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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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...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.

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