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I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.
A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.
The long version might require a bit of background to explain.
I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.
As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.
The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
This is the topic of The Righteous Mind and Moral Foundations Theory, which suggests that people have Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values. Liberals are more sensitive to Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives equally mix all five. Thus Haidt suggests a blind spot where liberals can struggle to understand conservatives when they make a judgement on the basis of Loyalty, Authority or Sanctity, but conservatives are still able to understand liberals when they make a judgement on Care or Fairness.
On the other hand I disagree with that. Liberals do still have those values in there, and can express them just as strongly if not stronger than Conservatives. They just need an unusual nudge to do so. Covid was one of those moments where Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values dominated Liberal moral decisionmaking.
I'm inclined to agree with this. I actually see a lot of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity in progressive politics, but it tends to come out in strange and indirect ways. These moral foundations often manifest like Freudian neuroses; they are seemingly repressed but then force their way through in ways that are often unconscious, perverted and vicarious.
I think Haidt is onto something, but his error is that modern progressives are psychologically more like old conservatives, except they have been raised in a tradition of progressivism. Older progressives were a self-selecting group of outliers, but modern progressives are just normies who grew up with that stuff. In any case, the upshot is that old fashioned expressions of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity have been tabooed. Essentially, the tenets of the progressive faith are all couched in the principles of Care and Fairness, and so when the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations bubble up to the surface, they do so dressed up in a guise of Care and Fairness. This is why modern progressivism seems to be taking on more a religious flavor, and it's often reinventing old customs but using new language to legitimize them.
They certainly have Authority ("It's not my job to educate you" and the whole attitude of acting like there's already a huge consensus behind them that they can't believe you aren't aware of, what's wrong with you) and Sanctity (observe the frequent use of "Gross" as a term of moral criticism, often meaning nothing more than that someone disagreed with some prog shibboleth).
Loyalty is a weird one. There is an intense loyalty to the movement, and an expectation of same (e.g. exhorting people to be "good allies"), paired with a near-total lack thereof toward any of the individuals that make it up. I was particularly struck by this in their treatment of Germaine Greer. This attitude seems weird and almost incoherent to me - what is the movement besides a useful shorthand for the people who make it up? - but apparently they have no difficulty squaring that circle. Their whole shtick is reifying/anthropomorphizing abstract group identities in ways that seem weird and unhealthy to me, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.
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