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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38163 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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From Institution Building to Identity Building and Back Again

Tanner Greer’s “Lessons from the Nineteenth Century” is the latest in a series on the decline of American self-governance and institution building.

He offers a comparison between the reaction to the Spanish Flu and Covid-19. In 1918 Americans sprung into action, organized committees on sanitation and medical care, delegated responsibilities, held regular meetings. When the crisis was over these committees had stern handshakes all round and then disbanded, not to burden America with ever more bureaucracy.

In contrast, during the early months of Covid no one seemed to know who was responsible, the major agencies all gave contradictory information that varied week-to-week, grassroots initiative was scattered and weak.

Seemingly we've forgotten how to do what our recent ancestors easily could. Nowadays Americans largely don’t practice addressing problems by creating their own organizations with formal structures and set goals. But back in the day if you were in one of America’s countless settler communities and there was a problem with bandits, or fallen trees covering the road or whatever, there was generally no higher authority to appeal to. If you wanted irrigation, you got together with your friends and you dug some darn ditches.

consider the situation faced by the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager. If he had settled near the frontier, he would had been involved in creating and manning the government bodies that regulated aspects of communal life—the school board, the township, the sheriff’s department, and so forth. Even if he was not a frontiersman, he was a regular attendee at the town, city, county and even state government meetings most relevant to his family’s concerns. Between his wife and he, his family participated in a half dozen committees, chapters, societies, associations, councils, and congregations.

In the last century these self-governed settlers have had their local autonomy worn away by the twin forces of modern bureaucracy and late stage capitalism, rule from the capitol beltway and the corporate boardroom. Greer speaks ably to how bureaucracy's distant web of control weaves through our lives from thousands of miles away. I’m more interested in what capitalism and wage labor have done to the American psyche, taking us from a world of self-employed farmers, builders, artisans, and shopowners, to a nation of people who show up when we’re told, eat during designated breaks, and ask permission to go to the bathroom. I’ll quote one of my favorite passages from T.J. Stiles' biography of Vanderbilt:

Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence ... More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household...But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883...these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”

The collapse of bottom-up institution building into the modern age of subjects-rather-than-citizens is Greer’s answer both to dilemmas raised by the left, but even more by the “New Right” (notice how different the portrayal of the self-actualized American settler is from the reactionary trope of the idealized beach bum-citizen, unconcerned with his distant dictatorial government). No, Greer says, the malaise in modern society didn’t start in 1776, or with the Enlightenment, or with the reformation. It started when people lost the ability to have a say creating their own world and had to turn solipsistically inward to feel any agency at all:

This week I finished listening to an episode titled “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self.” The parallels between the Hellenistic trends Metzger describes and the problems of the current moment are worth pondering...

Destroyed: a world of cohesive, tradition bound city states whose citizens were joined together by shared loyalty to a polity whose fate was set by these same citizens’ own sweat. In its place: a tangle of marauding empires whose political outcomes were decided by the machinations of the distant few in the despot’s court or the mercenary’s camp...Men who led small and bounded worlds now found themselves the playthings of inconstant forces operating on imperial scales.

The intellectual response to these developments was to turn inward...New faiths were focused less on public goods than private salvation...No longer did great thinkers squabble over the form of the ideal polity, or ask what political communities must do to foster good character in their citizens. Hellenistic philosophy was not focused on citizens. It was obsessed with individual ethics...Like the new religions, their focus was on the soul within a man, not the community of men outside him...

To explain this all Metzger quotes historian Peter Green: “The record we have… speaks with some eloquence to the dilemmas that faced a thinking man in a world where, no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul.”

The modern obsession with “expressive individualism,” whether it be gender-bending woke idpol, or right wingers joining neo-paganism or contrived versions of internet catholicism, is what happens when people have no influence over the outside world and instead must turn inward to the only place they have control over: their own identities. It's all just a desperate screaming attempt to regain a semblance of control in a world that has taken that from us. Everyone could win their modern culture war wishlist, but you still won’t have addressed the root issue that’s driven us from the real world and inward down endless black holes.

To end on a positive note, I’ve been a tiny cog in other machines my entire life, but I’ve tasted the kind of self-governance Greer describes. A long time ago I helped run a campaign for a local politician; the whole team was me and my friends, if we needed more staff we had to convince people to work for us, if we wanted people to vote we had to meet them face-to-face and make our damn case. It wasn’t an important race or anything, but the giddy feeling of having a tangible influence on the world around you, of creating something from scratch with your own willpower, has stayed with me ever since. Not so long ago this was just American life. America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice. As the shocked Toqueville said of the people he met in the United States:

there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.

I think we have been institutionalized to a very large degree and that’s why COVID responses didn’t really form the ad-hoc organization. Most of us don’t do that anymore and in fact it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost. In fact the skills that form group cohesion are being eroded as well, which is why the cry-bullying seems to grow by the day. Such a thing cannot work in a situation where members of the group hold autonomy. They’d simply kick the malcontents out. But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.

it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost

I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

What about stable diffusion for art? Surely the barrier to entry for art is very low and falling rapidly! I was always rather hopeless at drawing but a decent GPU is within reach of most. Or Midjourney? Or writing a story with a word processor?

Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

I disagree with all the other comments on here. I was just in East Asia for half a year, no one cooks at home- people don't even have ovens in their homes, and food is so good and plentiful and cheap there that no one eats at home. Americans cook way way more than that, everyone I know from my mom to my brothers and sister to my friends in NYC to my friends in the midwest are into cooking their own food. Eating out is very expensive in the US. My dad, recently deceased, ate out every meal of his life after leaving home, but he was particularly rich and an outlier in many other ways. Everyone else in my family cooks for themselves and their families.

I met this woman at a friend's birthday party who was early 30s, corporate lawyer, she said the last thing she had cooked herself was something like 6 months earlier and it was an egg. She and her partner just order out for every meal. Very real in big cities in America.

Less and less, I think. I have friends with persistent delivery habits, and though I regularly cook for myself, I'm tremendously lazy about it - fry some meat in a pan and have some kind of simple starchy carb with it.

It's a significant decline from the Boomer/Xer generation from my read.

I haven't met a single zoomer who can cook. When they attempt it, it's aggressively bad. Millennials tend to be outliers - either they are horrendous cooks who subsist mostly on takeout or they consider cooking a hobby and absolutely crush it (my friendsgivings are almost universally excellent for every dish).

When it comes to DIY items it seems like everyone gives up and has someone else do it for them. Some folks can't even be bothered to get multiple quotes. I know that I personally am absolutely shitty at maintaining a house compared to my parents, and I'm still the guy people call about house problems etc.

Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

In the full sense of "buy fresh ingredients from a grocery store and prepare a meal from scratch" I would say the proportion of Americans that regularly do that has been in continuous decline since at least 1945. The idea of a nice home-cooked meal to a typical Amerikaner might be a can of tomato sauce heated up in a pot with some prepackaged meatballs served over spaghetti with some mozzarella dust from a jar sprinkled on top, so about the only skill needed is knowing how to turn on the stove and boil noodles. If our hypothetical home cook decided to splurge and get better tomato sauce it might even have recognizable bits of vegetables in it.

Well if there's a pan involved, then it's cooking IMO. I put vegetables and meat in a pan, stir it around a bit, rotate at times.

I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

Within certain classes of people generally no. Between fast food restaurants, full service restaurants, meal prep/delivery services, ready-made meals, frozen meals and meal replacements it is quite possible for Millenials and Zoomers to never operate anything more complicated than a toaster, a microwave and maybe boiling water on a range. Especially if the skillset was not deliberately passed down by Boomer/Gen X parents whose own skillset may be lacking/atrophied compared to their parents' generation. What level of cookery is necessary to prepare a dinner of hamburger helper or pasta from a box paired with sauce from a jar, after a breakfast of cereal from a box with toast and a lunch of factory sliced cold cuts/cheese/bread sandwich and a bag of chips?

But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.

Ironically, if I haven't inundated this forum enough with his blog, Greer makes much the same case, arguing that modern victimhood isn't a cultural quirk but a pretty reasonable response to a society where the most effective way to get things done is earning the sympathies of the vast, impersonal powers we all live under.

A long time ago if you wanted to build a house you needed land and the knowledge of practical house building skills: brickwork, carpentry, plaster, etc. Today, the practical skills associated with house building are more complicated: electricity, plumbing, gas lines, scoping for major appliances, carpeting, the physical systemization of everything, a higher expected level of finish and polish on everything.

It's harder now to build a house just based on practical matters- it is less likely that a regular person will have all the skills to do it himself. He might be forced to hire a specialist or three. He may feel like he is no longer a master of his fate in this regard.

Navigating regulation is a skill of its own, which must be learned. It is not an intuitive skill. Some people aren't good at it, but I don't think it represents a phase change in personal ownership- only a change in degree.

That being said, the value/cost ratio of regulation like this is probably low in a lot of cases.

My family built two houses doing everything except hanging the garage doors once and everything except hanging the garage door and some concrete work the other time.

Power tools are nice but the gigantic advantage someone has today is theres someone showing you how to do everything for free on youtube. Reading a book on how to wire a three way switch and then successfully wiring one in is hard, unless you have done some electronics work and know how a flip flop works. Doing it after watching someone wire one on YouTube is ezpz.

You need enough basic skills to differentiate between the martial art and the bullshido though.

I wonder if there is even much bullshido on YouTube. If you want to replace the driver side window on a 2011 Honda Accord, there's a YouTube video for that.

In some ways, but I think in a lot of ways building is way easier now. Anyone who's played around with power tools has to wonder "how the hell did anyone ever get anything built before these?" And I'm not just talking about the difference between a hammer and a nailgun, but literally having ready access to the nails.

Generally nails weren't used, I assume you are familiar with thatch and carving notches in logs.

Part of the good thing about living in Amish country is that they still do post and beam construction, versus the modern balloon frame construction where the shell is the support structure as well.

Having done it the old way in the literal middle of the fucking jungle:

With friends.

You put out the call and everybody comes; the dudes from the harbor bring block and tackle; the dudes down the valley bring some donkeys, and everybody brings their sweat and you put that shit up.

Working without fasteners isn't actually that much harder for simple structures; it's just much more time consuming.

Then again; I can't imagine doing it without the products of industrialization. Even if we didn't have electric drills we did have HSS bits, as it were.

Then again; I can't imagine doing it without the products of industrialization. Even if we didn't have electric drills we did have HSS bits, as it were.

As you say, same thing only slower.

You can bang a spade bit out of iron, or even stone I guess -- you can make a brace out of various things, with a bow drill being probably most primitive.

You can hack boards with an axe -- which is one of the older tools in existence.

The story of technology is that of workers figuring out ways to make their jobs easier, and it is a pretty long story before you get anywhere near the industrial age.

And power drills and nails are designed and fabricated at locations very far from you, and are useful to you or not (supply, packaging, standardization, spare parts, etc) based on the decisions made by far away people, often times leaving you no recompensed if those decisions impact you negatively.

The glib libertarian answer would probably be that the kind of international trade that facilitates the manufacture and supply of technology is also best maximized by getting the government out of the way. But I'll bite the bullet and say that I think modern states also frequently lower transaction costs for trade, and that the kind of institutions that create power tools are likely to be large scale corporations with bureaucratic management structures themselves. I'm a great enjoyer of modernity and I think the vast, impersonal scale of our institutions is part of what drives prosperity. There's a reason why humanity generally trades off independence and self-reliance for the stultifying comforts of advanced society.

I certainly wouldn't undo that trade myself, but I want to highlight that something important was lost through the trade, something that's partially a choice and can be recovered without sacraficing everything else. The Spanish Flu response that Greer highlights was in the early twentieth century, after both industrial capitalism and modern bureaucracy had been built, and yet we still understood how to achieve wide-scale, grassroots activism and institution building. A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.

A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.

Agreed. Maybe I was taking issue with the framing, as if these skills were "just lost" like a penny in a gutter, or via some nebulous "force of bureaucracy". They were abandoned for the same reason that you cannot build a power drill yourself (or probably even a hammer).

(Though I also believe we'd be a better society if everyone knew how to make a power drill)

...the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager.

Is this actually true? The average 19th century Californian man likely lived surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations. These may only distantly have included the federal government in Washington but they certainly included locally powerful figures with whom he was most likely not directly acquainted and who wielded a substantial degree of power over him.

I agree with @Soriek, while the early settlers and people in previous historical communities didn't control everything that happened around them, there were faces they could either love or hate depending on their circumstances. They could go to another person, beg forgiveness or extension, and generally make sense of their world in a more comfortable way.

The modern issue of dealing with "machinations in a distant court" is the exact problem here. Humans have lived with tribes and been comfortable dealing with powerful people in their direct, personal experience for almost all of our history after language, probably even before. Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I'm of the opinion that this alienation is why so many modern movements are focused around spite and anger, such as the Alt Right or whatever name they go by now. Our current way of living in the Western world forces us to constantly repress anger, and there's no good outlet for that anger because we don't personally see the people screwing us over.

Edmond Dantes was in deep despair while imprisoned in Chateau D'If for an unspecified crime on the accusation of an unknown person. Only when he finally deduced what his "crime" had been and who was responsible for his wrongful imprisonment did he regain his will to act.

I think this is an accurate reflection of how many people internally experience oppression by a specific person with intelligible motives versus oppression by an impersonal, alien force to which they are merely unnoticed collateral damage.

"Why is my rent going up this month? Isn't there anything you can do?" "Nope, sorry, the computer system says your rent goes up $125 this year. Corporate sets the rules, there's nothing I can do."

Indeed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Without a "why," the "how" is often unbearable.

That presents different problems. The tyranny of the ten most powerful people in your village might be genuinely and significantly worse than the tyranny of the central government, which doesn’t care about anyone in the village specifically but might care about upholding broad rules that protect you from those ten people. Often local politics is far more aggressive, far more bitter, even far more violent than national politics.

That's kind of orthogonal to the argument, no? Your point is about the objective conditions of the system, whereas the argument was about the subjective ease the people in the systems have dealing with the systems.

At least the person in the village could be ousted if not appealed to. Modern decisions are made in such a way that most decision makers have never been to the places affected nor bothered to meet, much less talk to, those people who would have to live with the decision. To the modern tyrants you aren’t a person, you’re a number in a spreadsheet. Your town, your street, your school? It’s a couple of charts. You are data you aren’t an autonomous agent, you’re a statistical model.

Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I disagree, or at least I would warn against generalizing on this point

When I say emotionally difficult I don't mean it's always better, I just mean in terms of having an outlet for your anger or being able to process the emotion it's easier. You're mad at Steve - you can imagine punching him in the face.

So many folks nowadays are angry, depressed, manic-depressive, anxious, etc etc etc because they have a massive amount of repressed emotions and don't know how to cope or process them.

It's worth pointing out (in case it doesn't come across in my re-telling of his work) that Greer isn't arguing for anything like libertarianism or an appeal to a lofty past of rugged individualism, but rather "rugged communalism." He very much acknowledges and expects us to live "surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations," that's part of the appeal! He just wants the bonds and obligations thick and personal.

His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible. Your local rich guy may always have an outsized influence, and your own impact on any given process will vary, but ideally most of the important institutions you come in contact with, your school board, church, sheriff's department, will be built and ran by people who know you by name and face and understand and care about your concerns in a way that isn't possible on a much larger scale. A world where if you and your friends encounter a problem, the first thought everyone should have is how you can organize and address it, rather than how you can make your cause sympathetic to an institution far away.

His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible

(edit: I was+am aware these are greer's views, not yours)

But the rules I care about the most are about "the kinds of high-tech chips and electronic devices I can purchase", "copyright and intellectual property of text or image bitstrings", or "ability to reverse-engineer and adversarially interoperate with online platforms". The company I work for probably sells their product over the internet to people not only in every state, but in dozens of other international jurisdictions, how can local rulemaking work for that? Even the most physical ones would be something like "environmental regulations, e.g. on dumping and pesticide use, on farms and factories within a 12 hour drive from me". Plus, aren't two of the biggest examples of local control today pathological, development-strangling environmentalism (neither endorsing nor non-endorsing that judgement) and NIMBYism?

I should probably add that I'm mostly relating the views of someone else, views I'm sypmathetic too and would like to draw some inspiration from, but do not fully endorse. I'm not an anarchist nor a libertarian and I think there are a lot of advantages to modernity, capitalism, and bureaucracy that I would not personally be willing to trade away. But there can be reforms that ideally lead towards a happy medium between some of the advantages of both. I also appreciate his work for a meta-level take on the two different sides of the culture war being an unproductive manifestation of the same root cause, rather than a solution to our actual prolems.

Greer isn't arguing for anything like libertarianism or an appeal to a lofty past of rugged individualism...

His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible.

Very confusingly, this description is somewhat close to what is sometimes called American individualist anarchism or aesthetic anarchism, which is somehow a branch of libertarian socialism or mutualism? Or maybe the other way. I think the gist of the idea is that individuals should voluntarily form mutually supportive networks, but that those networks should be made via deep and direct social connection rather than a mandate enforced with a monopoly on the use of force. Some of the terminology is archaic and not in the current common usage, so IDK if the message is aligns with real libertarianism.

I'm not sure what Greer would make of the labels, but he pointed out that the movement against bureaucracy was for a long time considered the purview of the New Left, though nowadays it's more popularly associated with the right.

Once you get into the fringes of homesteadism the lines between far left and generic kind of right-libertarianism blur since ancoms consider homesteading to be acceptable personal property + owning your own means of production.

America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice.

The skills may be waiting, but they are behind barbed wire, with a stern Bureaucrat handing us a dozen forms that may as well be in another language before we are allowed to touch them. Any unauthorized attempts will fine you into permanent poverty or get you thrown in a rape cage.

Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

I few months back I was reading a post by someone in my local subreddit about them attempting to navigate the permitting process to do some work by themselves on their own home. The entire system was literally set up so that he could not possibly complete it. It required his "business's" tax ID and other registration information. And no bureaucrat he spoke to about this could provide him any solution. They just robotically repeated that he had to complete the forms in full with all the required information. Not sure how, or if, that ever resolved itself.

watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

This is true, but I should like to say that this is because of a surfeit of local control, not central control. It wasn't because of some faceless bureaucracy that he was thwarted, it was the people who lived amongst him that stopped him, wielding of course tools granted them by central government, but nonetheless it was local NIMBYs who got up and stopped him, not some civil servant dispatched from Whitehall. Indeed, if we are going to start building again in Britain, power must move closer to the centre, not further from it.

I’m pretty sure no one actually gets permits to work on their homes. My dad sold his house a few years ago with a completely unpermitted fire place, the only consequence was the inspector reporting this to the buyer. No one cared and they still closed the deal.

I think it's important not to over-doomer it, regulations don't necessarily last forever. Part of the value I got out of the comparisons to ancient Greece was that this stuff always rises and falls in major societies over time. Diocletian's taxes and price controls were abolished, the Sassanians abandoned their mass standardizations, in recent history the American progressive movement made significant process cutting red tape and reducing bureaucratic bloat. Reform is always possible. Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?

Insofar as things carry on at a larger scale, it's at least in part because there's little meaningful opposition to this state of affairs. I didn't include it for brevity's sake, but the remainder of the first blog post, and in this piece for Palladium, Greer outlines what he seens as the actual muscles America needs to flex and train to regain our organizational prowess: 1) the importance of public usefulness as a virtue, 2) a commitment to formality, and 3) the proper use of heirarchy and scale:

The benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal:

...First, institutions cultivated a sense of public kinship and brotherhood, sometimes formalized by sacred oaths. Just as citizens took oaths to the republic or upon the Bible, social and political associations took their bonds of loyalty no less seriously. The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. They required earnest oaths that committed their members to a life of charity, public service, brotherhood, and the betterment of their fellow men. Lodge leaders developed these rituals and treated their oaths with great solemnity. This required their culture to have a functional role for solemnity and seriousness at all. When irreverence becomes a universal norm, attempts at seriousness degenerate into performative role-play.

A commitment to formality:

The famously irreverent Boomers were the first generation of Americans born in the shadow of the new managerial society. The “New Left” counterculture of the 1960s was, in turn, the first attempt to break the shackles of bureaucracy and conformity. New Left radicals condemned the “bewildering dependence” of Americans on “inaccessible castles wherein inscrutable technicians conjure with their fate” and identified the “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy” as “the greatest problem of our nation.” Their movement ultimately failed, however, to create viable counter-communities capable of agency.

A central reason for their failure is that for all of their talk about “participatory democracy,” the radicals of the New Left were not interested in the discipline, formality, and commitment to reasoned debate that made the actual participatory democracy function. Associating rationalism and rules with the suffocating bureaucratic structures that they rebelled against, New Left radicals ended up mounting a titanic effort to liberate themselves from the very intellectual and organizational tools that successful institution builders use to assert their agency. The cause of self-liberation ended up in conflict with the cause of self-government….

Self-government meant a deep commitment to an otherwise mundane set of tasks...Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action.

And finally, the usefulness of scale and hierarchy:

The third virtue was, instead, an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems...

Many of the modern institutions which have most successfully retained their nineteenth-century commitment to decentralized local leadership—such as the LDS church or the U.S. Marine Corps—have famously rigid hierarchies. These institutions integrate clear chains of command with a structure and culture that encourages initiative and independent problem-solving by leaders at the lowest level of the hierarchy. The leaders of these institutions understand that the only way to train someone to effectively lead large organizations is to give them practice acting autonomously on a smaller scale. Empowering people down the chain to make mistakes lets their leaders up the chain prevent them from happening at a larger scale.

Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?

People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances. (for bonus points, places attempting to limit anonymous tips have often found themselves facing ACLU opposition), across a wide variety of locations and cultures and jurisdictions.

((For even more fun, it's not just a matter of getting the permit; it's quite possible to get a wholly-correct assembly together, and then have code enforcement decide to call you out years later for a final inspection asking to see things literally buried under feet of dirt.))

They're not even always wrong to do snitch! If someone's laying a hilariously bad electrical fire risk, or pouring 90psi of water at your front door, or propping up a giant hammer with a little piece of string aimed at your property, there's no magic ward at the edge of your property.

But it's often not about that. And short of finding places where the law doesn't touch at all, or having such a large remove from other parcels that there's no one to report, it's just something that comes with home ownership. And this isn't specific to building ordinances.

There is a small industry of ADA testers that will find any business that doesn't meet their standards, even if they didn't intend to actually buy that businesses's products or services. There's EPA and Army Engineers if you want to build on a wide variety of parcels -- and even if you think your land isn't covered, the right advice right now is to get them to actually give you that in writing instead. And this is just the easy universal stuff! God forbid you do something dangerous like deal with chemicals, or firearms, or anything financial. There's thousands of these things.

There are two things ordinary people will fight like rabid dogs over - wills, which tear apart families where siblings will cut each other's throats over who gets Granny's good china tea set, and neighbours - did you trim the hedge? did you not trim the hedge? is a branch of a tree in your garden growing over their boundary wall? are you encroaching two inches on their property? are they encroaching two inches on your property? are they/you parking their/your vehicle outside their/your house, and does this block them/you off from access to their/your own property?

Ordinary people can get bloodthirsty vindictive over cutting three inches off an overgrown hedge.

People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances.

No denials at all that latticeworks of these kinds of building regulations absolutely do exist and weave through American life. But these examples all happened in Miami, Nashville, Atlanta and its suburbs; the smallest polity here is Lancaster Ohio, whereas my comment was about rural areas farther removed from the modern reach of the state. When I say "neighbor" I mean it in the sense of someone you know personally and have a relationship with rather that someone who moved next door but you don't interact with.

I don't doubt that someone could find an isolated example of this kind of behavior in nowheresville, but it's assuredly much less common. As an example, my old boss decided he wanted to build a guest house on his property that he could rent out. When we laid the permanent foundation I asked him if he was supposed to have gotten a permit for it. He replied something like "possibly, I'm not sure." Why would he care? He was building in the middle of the woods and his property was surrounded on either side by his mother and uncle's farms. His isolation was extreme but not that extreme; most people where I grew up lived in areas with low visibility, far from the reach of your local bureaucrat, and flanked by people who cared about them; this is still reality for lots of rural Americans.

I heard a similar tale about a guy who built a barn on his farm. No permits or anything just did it because it was his property and he could get done, besides he was close with all the people who mattered in the small town including the planning board. Except he put it very close to the property line in violation of setback regulations which caused property damage to his neighbor's farm. That neighbor has since been going after him for the damage and now the town planning board because they tried to protect barnguy (a local) from this weird autistic scifi author from Boston (injured neighbor) and violated all kinds of their own bylaws (and state records/meetings laws) to try to retroactively bless the creation of the offending barn. Last I heard there's still three lawsuits on going against barnguy and the town and the angry neighbor got himself elected to the state government out of spite.

He'll be made to care if, heaven forbid, anything happens to the people renting out his guest property and they take him to court. Then it will all come out about "did you get a permit" and the rest of it.

I should clarify he was a career carpenter who had built his own house, not just a mad lad looking for a quick come up.

You might be able to get around many of those bureaucratic restrictions in the hollowed-out husk of some rust belt city, where there is minimal municipal oversight and what little there is could probably be convinced to look the other way for the right price. Everyone involved would probably have to be black, however, otherwise the kind of security measures needed to protect such a community-building endeavor would draw the wrong kind of publicity.

Or you could do it in the middle of nowhere.

Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

Amusingly, though, the solution to a lot of this stuff isn't for more local government, it's for less of it. Planning restrictions are almost all decided locally. Pesky municipal by(e)laws are - in large part - why Clarkson couldn't do most of what he wanted to do on his farm. Local government is inherently NIMBYist, especially in a wealthy rural locale, as he found out.

The best answer is to abolish local government and make the smallest unit of government the state or - possibly - the city in the case of extremely large (4+ million inhabitant) municipalities. A 75 year old member of the town board of supervisors living in the local pristine heritage area with a valuable home they bought in 1985 is always going to veto any construction. A 24 year old bureaucrat in the capital city whose job it is to stamp forms can be instructed much more easily to approve everything. Billionaires can lobby the state, but even relative nobodies with a little time on their hands can stymy the functioning of local government.

One of Boris Johnson's core plans was to reform planning in England to make construction much easier (by making it harder for local councils to block planning permission, by simplifying the environmental review process etc). His own voters rebelled, and the Tories lost a by-election in a formerly safe seat to the Liberal Democrats (whose leader said it was "a massive mandate for those of us who were campaigning against the planning reforms"). So they cancelled the reforms.

Endless ridiculous HOA stories show that tyranny, for the most part, is local rather than federal or national. Fewer people with power might well mean more freedom for everyone.

I think the actual answer is to keep the role of government to its proper place. My right to my property must be much greater than the local council's right to interfere with my enjoyment of that property.

Okay, but, you are not allowed to buy the lot next to mine and turn it into a combination pig feed lot, fireworks factory and homeless shelter. That would financially ruin myself and my neighbors. We would follow the obvious and powerful incentives to get our local government to use zoning rules to block that.

The problem is precisely people in the local council thinking their right to their property includes their right to, say, prohibit the construction of a house in front of their own that would block their views (etc).

Outside of hyper contractualist ancapistan where things like rights to a view are priced, sold and bundled as contracts and liens attached to properties, the local council being the community consensus decision making group for balancing overlapping property interests seems reasonable. Local governments can be wildly corrupt and not follow their own rules (see #barnlaw) but the principle is quite sane.

The principle at first glance seems 'sane' but something has clearly got to change in Britain, we simply cannot go on like this. In practice, 'community decision making' means 'elderly home-owner decision making' which in turn in practice means 'sorry you can't open a restaurant because Doris might have to queue in traffic for two minutes to go to bridge'. If these committees were composed of people who dispassionately analyse the costs and benefits it would be fine, but they by and large are not.

Costs and benefits to whom? Why are the benefits to a homeowner who has a long term vested interest in their community (going to bridge) who will bear the costs of increased traffic something you think should be valued lower than a business (are they even property owners or non-permanent tenants?) catering to the kind of people who don't care enough to participate in local politics (or even non-residents). As a general rule, low level politics are dominated by people who care and people who show up.

Benefits to the entire are and indeed to the nation, not just to one small section of the community. And as other who have pointed out, it's only time-rich pensioners with nothing better to do who have the time to turn up to such things and so their influence is outsized. The problem is that planning has implications for the entire region or nation, so deciding everything at the local level means that considerations of those benefits gets lost. One project won't decrease rents much in a partiuclar neighbourhood, but if everyone takes that attitude then nothing ever gets built and we are where we are today with thirteen years of stagnant productivity growth. Something's got to give.

catering to the kind of people who don't care enough to participate in local politics

Or rather, people who work for a living and don't have time for a second job participating in local politics.

To some extent, but your average builder is also heavily burdened by restrictions from the state and federal level: environmental reviews, a litany of Executive Orders, design requirements, licensing and permitting processes, stacks of procurement, contracting and hiring regulation, etc. Good high level government would indeed fix construction problems, but it's like saying good local government would solve NIMBYism as well - the problem is getting from here to there.

Very little of the NIMBYism in, say, Berkeley, CA is coming from the federal government, though. Some of it comes from the state. Even in California, however, much of it is local.

If we're talking about nimbyism as a movement by residents to block local building, then yeah by definition it's a local issue. But state and federal regulations most certainly raise obstacles and costs to building; often they are the very tools that give local NIMBYs their power in the first place. To use your example of Berkley for instance, a federal judge blocked construction of their supercomputer laborotory because the University of California hadn't gone through the nationally required environmental impact assessment. More recently, Berkley's attempt to build more (desparately needed) student housing was blocked under California's state level Environmental Quality Act.

My argument isn't that local roadblocks aren't important, it's just that the solution isn't as simple as shifting authority to higher and higher levels, when you look at their track record thus far.

I think the point is that federal issues are more tractable. If most restrictions were at the central level, and politician X wants to build more houses, he can quietly abolish some of the more onerous ones, and there you go, national housing stock will increase. With restrictions at the local level, that kind of action will never be co-ordinated nationwide.

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