life unbothered by consequences, and that all we have to do is imitate that lifestyle and we too can live that way. To give away the fact that we have to wash laundry and be protected by cops and face consequences for our actions feels degrading to many people.
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The idea that society should be scientifically managed is very appealing to those who believe themselves to be very intelligent but yet find themselves not managing society.
It's the class of people who see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed central planners".
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I'm not sure that it's the socialist worldview that is so appealing as much as the fact that the people looking at alternatives are demonized as evil Nazis. Go look at imgur nowadays and you'll see the hivemind in action. 100% of non-progressive ideas are presented as evil with "the cruelty is the point" NPC comments updooting each other. Lefty tweets are presented as indisputable facts. To people in that bubble, it must look like only the progressive left is even trying to be compassionate and solve the problem and that everyone who isn't on the progressive left just loves oppressing black and brown bodies for fun and profit. Because of that, I'm not even sure that the people you're describing would even call their own thinking a "socialist worldview." From their perspective in the bubble, it's just the reality of caring people trying their best to fight against the forces of evil. Consider the recent tweets trying to use the barter system to defend "socialism". To the extent they would label their worldview "socialism", it's not related to the political system debated for a century and is instead just a mishmash of the hivemind on the current thing. It's not easy to break out of that mindset when everyone you know agrees with it.
I'm curious about the "'retvrn to barter' as socialism" thing. My impression is that that sort of thing did actually happen in the Soviet Union between citizens.
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This will not be a great post because I'm exhausted today, but I remember reading an author who coined the (awkward) term "indiscriminateness" to describe the fundamental principle that led to the disconnect you describe. This principle has become a cardinal virtue in our society.
The idea is that judging someone is about the worst thing you can do. You can't disparage train shitters and train masturbators as "scum" or "bad people" or "degenerate" or even "a public nuisance" because that would be cast judgement on their actions or character. And you know who does that? The hated and reviled Outgroup! Not only are you an ignorant person for negatively judging someone, but you even sound like one of The Bad Guys. And so you will do increasing complex mental gymnastics to explain Why Some People Are Like That, continue to invent ever more complex epicycles to explain social decay.
I think this is a critical point regardless of worldview and also a common trap people fall into.
It is self-satisfying, comforting, safe, and easy to write off one's opponents as immoral or somehow irredeemable. It saves the trouble of having to engage with their point of view and/or arguments. One's in-group affiliation also strengthens ("Totally clapped back today, sis!" / "Owned this lib at the gas station!"). Eventually, however, you end up as an inmate in the echo chamber.
The (admittedly incomplete) method I try to use is trying to think through a different prioritization of values by the other party, leaving moralism out of it as long as possible (exceptions apply, see below). Trying to see past someone's surface level political / ideological / social arguments to identify their personal value system keeps them human (objects / boogeymen can't really be said to have values), punches through midwit argumentation (akhtually, crime went down when xyz happened), and helps you steelman without requiring a ton of intellectual calisthenics.
"This person has a MASSIVE investment into personal emotional comfort. This leads them to advocate for a lot of "outreach" style community services instead of traditional policing. Their relative value of community stability and common welfare is lower." Far more useful as a thinking aid and mental model than the more emotionally satisfying "These m-f'er wants to give free hotel rooms to crackheads?!"
Two caveats. First, this is not koom-bay-ah common-ground finding. That's one of the most bullshit concepts in all of politics / culture war. I'm not trying to find where you and I overlap, I'm trying to figure out why you and I have intractable disagreements. I don't really think I can change your value system, but I might be able to articulate something that shows you the cost and imbalance of your value system. I use business analogies and metaphors a lot because my life is a horrible series of nested spreadsheets but w/e I like it. If you have a stock portfolio that is 100% Tesla, you're taking on concentrated risk and there's a (potential or realized) massive downside. You really believe in Tesla? Ok, that's fine on its face, but you have to realize you're overinvested in a single thing. Applied to our culture war framework, Greta Thunberg (leaving aside the likely weird parental coaching) is 100% in on environmental issues and seems to actively ignore related economic, political, technological, stability impacts. There's not a moral argument there, just an examination of her value system.
Second caveat is that this does break down when you get to the real extremes. Obviously when someone's value system explicitly allows for physical violence in any case but self-defense (let's leave just war theory etc to the side for now) ... it's hard to really deal with them in good faith. The trickier part is when the other person stops short of endorsing physical violence but advocates for such a massive change to existing political order than the immediate second order effects seem to be violence. My favorite example (from right here in Motte-land!) is this post on the lunacy of Ibram Kendi. Obviously, he "values" whatever "anti-racism" is but he also clear values state-level coercion and illiberal and anti-democratic practices in support of that goal. I don't have a good workaround for that.
Your average laptop-class do-gooder millennial progressive, however, isn't anywhere near that. Yes, they will call themselves "anti-racists" to enjoy some in-groping (intentional typo) and mood-affiliation, but, by doing that, they're showing off their value system - pop culture virtue signalling, hipness with the times (so, social perception ability), and (ironically, imho) respect for conformity to prevailing ideas.
Again, this is, I think, a good means of understanding people better and doing some high-return thinking for yourself. As a tool of persuasion, I think this has close to zero value. I'm laughing thinking about that conversation - "You know, I think I understand your entire personal value system and can say confidently that you don't value community safety as highly as individual expression, regardless of long term social cost." You'd probably be better off with some nice Forer statements. "You're a creative soul who loves people, but sometimes find it difficult to fit in."
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I believe it may have been Evan Sayet, whose lecture on the “liberal” (progressive) mindset introduced the idea of indiscriminateness to many conservatives as a sort of revelation.
His channel has his three other main lectures.
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This can't be how they operate. They are very eager to judge racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or even just people who are insufficiently zealous about combating the aforementioned groups. They have no problem judging the character of people they consider to be their outgroup.
Which, you basically acknowledge at much. But you have to take the next obvious implication of that, which is that "judging someone is the worst thing you can do" can't be an accurate model of their psychology.
It actually rings true to me, because I guess it's how I thought for a bit. And it rears its head even in interpersonal affairs. Somewhere during my youth it got instilled in me that being judgmental was an inherently negative trait - a sentiment I attribute entirely to the pop dissemination of therapy talk.
I remember expressing to a friend my concern over some obviously bad and harmful decisions they were making, and was defensively accused of being judgmental with a real finger-wagging tone. A couple other instances of things like that eventually broke the spell, but god knows why I didn't see the absurdity of that thinking earlier.
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Yes, you're right. The common thread in your examples though is that the Xphobes and Xists are all deficient in the virtue of indiscriminateness. They are guilty of some form of judgment against groups that are deemed "oppressed," and (the thinking goes) those groups wouldn't be oppressed if only the Xists and Xphobes would embrace indiscriminateness. Maybe it's better to use one of their own slogans to sum up their beliefs. I've heard some of them say that they will "tolerate anything except for intolerance." So I should qualify my above comment by saying that violations of the principle of indiscriminateness are permissible only in order to further spread the principle itself.
That's definitely a justification used a lot, but I think you were right in your first post and those people are just lying to themselves and othering their outgroup so hard they no longer register as 'people'. They were perfectly happy to judge right wingers who don't 'hate' minorities - Kavanaugh, Romney, Rogan and so on.
I had indiscriminateness beaten into me as a child by my father, who was a devout Christian - None may judge but God and all that. I think I was about 12 or 13 when I noticed how many people we knew who claimed to be non-judgemental but actually judged the shit out of people all the time. I brought this up with my dad, who smirked that I was now judging them, so who was I to talk? To which I replied, almost in despair, that that was exactly my point. Nobody is non judgemental, only God could be, because only God can know things without evaluating them first. He actually listened, thank goodness.
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Possibly because socialism is extremely common and extremely successful on the very small scale. As a general rule, this is how families work, and sometimes extremely tight-knit groups with very high in-group loyalty, like cults. The problem is that it doesn't scale up, and this is a massive problem when you're talking about organizing a society.
The insight of incentives, free markets, etc. is that you can have net-positive interactions without the reinforcement of high in-group loyalty to control defection. The "problem" is that this type of interaction doesn't scale down--it would be a bit ridiculous to run a family on a barter system: infants don't have anything of value to trade for food and diapers beyond weaponized cuteness. This is an illusory problem, though, when you're applying a system to the matching scale of its competence--socialism for family structures, markets for societies.
Yes, and western culture seems to be trying to force the exact opposite on people at the moment: socialism at the society level and individualism at the family level.
This is wicked and can only end badly.
This is a great point. Also love the phrasing. Bravo.
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I'd call that communism rather than socialism, but that's a definitional quibble.
The bit that seems interesting to me is that this could plausibly boil down to evo-psych. Maybe we're communists at heart because we're evolved for communism? Large societies are pretty recent, after all...
I don't think you need evo-psych, so much as just recognizing patterns. For the most part, people grow up in families, and they are used to socializing gains and losses across the family unit. But you can't socialize gains and losses across too large a structure without destroying the individual incentive to succeed (barring extremely high in-group loyalty). Extending this outward, you get clan/extended family structures, and this is where you start to see the failure to scale.
John is in a poor society, but has managed to scrape together enough capital to start a small food stand. If John's society has a cultural expectation of "family member has food, therefore I have food," then enough cousins come out of the woodwork, eat all of John's food for free, and ruin his potential small business. The only way John's business can survive is if he's got the cultural backing to set boundaries and refuse to socialize his gains to his cousins. (Alternatively, John tries, fails, says "fuck this" and moves to America to get away from his cousins, but more importantly, to get away from the cultural expectation that the cousins have a right to his profits.) This is a very common pattern in poor societies, and I'd say, adequately explains why they stay poor.
So, these people in poor societies look pretty dumb for not figuring out the dynamic that keeps them poor, yes? I'd say yes, but actually no. How does a potential reformer present the message "you need to not automatically share with your cousins" without coming across as a selfish defect-bot? If he's saying we shouldn't automatically share with our cousins, does that mean we also shouldn't share with our children?
This is where Ayn Rand points out that this was her core insight: "greed is good." I think she's directionally correct in many instances, but no, charity is still a virtue. It's not about whether John shares his food with his cousins or does not. It's about whether he has the right to choose to share or not--whether his society permits him to make that choice without penalty. It's a culture where a cousin may ask, but--on average--will accept a "no" without trashing John's reputation, and will himself be seen as greedy if he insists on a right to John's assets. Charity cannot exist without choice. There are various arguments for differing levels of socialism, but "creating a charitable society" is flatly wrong.
I happen to be re-reading Atlas Shrugged through audiobook on x1.5 speed mostly out of spite for its anti-fans. I appreciate her depiction of a communist dystopia which is, if anything, less dystopic than the real thing. But it's driving me insane how much her "greed is good" pitch relies on her putting pro-charity arguments in the mouths of the most snivelling hypocritical wretches you ever met, while having callipygian I-invented-calculus-at-age-twelve gigachads tell you how they only work for money.
It would be so much the better book if she left it as "yeah, communism sounds nice but everything falls apart."
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Below Dunbar's number, we're all communists, and it works. Your family is a commune.
The higher you go above Dunbar's number, the harder it becomes to detect and handle defectbots.
Then, at scale, sub-dunbar units within the society themselves become defectbots. You can see the collapse of communism by looking at societies as they scale in size, from bands to tribes to chiefdoms and then states.
Whose family is a commune? Traditionally they were patriarchies or sometimes matriarchies. Nowadays they may be more equal partnerships, but little Billy doesn't own the house in common, neither legally nor in reality.
Little Billy does in fact refer to it as "his house," and he is correct to do so. No, he cannot sell it, but there is a meaningful sense in which it is "his." "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need" is a good approximation of how families are run. If you point to a patriarch in charge of a family, I can point to any communist regime ever with an obvious patriarch at the top of society.
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"Own" is a contract with the larger society. Billy gets to live in it and use it and the things in it in accordance to his needs. Dad pays the mortgage and does 80% of the yardwork in accordance with his abilities. If Billy shatters his spine and becomes paraplegic, he can do 0% of the work and not only will his claim to the resources of the house not be threatened, it will increase and Stacey will be expected to pick up the slack and forgo things she used to get that the house can no longer afford.
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