December 2017

discoursedrome:

etirabys:

is there a consensus on the statement “being a nerd is more about announcing yourself as belonging to a particular cultural coalition than about announcing yourself to have certain personality characteristics”?

my cumulative exposure to the contexts in which it’s used indicates to me that it’s the former, but the giant thinks it’s more the latter

or is it both but people switch back and forth without indicating (or being aware?) that they’re doing so

Both meanings are definitely in use, and in use for different coalitions and characteristics at that. I’m not sure how much individuals switch back and forth but it’s definitely a case where there’s a cluster of related concepts and different people are picking different concepts as the “real” one.

All that being said: the line between advertising your personality characteristics and affiliating yourself with a cultural coalition is kind of fuzzy, because different cultures ascribe value to (and therefore attract people with) different characteristics.

I do think it’s something more substantive than the general “different cultures ascribe value to (and therefore attract people with) different characteristics.”  Nerd culture in particular, being a perpetually embedded subculture, spent decades conflating personality with culture – “this is the culture for People Like Us, and People Like Us are automatically drawn to our communities and our signifiers” – in a way that’s proving pretty tough to unravel even as broader social shifts are making that unraveling increasingly important. 

Do not let your universal virtue schema become slave to your personal identity-construction. 

This is a thing I see a lot, although right now it doesn’t seem helpful to call out specific examples.  It’s a thing I’ve done a lot, probably a thing I still do sometimes, although Lord knows I try to be better than that. 

You see someone talking about X, or doing X, or being X.  And you think: “Man, I am not X.  It is really important to me that I am not X.  I would never ever in a million years want to be X, or want anyone to believe that I was X even for a moment.”  And that’s just fine, as far as it goes. 

But it’s so easy to underscore that identification by responding with, “X is stupid / evil / contemptible, and fie on anyone who is X.”  Which is an attack on a way-of-being, and on a lot of people.

Maybe you really mean it.  Maybe you really think that, in this particular way, everyone should be just like you.  Maybe this is a case where it’s worth flattening the diversity of the world, where it’s worth cutting off a bunch of selves and narratives that people find rewarding, in order to get rid of the awfulness that is X.  If that’s your position, then fine, go to.  Some things genuinely are just bad. 

But maybe you’re just trying to find a viscerally gripping way to shout, “BEHOLD!  I AM NOT X!  TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!”  This is pretty likely, actually, based on my experience.  And if that’s what you’re doing…then stop.  Let the X people be X in peace, with your blessing.  Their lives will be richer for it.  Hell, your life will be richer for it – in an identitarian sense, being not-X is more meaningful and more salient in a world where it’s not a universal default.   

This is one of the many mechanisms by which we might begin to reclaim reasoned discourse from the churning personal needs of the discoursers. 

brazenautomaton:

centrally-unplanned:

brazenautomaton:

the-grey-tribe:

bambamramfan:

the-grey-tribe:

Episode VIII retconned away most of the new stuff established in episode VII. It also retconned a bunch of stuff from the other trilogies.

There was a lot of set-up in TFA: Who are Rey’s parents? What is Snoke’s end game? What‘s up with Phasma? How will the First Order stomach the destruction of Starkiller Base? How powerful is the First Order anyway? Can the Republic recover from the destruction of Coruscant Hosnian Prime?

Can you lower the stakes even further? And who cares?

You have helpfully already grouped these questions into the relevant answers.

---

• Who are Rey’s parents? 
  
• What is Snoke’s end game? 
  

These things deserved to be tossed into the mud, and was the best decision Rian made.

• What‘s up with Phasma? 
  

Yeah that sucked. Though don’t let memory exaggerate for you how much screentime Boba Fett really got, relative to how much we’ve built him up.

• How will the First Order stomach the destruction of Starkiller Base? 
  
• How powerful is the First Order anyway?
  
• Can the Republic recover from the destruction of Coruscant Hosnian Prime? 
  

These were treated as trivial, ephemeral concerns within TFA from the getgo. Their appearance and destruction were already inconsequential, and followed dream logic. TLJ did not really contribute to that.

The last three are important to get me to care about the success of the resistance! I still don’t know what’s at stake! It’s like James Bond being saving the country of Liechtenstein from a communist invasion and dictatorship.

“How powerful is the First Order anyway” is fucking vital for the movie to work. Just because a nerd would care about something, and you feel contempt for nerds, doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. If we don’t know how powerful the First Order is or how the fuck they got so powerful after what we’ve seen in ROTJ and TFA, then we don’t know the stakes and context for the conflict. We can’t care about opposing them, because without that information, their victory and loss follows no rules.

I dont think BamBam disagrees with you on that one - just that TFA *also* did not care about this completely vital thing. There was absolutely no politics in TFA, the destruction of Coruscant elicited almost no reaction from anyone in the movie, the comparative strengths and organizations of the Republic and the First Order were never delineated, and so on. If you saw TFA, you never should have expected any discussion of the politics of the universe in TLJ, it was clear the series did not care.

Okay, but TLJ seems to be focused on throwing out a bunch of other stuff from TFA, saying “no forget that” and “that’s dumb that doesn’t count”. It threw out Snoke’s plan and Rey’s parentage, which TFA set us up to believe were important. So, if the movie is changing course so hard and throwing out so much of what TFA did, why double down on THIS problem, and why should we expect continuity in this issue from a movie that doesn’t have that same continuity for anything else?

I have any number of bones to pick with The Last Jedi, but its handling of the Rey’s-parentage issue is not one of them.

By which I mean – it didn’t come across as “whoops, we decided that we want to take things in a different direction, never mind about all that stuff from the first movie.”  It came across as deliberately raising expectations of a particular kind in order to make a point by undercutting them. 

Star Wars has always been a story about dynastic ties and destiny-arising-from-birth.  The narrative hinge of the entire original trilogy is “Vader is Luke’s father.”  The prequel trilogy was about a messiah who could be foreseen from birth by midichlorian count, and about his forming predestined connections with all sorts of [metanarratively] famous people, and about the spiritual Yoda –> Dooku –> Qui-Gon –> Obi-Wan –> Anakin lineage.  So when The Last Jedi comes out and teases “maybe Rey is the child of important people,” it’s proffering another iteration of exactly the story that we’re awaiting.   And when it then (in a moment of great drama) says “nope, Rey’s parents are no one special, whatcha gonna do now?” – it’s attacking that trope, it’s saying “heroism is not a dynastic thing,” it’s saying “you don’t have to be connected to Special People in order to be special yourself.” 

And maybe that makes you cheer, or maybe it annoys you a bit, in a “mumble grumble Star Wars believes in dynasties and you should respect that” kind of way.  Either of those responses is reasonable.  But it’s not like this setup was an accident. 

A similar point, less strongly, could be made about Snoke.  “Turns out he’s not interesting, he doesn’t have some kind of cool backstory or mastermind plan, he’s a generic creepy dictator who serves as a stepping-stone in Ben Solo’s saga.  Sometimes the importance doesn’t lie where you think it does, sometimes the tropes don’t pan out in exactly the way that seems most obvious.” 

bambamramfan:

cromulentenough:

argumate:

collapsedsquid:

alexanderrm:

ms-demeanor:

thatonemushroom:

fierceawakening:

earlgraytay:

lizardtitties:

ms-demeanor:

collapsedsquid:

I think I’ve had three people that don’t really speak to each other about talk how the Bush years were actually worse than the current years with the “with-us-or-against-us“ thing.  With Trump, it’s a small, if loud and shrill group, but in those years it seemed like the damn nation thought people against the Iraq war were purely evil traitors.

Freedom fries. You didn’t even have to be explicitly against the war, just being okay with the concept of France was enough to justify a boot in your ass.

There’s a Boston Legal episode about an Edwin Starr impersonator who’s not allowed to sing “War” (huh, what is it good for…) because it could be construed as anti troops/bush/government. It’s a very realistic plot.

I know I say this a lot but anyone too young to remember the Bush years should watch that show, it’s a very good example of the sorts of insane shit that people were arguing about back then.

Yeah. Trump may be worse (and the Republican Party may be crazier/more openly awful), but Trump doesn’t have Dick Cheney. Or anyone half as competent/evil. 

Knock on wood.

Does anyone remember Trent Reznor not going to the… vmas one year I think it was, because he wanted to perform “Capital G”, a song criticizing the government, in front of a picture of Bush and they told him he couldn’t? And he was like fuck you then and just didn’t show?

If y’all wonder why older tumblerians get twitchy about censorship that shit is why.

Hell, one day when I was in grad school I was walking around and said something like “I hate Bush” to the person I was with and they shushed me in obvious fear.

If you wonder why I think free speech is an idea, not just the letter of a law… there you go.

The Bush years were awful.

Something that I just realized that younger tumblrites or folks outside of the US might not get:

“Doing X is letting the terrorists win” has become a hyperbolic meme but people were fucking serious about that.

I was just a wee baby high schooler for discussions about the patriot act and libraries handing over information and the government tracking searches, but I knew I didn’t like it, I knew that it was a bad idea and said so.

“What, do you want the terrorists to win? We’re just going to let everyone buy explosives with no oversight because you wanna read fanfic at the library? What if your mom had been on those planes, how would you feel about it then? We have to do this to keep everyone safe, what is wrong with you that you don’t want to stop this from happening again?”

In early 2002 I was a wee baby high schooler at an airport for a school conference. I’d left my boarding pass at the security station and ran back to get it once I’d realized it was lost. When I stumbled up to the metal detector (which seems so quaint in this era of full body scans) two national guardsmen in full BDUs with helmets and armor turned and pointed their M4s at me. “Are you Allison?” one barked and I unfroze long enough to nod. He handed me my boarding pass. “Be more careful!” When I got back to my group I was bawling and having what I didn’t realize at the time was a panic attack (having guns pointed at you is extremely scary).

“Well what did you think, you can’t just go running around an airport! They’ve gotta keep everyone safe - of course they’ve got military guns at the terminal, what, you think terrorists should just be able to waltz onto an airplane whenever they please?”

(Sidenote, I don’t check bags anymore because they always get opened and examined for “random” searches and I get pulled aside and patted down more than anyone else I know and I’m 100% convinced that’s because of this one mislaid boarding pass when I was 15)

Don’t want people tortured in prison? You’re letting the terrorists win. Questioning the validity of invading Iraq? You’re anti-american and letting the terrorists win. Sitting for the pledge of allegiance? You hate this country, which is what the terrorists want and you are therefore letting the terrorists win.

Saying “if we change our whole way of life and stop protecting people’s rights and freedoms then the terrorists HAVE won and we’re sacrificing liberty for security which is exactly the kind of thing you assholes say we shouldn’t do” to your political science professor in college? Oh my god maybe you are a terrorist. 

Also tumblr kiddos - read up on the Dixie Chicks:

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks performed in concert in London on March 10, 2003, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre in England. This concert kicked off their Top of the World Tour. During the introduction to their song “Travelin’ Soldier”, Natalie Maines, who along with Robison and Maguire is also a native of Texas, said:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”^[41][…]

Maines’s remark sparked intense criticism;^[44] media commentators claimed that she should not criticize Bush on foreign soil. Maines responded, “I said it there ‘cause that’s where I was.”^[45]

[…] Maines attempted to clarify matters on March 12 by saying, “I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”^[47]

The statement failed to appease her critics, and Maines issued an apology on March 14: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers’ lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American.”^[48][49]

In wake of the statement against Bush, many supporters of the group dropped their support. […] In one famous anti-Dixie Chicks display, former fans were encouraged to bring their CDs to a demonstration at which they would be crushed by a bulldozer. […] Bruce Springsteen and Madonna both felt compelled to come out in support of the right of the band to express their opinions freely; however, Madonna herself postponed and then altered the April 1 release of her “American Life” video in which she threw a hand grenade toward a Bush look-alike, after witnessing the backlash against the Chicks.^[51][52]

Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two of its disc jockeys on May 6 for playing music by the Dixie Chicks.^[60] On May 22, at the Academy of Country Music awards ceremony in Las Vegas, there were boos when the band’s nomination for Entertainer of the Year award was announced. However, the broadcast’s host, Vince Gill, reminded the audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech. The academy gave the award to Toby Keith, who had been engaged in a public feud with Maines ever since she had denounced his number one hit “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American)” as “ignorant” the year before.

That Toby Keith song was the one I kind of obliquely referenced in my post up there, the one with the lyrics:

Justice will be served and the battle will rage
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way

The hyper-militarization of the police, invasive overreach and surveillance of our digital lives by the NSA, the jingoism and mandatory patriotism that have transmuted into virulent nationalism, and the longest war in US history are relics of Bush.

*Fuck* Bush and the awful, imposing, frothing all-or-nothing patriotism that so many people were expressing at that time.

Ofextremelycourse fuck Trump and his nationalist, paternalist, misogynist supporters too.

The impression I’m getting is that while Trump as a person/president is more awful than Bush, probably >50% of the country thinks he’s terrible (just like 3 percentage points of that not enough to vote for Clinton), whereas in the Bush years there was strong public support?

Honestly even if I thought the two wars were good ideas I’d be pretty horrified by that level of grassroots censorship; maybe what we’re looking at here is less the president himself and more the public as a whole.

You gotta remember that Afghanistan, Iraq, the PATRIOT act, all of it were supported by both parties.  Trump polarized everyone right off the bat, but then you would have senior democrats saying you were divisive or naive for going against those Bush policies. The antiwar crowd were all Dumb Fucking Hippies to everyone.

the decadent left in their coastal enclaves who may mount a fifth column, indeed

being in the UK and ‘bush/ iraq war sucks’ seemed to be the consensus i assumed the same was true in the US, but wow.

Experientially for most rat-tumb people, the difference was: you knew Bush voters, and had to argue with them, and put up with their bullshit arguments. This meant it was constantly infuriating to argue against, but also you were aware of some of their justifications.

Trump’s support is so class-shifted, and we’ve filtered our cohort so much, that most of you don’t know Trump supporters - not in large and frequent numbers - and so you experience him only as bizarre parodies of what the people you read or what trolls are the loudest.

It’s also worth noting that the Bush Thing and the Trump Thing, independent of their internal inherent qualities, arose during very different cultural / political moments.

The late ‘90s was the End of History, remember, the point at which most of the country thought that we’d Solved Government and that politics didn’t really matter anymore.  The dittoheads with their Clinton Derangement Syndrome Mk. I were a fringey phenomenon, and anything remotely resembling a passionate active left was even fringier.  The Republican party elites kept trying to engulf the country in a passionate culture war, culminating in the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and…the country just kept laughing at them. 

The 2000 election was played out in most of the mainstream media – and, I believe, in the hearts of most Americans – as Gush v. Bore, a pointless dumb-show that wouldn’t really matter to anything, relevant mostly insofar as it produced goofy SNL jokes. 

So when 9/11 landed like a brick in our laps, we genuinely did not know what to do, we were in a situation for which our political thinking-of-the-time had no script.  A lot of people and institutions fell back on WWII-style thinking: y’know, “this is the Moment of Crisis, time to pull together as a nation and put aside our petty squabbles and stand behind our brave leaders etc.”  Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s war plans.  The New York Times supported Bush’s war plans.  All sorts of notionally left/liberal thinkers supported Bush’s war plans. 

…which meant that, if you were genuinely anti-war, if you were sufficiently political (on the anti-Bush side) that you weren’t inclined to get swept up in the zeitgeist – if you were embedded in a little cultural bubble of Super Leftism, for example, as I was at the time – it was incredibly scary.  The world was turning upside down, factions were dissolving and realigning, everything was happening super fast.  You were watching almost everyone around you, including everyone in a position of power, going nuts. 

When the Bush regime started screwing up enough that the WWII thing became totally non-viable, and Bush became an official Bad Guy for half the country, a lot of the resulting cultural fallout was driven by the panicky paranoia that had taken root on the residual angry left during that period.  And a lot of it was driven by the sense of deep betrayal that the mainstream-left was feeling. 

When the Trump phenomenon began, the country had been riven by a vicious internal culture war for something like a decade.  If you’re a denizen of Blue America, Trump is just the culmination of all the things you’d already been thinking about Red America – yeah, OK they really are that stupid, that crass, that mean, that corrupt, that racist, etc. etc. etc.  His presence on the political stage is driving a few elite-conservative-thinker types like Douthat into paroxysms of identity crisis, but mostly he’s inspiring people on the left to retrench and Fight Even Harder in the battles that they were already fighting.  We may feel a certain level of horrified awe as we ask ourselves “how low can he go?,” but honestly no one is really surprised by anything that’s come out of his regime. 

balioc:

bambamramfan:

transientpetersen:

unknought:

A point that often gets neglected in discussions about tone policing is that it can be okay for someone to express something angrily and also okay for others to choose not to listen to it for that reason. These aren’t contradictory, and there are many situations where they’re both true.

There’s an inherent intimacy in listening to someone express strong emotion and it’s always permissible to opt out of intimacy.

This is definitely the correct personal attitude to take: to neither shame the angry/acting-out person, but not to give them undue sway either.

However this becomes a real problem in a larger social situation. Anger (like a smaller form of violence) is an extremely effective tactic for getting people to agree with you. It is so effective that we have basically banned it as a typical rhetorical tool, because both emotional and physical violence overwhelm the virtues we normally prize in conversation: accuracy, fairness, probity, etc.

When you give people “permission to be angry”, you are often handing them the keys to social victory. You may personally resist their anger, but most other people will say “this victim who is screaming about their pain needs to be placated, and your dispassionate defenses of yourself can go hang.” When one side of a dispute is allowed to be angry, and the other isn’t, we are choosing a likely victor. This is why we deter that with “overly angry people automatically lose” heuristics.

(This does not just apply to the obvious social justice circumstances, but also in the reactionary racist environment that preceded them. White people could be angry, black people couldn’t be without looking threatening, and so white people would win arguments like “how can you note allow the death penalty for this type of monster?”)

Ideally, you should have omni-compassionate environments that listens to the emotional rawness in everyone’s pain, but then makes its judgments coolly. But we can’t always (or ever) get that. In which case “no one can be publicly angry” is a rule that leads to better results than “some specific people can be publicly angry.”

This is very true.

It is also worth noting that “[only] some specific people can be publicly angry” isn’t the only failure mode here.  Even if your community isn’t doing that, even if you genuinely allow everyone to be emotionally expressive, you’ve effectively turned almost every dispute into a contest of “who can most convincingly perform anger and pain?”  Down that road lies a lot of terribleness. 

[I suppose I should make it clear that my analysis, and @bambamramfan‘s, apply far more in certain cultural and social milieus than in others.  There are places where performative public anger has been more-or-less normalized – and where everyone knows how to roll with it when people yell and scream and make highly-charged personal claims, because that happens all the time.  There are also places where the norms dictate a much higher level of restraint in the general case, where someone crying and making a scene in public indicates an emergency on par with someone having a heart attack.  My world is much closer to being that second thing, and so I’m used to performative anger being a social superweapon, but I’m aware that at least in some cases this is largely a matter of cultural translation.]

bambamramfan:

transientpetersen:

unknought:

A point that often gets neglected in discussions about tone policing is that it can be okay for someone to express something angrily and also okay for others to choose not to listen to it for that reason. These aren’t contradictory, and there are many situations where they’re both true.

There’s an inherent intimacy in listening to someone express strong emotion and it’s always permissible to opt out of intimacy.

This is definitely the correct personal attitude to take: to neither shame the angry/acting-out person, but not to give them undue sway either.

However this becomes a real problem in a larger social situation. Anger (like a smaller form of violence) is an extremely effective tactic for getting people to agree with you. It is so effective that we have basically banned it as a typical rhetorical tool, because both emotional and physical violence overwhelm the virtues we normally prize in conversation: accuracy, fairness, probity, etc.

When you give people “permission to be angry”, you are often handing them the keys to social victory. You may personally resist their anger, but most other people will say “this victim who is screaming about their pain needs to be placated, and your dispassionate defenses of yourself can go hang.” When one side of a dispute is allowed to be angry, and the other isn’t, we are choosing a likely victor. This is why we deter that with “overly angry people automatically lose” heuristics.

(This does not just apply to the obvious social justice circumstances, but also in the reactionary racist environment that preceded them. White people could be angry, black people couldn’t be without looking threatening, and so white people would win arguments like “how can you note allow the death penalty for this type of monster?”)

Ideally, you should have omni-compassionate environments that listens to the emotional rawness in everyone’s pain, but then makes its judgments coolly. But we can’t always (or ever) get that. In which case “no one can be publicly angry” is a rule that leads to better results than “some specific people can be publicly angry.”

This is very true.

It is also worth noting that “[only] some specific people can be publicly angry” isn’t the only failure mode here.  Even if your community isn’t doing that, even if you genuinely allow everyone to be emotionally expressive, you’ve effectively turned almost every dispute into a contest of “who can most convincingly perform anger and pain?”  Down that road lies a lot of terribleness. 

Rivka Weinberg AMA

redantsunderneath:

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/7fw5jr/i_am_rivka_weinberg_philosopher_and_author_of_the/

This kind of “is having a kid ever OK” shit flabbergasts me.

Just posted the following question:

“Hello. Thank you for the opportunity to ask a question. How would you respond to the following?

“Any meta-ethics rests on a foundation of fitness, i.e. being to the benefit of survival and reproduction. All higher order modes are either offshoots of this (how to keep people from killing each other) or artifacts of the ongoing debugging of consciousness (itself a product of selection) as a mode in which the ethical discussions play out (the nature of pain, suffering, happiness, etc.). Things seeming to have a point, the quest for meaning, utilitarian heuristics, faith, virtues, etc all derive from some desire to secure the continuation of some essence into the future.

“Your formulation, as you admit, is not intuitive. I’d venture to say it is anti-intuitive to the vast majority of the population. Anyone who buys what you are saying is less likely to survive and reproduce. So how can a philosophy which is itself maladaptive be in keeping with any ethical system?”

Let you know if I get a response.

This is a super weird formulation. 

Any meta-ethics rests on a foundation of fitness, i.e. being to the benefit of survival and reproduction.

I mean, you can employ whatever meta-ethic you want, that’s the beautiful legacy that David Hume left to us poor sinners, but…this doesn’t reflect either any kind of abstract necessity or any kind of common concretely-grounded foundation for practical ethics.  So I’m having trouble seeing what good it does either theoretically or pragmatically. 

Theoretically speaking, as I said, your terminal values are ultimately going to have to stand on their own (because you can’t derive ought from is, to put it in shorthand).  If you don’t like the demands of fitness-based evolutionary ethics, if they strike you as being evil, there is nothing logical or empirical that can compel you to accept them as good.  [Not living up to the demands of evolutionary fitness will make you less evolutionarily fit, of course…it may even make your moral system less evolutionarily fit, if it turns out that such things primarily piggyback through human reproduction…but, as the Sage of Ethics says, “who cares?”]

Practically speaking –

– this was originally like a ten-paragraph essay, but in fact I think it’s simpler and easier just to say “it turns out people care about being happy and fulfilled etc. way more than they care about fitness, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that they will sacrifice fitness for other moral goods, and so you schema turns out to be just as counter-intuitive to the population-at-large as the schema against which you’re arguing.”

oligopsoneia:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

Just a reminder: there are still normies in the world.  Lots of them.  In fact, they probably still constitute a strong outright majority of the population, although the proportions are less overwhelming than they used to be*.

The fact that the public and semi-public conversation spaces are all filled with weird-ass warring tribes just tells you what sorts of people are really interested in carrying out public and semi-public conversations.

---

* at least within wealthy-ish more-or-less-cosmopolitan First World etc. societies

Clearly we haven’t had an argument about “reasonable people” in a while.

It’s interesting that you use normies here to refer both in the contexts of political vanguards, and geek interests (and their difference from them.) This analogy shows why you’re wrong.

Remember how popular Games of Thrones, and Avengers, and World of Warcraft, and Angry Birds got? Once the domain of a stigmatized minority, once they became mainstream acceptable, they became incredibly popular. It’s like they were incubating and learning the tricks to appeal most directly to our stimulus centers… and then once the stigma went down, they spread amongst the “normal” populace like wildfire.

Same with political tactics. There’s a stigma (or was) against being “that guy (political edition).” It’s more casual to live and let be, and only amongst some addicted extremists do they involved in the “circular firing squads of constant political debate.” Man, who says stuff like “tone policing” and “all my opponents are Nazis?” Just chill out and leave politics out of it.

Except, once the walls come down, and being a political obsessive is admirable and socially useful. Then, much like GRRM showed us what the “good stuff” was, tumblr arguments pre-figured what arguments you’ll see play out and dominate the “normies” once they too think “the personal IS political.”

It’s whiplash how fast people go from “we don’t police political opinions here” to “we are committed to making this a safe space” after all.

You’re reading a lot into a short and deliberately-vague post.

But I will say:

It’s true that, with good content and good marketing, you can popularize The Avengers and A Song of Ice and Fire, transforming them from niche geek media into normie media.  But if you’re an old-school geek, and you expect the new normie fans to appreciate those things the way in the manner that you and your friends appreciated them in the old days, you are going to be very disappointed.  More relevantly, if you’re an old-school geek expecting that all these new fans are going to be friends and kindred spirits based on their fondness for your beloved media, you are going to be very disappointed.

And it’s true that, with the right kind of cultural suasion, you can popularize concepts like “safe space” and “toxic abuser” and push them into the mainstream.  But if you’re a typical sort of social-justice-driven Tumblr denizen, and you imagine that all these newly-”converted” corporate citizens and SNL-watchers are going to share your social norms and your fundamental values in a way that makes you comfortable…

This analogy between political and entertainment interests is correct as far as it goes, but n.b. a relevant difference is that, to a significant degree, political subcultures want (or should want) to become the superculture, even in a bastardized form, whereas there is no need for entertainment subcultures to care about this.

Like, I’m into tabletop roleplaying games and far-left politics, and both of those have become a lot more cool and popular over the past couple years (while still remaining niche in an absolute sense), probably as a result of the general processes alluded to above. As it happens I’m.

[Your post seems to have been cut off mid-sentence.  I’m honestly not sure where you were going there.]

True.

It’s worth noting, though, in a now-we’re-off-on-a-wild-tangent kind of way, that there’s a natural and hard-to-escape pressure that pushes entertainment subcultures to want to grow and grow and mainstream-ize.  Content creators like the idea of becoming rich and famous.  Alienated low-status fans like the idea of having their beloved Thing become respectable for once; they like the idea that people with their interests might be widely perceived as cool, not as hopelessly ridiculous.  Pretty much all fans like the idea of more Thing being made, overall, with more budget behind it.  Pretty much all fans like the idea of finding new friends with whom to share the Thing.

Often this ends up going very poorly even when it succeeds, and leaving a lot of people very sad.  See: video games over the past fifteen years. 

There are ways to guard against it, mostly involving hipsterism and deliberate preemptive rejection of mainstream success, but these of course have their own costs.

bambamramfan:

balioc:

Just a reminder: there are still normies in the world.  Lots of them.  In fact, they probably still constitute a strong outright majority of the population, although the proportions are less overwhelming than they used to be*.

The fact that the public and semi-public conversation spaces are all filled with weird-ass warring tribes just tells you what sorts of people are really interested in carrying out public and semi-public conversations.

---

* at least within wealthy-ish more-or-less-cosmopolitan First World etc. societies

Clearly we haven’t had an argument about “reasonable people” in a while.

It’s interesting that you use normies here to refer both in the contexts of political vanguards, and geek interests (and their difference from them.) This analogy shows why you’re wrong.

Remember how popular Games of Thrones, and Avengers, and World of Warcraft, and Angry Birds got? Once the domain of a stigmatized minority, once they became mainstream acceptable, they became incredibly popular. It’s like they were incubating and learning the tricks to appeal most directly to our stimulus centers… and then once the stigma went down, they spread amongst the “normal” populace like wildfire.

Same with political tactics. There’s a stigma (or was) against being “that guy (political edition).” It’s more casual to live and let be, and only amongst some addicted extremists do they involved in the “circular firing squads of constant political debate.” Man, who says stuff like “tone policing” and “all my opponents are Nazis?” Just chill out and leave politics out of it.

Except, once the walls come down, and being a political obsessive is admirable and socially useful. Then, much like GRRM showed us what the “good stuff” was, tumblr arguments pre-figured what arguments you’ll see play out and dominate the “normies” once they too think “the personal IS political.”

It’s whiplash how fast people go from “we don’t police political opinions here” to “we are committed to making this a safe space” after all.

You’re reading a lot into a short and deliberately-vague post.

But I will say:

It’s true that, with good content and good marketing, you can popularize The Avengers and A Song of Ice and Fire, transforming them from niche geek media into normie media.  But if you’re an old-school geek, and you expect the new normie fans to appreciate those things the way in the manner that you and your friends appreciated them in the old days, you are going to be very disappointed.  More relevantly, if you’re an old-school geek expecting that all these new fans are going to be friends and kindred spirits based on their fondness for your beloved media, you are going to be very disappointed.

And it’s true that, with the right kind of cultural suasion, you can popularize concepts like “safe space” and “toxic abuser” and push them into the mainstream.  But if you’re a typical sort of social-justice-driven Tumblr denizen, and you imagine that all these newly-”converted” corporate citizens and SNL-watchers are going to share your social norms and your fundamental values in a way that makes you comfortable…

The Stepford Wives Fallacy

mailadreapta:

Nothing can actually be perfect, so many people have a great suspicion of groups or individuals which seem to have it all together. We do not believe that anyone can actually be that organized, charming, and happy, so there must be something wrong. Let’s call this the Stepford Wives Fallacy.

In its weakest form, this is just the recognition that no one is perfect, so a person has no visible flaws probably has a few small imperfections that you’re not seeing. This form of the belief is actually true, and not a fallacy.

The stronger, fallacious form operates on the hidden assumption that all people and communities must have roughly the same level of dysfunction. So if someone(s) seem to be doing better, they must have something especially bad that they’re hiding, which, if known, would bring their degree of dysfunction back up to the average level.

In its strongest form this fallacy is actually used as a kind of litmus test. Something being superficially flawless, or even significantly better than average, is treated as positive evidence that something especially heinous is going on unseen, and people under the influence of the strong form of this fallacy often express an explicit preference for visibly dysfunctional communities and individuals.

Sometimes people falling prey to the Stepford Wives fallacy are themselves the victims of communities or individuals which looked perfect to others. These people at least have an excuse. More often, however, this fallacy is simply used as a way to discount people who are your political or personal rivals by ascribing unnamed crimes to them without evidence.

I suppose the fallacy that you describe probably does exist in the form that you describe it, in the sense of “there are people who make those particular calculations for those particular reasons,” but…at least in my experience, you more often get a very similar result from a form of logic that makes a lot more sense. 

In this model, the reasoning doesn’t rest on some kind of abstract variable representing “things being wrong in the community,” but rather on specific stereotypes of community types (based on experience, cultural osmosis, etc.). 

Free-happy-joyful-creative-whatever communities – “good communities,” by the standards of the people making the calculations – tend to involve a lot of expressiveness, a lot of unrestrained communication, a lot of people wearing their hearts on their sleeves.  When you enter such a community, you’re likely to encounter its dramas and dysfunctions very quickly.  Maybe there will be very few such problems, maybe there will be a fair number, but either way they’ll be visible on the surface. 

There are, of course, many different varieties of bad communities.  But one of the best-understood is the Repressed Vicious Puritan Community, where there’s lots of abuse and cruelty behind closed doors, but everyone is super concerned with keeping up an appearance of flawless functionality. 

So if you find a group of people who seem flawlessly functional at first glance, it might be that they actually are, but it’s more likely that they’re hiding whatever dysfunctions they have…and “taking pains to hide your dysfunctions” is a red flag for Repressed Vicious Puritan Communities. 

I don’t fully buy into this model by any means.  Given your general predilections, I assume you buy into it even less.  But it’s basically coherent, whereas “there are no variations in functionality” is not.  RVPCs are real, although reports may differ on how widespread they are, and taking pains to avoid them isn’t crazy.  

Just a reminder: there are still normies in the world.  Lots of them.  In fact, they probably still constitute a strong outright majority of the population, although the proportions are less overwhelming than they used to be*.

The fact that the public and semi-public conversation spaces are all filled with weird-ass warring tribes just tells you what sorts of people are really interested in carrying out public and semi-public conversations.

* at least within wealthy-ish more-or-less-cosmopolitan First World etc. societies

jadagul:

nuclearspaceheater:

jadagul:

I am feeling very called-out by this Joseph Heath essay on the Culture novels.

Given all these options, how do you choose? More fundamentally, who are you? What is it that creates your identity, or that makes you distinctive? If we reflect upon our own lives, the significant choices we have made were all in important ways informed by the constraints we are subject to, the hand that we were dealt: our natural talents, our gender, the country that we were born in. Once the constraints are gone, what basis is there for choosing one path over another?

This is the problem that existentialist writers, like Albert Camus, grappled with. The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choice of all meaningfulness. The answer that Camus recommended was absurdism – simply embracing the paradox. Few have followed him on this path. Sociologically, there are generally two ways in which citizens of modern societies resolve the crisis of meaning. The first is by choosing to embrace a traditional identity – call this “neotraditionalism” – celebrating the supposed authenticity of an ascriptive category. Most religious fundamentalism has this structure, but it also takes more benign forms, such as the suburban American who rediscovers his Celtic heritage, names his child Cahal or Aidan, and takes up residence at the local Irish pub. The other option is moral affirmation of freedom itself, as the sole meaningful value. This is often accompanied by a proselytizing desire to bring freedom to others.17

Because of this, there is a very powerful tendency within liberal societies for the development of precisely the type of “secular evangelism” that Banks described. It acquires a peculiar urgency, because it serves to resolve a powerful tension, indeed to resolve an identity crisis, within modern cultures. It often becomes strident, in part due to a lingering suspicion that it is not strong enough to support the weight that it is being forced to bear.

There’s already a well-known identity for people who seek struggle for the sake of struggle: gamer.

My usual serious position on this is that the need for “purpose” is filled by picking goals and then working to achieve them. Which is basically gaming.

I may be overestimating other people’s ability to gain fulfillment from picking arbitrary goals and then achieving them, though. I may also be overestimating people’s ability to achieve arbitrary goals.

Actually arbitrary goals?  Yeah, that’s so rare as to be not-worth-considering.  Even a very bored, aimless person isn’t going to be happy if you dump a bucket of sand on his desk and tell him to count the grains. 

(Yeah, yeah, I know, the “picking the goals” part matters too.  The Buridan’s Ass problem is the real issue here.  Under most circumstances, it’s pretty damn hard to go for an arbitrary goal if you yourself feel that it’s arbitrary.) 

That said: it’s not that hard to make actually-pretty-damn-arbitrary goals seem compelling and appealing if you dress them up right.  Flavor matters, narrative matters, bells and whistles matter, identity hooks matter.  This is the engine that makes grindy video games run.  And, frankly, a lot of my social agenda boils down to “get a good content team to create the right flavor and skinning for useful goals and also for arbitrary goals.” 

jadagul:

I am feeling very called-out by this Joseph Heath essay on the Culture novels.

Given all these options, how do you choose? More fundamentally, who are you? What is it that creates your identity, or that makes you distinctive? If we reflect upon our own lives, the significant choices we have made were all in important ways informed by the constraints we are subject to, the hand that we were dealt: our natural talents, our gender, the country that we were born in. Once the constraints are gone, what basis is there for choosing one path over another?

This is the problem that existentialist writers, like Albert Camus, grappled with. The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choice of all meaningfulness. The answer that Camus recommended was absurdism – simply embracing the paradox. Few have followed him on this path. Sociologically, there are generally two ways in which citizens of modern societies resolve the crisis of meaning. The first is by choosing to embrace a traditional identity – call this “neotraditionalism” – celebrating the supposed authenticity of an ascriptive category. Most religious fundamentalism has this structure, but it also takes more benign forms, such as the suburban American who rediscovers his Celtic heritage, names his child Cahal or Aidan, and takes up residence at the local Irish pub. The other option is moral affirmation of freedom itself, as the sole meaningful value. This is often accompanied by a proselytizing desire to bring freedom to others.17

Because of this, there is a very powerful tendency within liberal societies for the development of precisely the type of “secular evangelism” that Banks described. It acquires a peculiar urgency, because it serves to resolve a powerful tension, indeed to resolve an identity crisis, within modern cultures. It often becomes strident, in part due to a lingering suspicion that it is not strong enough to support the weight that it is being forced to bear.

Yep.

It’s possible to square this circle, though. 

We’re not imposing an identity or a way-of-life on you.  Ultimately it’s your job to find one that suits you well. But we understand that identity-construction can be difficult, and that some forms of identity work much better than others, and that living any kind of cohesive Good Life is often a lot easier when you have other people – and, ideally, actual social structures – helping you along your path and validating you for your choices. 

So we will try to make those things available to you.  We will create a bunch of preformed widely-available identities, maybe with some mix-and-match-able modular bits, and then we will actually teach you how to live up to those identities.  We will provide forums through which you can find communities of people whose preferred ways-of-life are similar or complementary.  We will generally make a point of recognizing you for being what you are, rather than callously ignoring you or trying to change you. 

And maybe none of that will be for you.  Maybe you’ll turn out to be a real psychological do-it-yourself-er, forging your own nature from scraps; maybe none of the prefab stuff will satisfy.  More power to you, if so.  But Hard Mode doesn’t have to be the default, let alone the only option. 

brazenautomaton:

mugasofer:

brazenautomaton:

sapphicautistic:

You’re on a massive spaceship with what’s left of humanity. It’s the only ship, what’s on the ship is all you have. There are no humans left except for the few thousand people on board.

There are a few Star Trek-style replicators throughout the ship. These produce food, clothing, medicine – all material needs. In order to produce enough for everyone to live comfortably, they require a few hundred people to use stationary bikes for a few hours each week to generate the required energy.

Paradise, right? Enough people are more than happy to spend some time helping the community meet its needs, and many just enjoy the exercise, so there shouldn’t be any problem getting those replicators running!

The trouble is, immediately after boarding the ship, a few people camped out by the replicators and claimed them as their own. Using the resources from the replicators, they have bribed some people to guard them and “their” replicator and beat up anyone who tries to use them.

Now that these people have total access to the replicators, they have total power over who gets food, water, medicine, etc. They demand that everyone on the ship use the bikes every day, all day, or they will not be allowed to eat or drink. (The exception is their enforcers, who are rewarded with more resources for keeping the population in line in a variety of ways.)

Overworking everyone else produces enough energy for the replicator-hoggers to live like kings. They order up luxuries for themselves from the replicators, and eat and drink when and whatever they want. They order up food and throw it away when they decide they don’t want it. Huge piles of objects go unused in their quarters.

They make rules for how everyone else on the ship has to live, under threat of violence from their enforcers. People who can’t or won’t spend all day using the bikes are deliberately allowed to die from hunger and thirst, and the resource-hoarders say it’s because life must be earned.

The resource-hoarders allow the ship to fall into disrepair, and even throw wild parties and break things. Engineers beg to be allowed to effect repairs, but the resource-hoarders refuse, even when warned that in a few years the ship will break down completely and no one will survive. They call the engineers liars and conspirators.

And people just… sort of get used to it. They rationalize it, they say that the resource hoarders work hardest of all because they decide who gets what and when. Even though there are thousands more being forced to work than there are resource hoarders or their enforcers, people are afraid, or don’t want to think about it, or they justify it, or they dream of the day when they can work their way up the ranks of the enforcers and hog resources too. 

And, I mean, it’s not human nature to hoard resources. Most people share their rations and help each other survive as best they can. It’s literally like eight jerks just camping out by the replicators surrounded by guards they bribe with the fruits of everyone else’s work.

But we let them do it. And the idea that we wouldn’t is considered wacky and fringe.

the idea is always “people cannot possibly generate value; it just springs out of the ether. there is no such thing as people doing useful things. so the only possible way for people to have more than I want them to have is to be morally depraved and wicked and actively attempting to hurt the Totemic Power Of The Common Man, and thus deserving of punishment. the only fair share is having exactly as much as i want you to have and i am the arbiter of everyone forever.”

this is why communism invariably descends into “murder everyone who hurts my feelings”

communism is so blatantly, odiously wrong and so blatantly, odiously malicious and so blatantly, odiously based in nothing but personal status, that it’s obvious why it can never be discredited and the inherently popular will always be shilling it and pushing it. communists are psychopaths who care only about causing harm to other people for the crime of being weak – it is utterly inevitable that communists will be lauded are pure and noble and virtuous and everyone will bend over backwards to exalt them and enable them.

thanks for the reminder, i went a few minutes without remembering all is lost and suicide is the only escape from their invincible inviolate power. but all is lost, and suicide is the only escape from their invincible inviolate power. the concept of doing useful things will leave and it will never return. the shrieking of murderous, smug, inherently popular communists will rewrite everyone’s values. suicide is our only respite. the grave is the only place their dominion cannot reach.

people cannot possibly generate value; it just springs out of the ether. there is no such thing as people doing useful things.

“Generating value” is precisely what the people on the bicycles are doing in the above scenario, what on Earth are you talking about?

This is attacking actual, real-world wealthy and high-status people.

the only fair share is having exactly as much as i want you to have and i am the arbiter of everyone forever.

This is a fair and extremely strong criticism of communism as practiced, which is why I’m not a communist.

---

But attacking people for pointing out that the actual real distribution of things is grossly unfair, on the basis that random internet communists are BadWrong and therefore powerful and successful (?!) is … pretty much the exact thing you usually accuse people of doing, frankly. 

Things are unfair. You know things are unfair. You frequently mention this well-known fact. 

But the moment someone you consider contemptable points it out, you’re rounding them off to the nearest badwrong stereotype no matter that it doesn’t fit at all. Because it’s attacking the status of high-status people.

What fucking high status people? The message of this is clear and unmistakable and can only be argued if you’re a fucking liar: People who have wealth do not do useful things, they only have wealth because of their malice and evil, it is impossible that people have wealth because they do useful things, and therefore they did not earn anything, are wicked and bad, are responsible for “our” suffering, and should be punished.

It is straight up Communism. It is absolutely inarguably one hundred percent Communism. Not “socialism”. Not “a criticism of capitalism”. People who are wealthy are innately wicked and do not do useful things and steal from the Noble Heroic Common Man. It is one hundred percent Communism and nothing but Communism. It is all of the lies told by Communism. 

Communism doesn’t ever attack high status people ever ever ever literally ever. Communism is status. Communism attacks people who had the audacity to improve their lot in life by any means other than “having innate status”. The people who are entitled to take utility from others by virtue of their innate status look at people who do useful things and say “Those people must be thieves!” 

This message, because it is Communism and it is nothing but Communism, does not attack high status people. It, after all, does not describe anything like what has occurred in reality, so it cannot correspond to an attack on people who exist and have status. It attacks the concept that people can ever possibly deserve to have more wealth than status, by proclaiming anyone who has more wealth than status is a wicked, evil, malicious thief who is exploiting everyone. That is all. That is all there ever is. That is all there ever will be.

They will not ever stop and they will not ever be stopped. You, along with every person, will bend over backwards to excuse them and to not notice the things they say. Because the only place where their dominion does not extend is the grave.

Communism doesn’t ever attack high status people ever ever ever literally ever. 

I know of some Russian princesses who might take issue with that.  “Ever ever ever literally ever” is a strong modifier.

That is all there ever will be. 

You, along with every person, will bend over backwards to excuse them and to not notice the things they say. 

“I know you’re holding onto this elephant, the same as I am.  The fact that you nonetheless persistently refuse to notice that the elephant is actually a snake is just one more sign that you and everyone else cannot think straight regarding elephant-related issues.” 

oligopsoneia:

squareallworthy:

shlevy:

drethelin:

isaacsapphire:

mailadreapta:

Social Coercion Is Actually Good

This is what… Actually, this is what literally everyone believes (with the possible exception of a few, but absolutely not all, Anarchists), isn’t it?

Social coercion is probably the best example of how people love to proclaim universal moral rules that they clearly don’t ACTUALLY view as universal. 

“Social” “Coercion” seems to package together a helluva lot right here.

Social pressure is a thing and is going to remain a thing, so we might as well try to use if for good where that is possible and diminish it where it is harmful.

And while we’re at it, how about we dump the tendentious term “coercion”? I think its use will generate more heat than light.

Substantively agreed, though I don’t know that “coercion” is tendentious in this context - otherwise nobody would be explicitly approving it!

Social coercion of what form, with what consequences?

“Play by our rules, or you can’t play in our playground” is a great system so long as those who can’t or won’t play by your rules have some option that doesn’t involve starving / going insane, and so long as there are systems in place to keep your playground from occupying most of the world. 

jadagul:

balioc:

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

jadagul:

balioc:

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

I’ve said this before, but, all the main political ideologies in the West since 1945, communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism, etc., have denied or ignored the importance of cultural identity to people, instead treating us as no more than individuals, or else members of an economic class. This is not to say that all those ideologies are wholly wrong, only that they are all deficient.

The Alt-Right is the return of that repressed, naturally in its most pathological and extreme form. From now and for the foreseeable future, the most pressing ideological/political task is the rehabilitation and restoration of the importance of cultural identity in society, guiding it somewhere healthy, in balance with all other concerns.

It’s going to be awkward, with alliances and positionings and denunciations and guilt-by-association and whatnot, in amongst the actual progress. No doubt a lot of political glass will get smashed in the process: what was unimaginable today will be commonplace tomorrow. And the Left will certainly not let up screaming blue murder throughout.

2016 is just the beginning.

I would prefer to say they have defeated the importance of cultural identity. Mostly.

Now we just need to finish the job.

True, but…this is a project to be approached with care and thought.

Cultural identity of the old-style pre-packaged you’re-born-into-it style is terrible.  But people want certain psychological, social, and spiritual things that it offers.  They really, really, really want those things.  They will do what it takes to get those things, one way or another.

And none of the ideologies mentioned in the OP is capable of providing those things, on its own, in the long term.  Hedonic liberal welfare capitalism certainly isn’t. 

So you’d better have some alternative plan in place.

I mean, that’s sort of what I’m declaring war on.

The desire for cultural identity, meaning, and belonging. That’s what I want to defeat.

Why, though?

I kind of want to point to @balioc’s response here and say “this, but without the negativity”. In particular

An ideology with a foundation of “people should generally get to do whatever they want” has a lot of value, but it is very bad at telling people how to live, which is culture’s primary function.

seems to me to be about as searing a critique of “culture” as it’s possible to make. We shouldn’t be telling people how to live. We should be enabling people to choose their own lives as freely as possible.

No gods, no masters. No values but mine, no choices but mine, connections and obligations only as freely chosen.

I don’t belong to anything. I’m not part of anything. I’m me.

“No gods, no masters, no values but mine” is nice rhetoric, but…as an actual recipe for a human society it’s empty.  For two major reasons, one abstract/theoretical and one practical. 

I.

If you leave a child out in the woods, and by some miracle he survives, he will not develop any values other than survival and the fulfillment of basic urges.

If you leave a child in an environment that protects him and fulfills all his basic needs, but provides no mental guidance, he will not develop any values at all.  Maybe he’ll go crazy with anomic despair, maybe he’ll basically be a walking piece of happy-beast orgasmium, but…he’s not going to be finding and fulfilling anything we would recognize as a purpose, self-constructed or otherwise.  He won’t have the mental infrastructure.  

Those are your options for having a totally free, uncultured human intelligence.  As soon as you provide someone with any socialization at all, as soon as you teach him how to read, you will find that you’ve already done a lot of work in terms of shaping his mind and setting him on a path.  He will have learned, from you, what is deserving of pride and what is deserving of shame.  He will have learned, from you, what he wants to be and what he definitely doesn’t want to be.  You won’t have a ton of control over the proceedings – maybe you’ll be a role model, maybe you’ll be an aversive bogeyman, maybe everything you say will get interpreted in some crazy sideways fashion – but your actions will be responsible for the shape of his thought.  And that’s culture.  There is no way around it.  There is only the question of what the culture does and what it fails to do: whether it actually creates victory conditions for the challenges it sets, whether it supplies sufficient grist for the intellectual mill, whether its values are compatible with human biology, etc. etc.

…this sounds like some glib silly reductio-ad-absurdum shit, I know, but it really is important.  There is no unmoved-mover homunculus inside us who gets to make all our decisions from the vantage point of Perfect Free Will.  We are made up of our influences, even if our minds perform some unknowable alchemy on those influences before they become part of us, and we are all influenced from the very very beginning.  The Free Decider is a phantom, and once you realize that, “let’s figure out what influences are actually doing the shaping” becomes a much more interesting and worthwhile project than “let’s try to have there be less influence overall somehow.” 

II.

…but of course, once you’re a functional self-willed human, you actually have a lot of intellectual and emotional freedom.  (Even if you’re ultimately driven by, ultimately made of, cthonic determinist forces you don’t fully understand.)  You can accept or reject influences.  You can seek out new influences of many different kinds.  You can Construct Yourself to a really very astonishing degree.

Let me say: I am super in favor of people doing this.  I am basically obsessed with this on a personal level.  A lot of my major projects involve finding new, off-the-beaten-path methodologies for doing this.  I am implacably opposed to any society that prevent people from doing this (by punishing them harshly for deviating from their culturally mandated identities, by denying them information and tools, etc.).

Let me also say: most people do not actually want to do this to any significant extent.  Also, they are very bad at it. 

Which is no surprise!  It’s hard work!  It’s socially-unrewarding work, at least compared to building up bonding identity with family members / allies / sex partners!  Making it pay involves a lot of living inside your own head, which is not really how most people function! 

If you tell people “go figure out the Good Life for yourself” – ninety-five times out of a hundred, they just don’t.  They try to copy each other, or act on impulse with zero reflection, or follow Good Life scripts from decaying obsolete half-understood Good Life philosophies.  They fall into anomie and madness, making themselves and each other miserable, failing to accomplish very much of worth. 

And you can stomp your feet and demand that they comport themselves like philosopher-kings, but this will not actually help them, or anyone. 

Sure.

I’m being kind of utopian here. I don’t think that stomping my feet will make this happen now.

But it’s obviously the goal. We can’t achieve it now, which is why I say we haven’t won yet.

It is a goal, I think, in precisely the same way that the orgasmium-tiled universe is (for others) a goal. 

Which is to say:

You can create a coherent teleology-for-humans in which this utopia of universal-self-construction is the end-state that maximizes your values.  But taking action in that vein, working to achieve that utopia, requires you to think like a conqueror – it demands that you replace other people’s (meta-)values with yours, and indeed that you transform them from the beings-they-are into the beings-you-wish-they-were.  Right now, they don’t want any part of what you’re selling.  It’s not good for them, and they display no especial desire to become the sort of people for whom it would be good.  You can overcome that, but you’d have to mold society in your own image. 

…which in this case seems like it’s probably defeating the point. 

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

jadagul:

balioc:

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

I’ve said this before, but, all the main political ideologies in the West since 1945, communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism, etc., have denied or ignored the importance of cultural identity to people, instead treating us as no more than individuals, or else members of an economic class. This is not to say that all those ideologies are wholly wrong, only that they are all deficient.

The Alt-Right is the return of that repressed, naturally in its most pathological and extreme form. From now and for the foreseeable future, the most pressing ideological/political task is the rehabilitation and restoration of the importance of cultural identity in society, guiding it somewhere healthy, in balance with all other concerns.

It’s going to be awkward, with alliances and positionings and denunciations and guilt-by-association and whatnot, in amongst the actual progress. No doubt a lot of political glass will get smashed in the process: what was unimaginable today will be commonplace tomorrow. And the Left will certainly not let up screaming blue murder throughout.

2016 is just the beginning.

I would prefer to say they have defeated the importance of cultural identity. Mostly.

Now we just need to finish the job.

True, but…this is a project to be approached with care and thought.

Cultural identity of the old-style pre-packaged you’re-born-into-it style is terrible.  But people want certain psychological, social, and spiritual things that it offers.  They really, really, really want those things.  They will do what it takes to get those things, one way or another.

And none of the ideologies mentioned in the OP is capable of providing those things, on its own, in the long term.  Hedonic liberal welfare capitalism certainly isn’t. 

So you’d better have some alternative plan in place.

I mean, that’s sort of what I’m declaring war on.

The desire for cultural identity, meaning, and belonging. That’s what I want to defeat.

Why, though?

I kind of want to point to @balioc’s response here and say “this, but without the negativity”. In particular

An ideology with a foundation of “people should generally get to do whatever they want” has a lot of value, but it is very bad at telling people how to live, which is culture’s primary function.

seems to me to be about as searing a critique of “culture” as it’s possible to make. We shouldn’t be telling people how to live. We should be enabling people to choose their own lives as freely as possible.

No gods, no masters. No values but mine, no choices but mine, connections and obligations only as freely chosen.

I don’t belong to anything. I’m not part of anything. I’m me.

“No gods, no masters, no values but mine” is nice rhetoric, but…as an actual recipe for a human society it’s empty.  For two major reasons, one abstract/theoretical and one practical. 

I.

If you leave a child out in the woods, and by some miracle he survives, he will not develop any values other than survival and the fulfillment of basic urges.

If you leave a child in an environment that protects him and fulfills all his basic needs, but provides no mental guidance, he will not develop any values at all.  Maybe he’ll go crazy with anomic despair, maybe he’ll basically be a walking piece of happy-beast orgasmium, but…he’s not going to be finding and fulfilling anything we would recognize as a purpose, self-constructed or otherwise.  He won’t have the mental infrastructure.  

Those are your options for having a totally free, uncultured human intelligence.  As soon as you provide someone with any socialization at all, as soon as you teach him how to read, you will find that you’ve already done a lot of work in terms of shaping his mind and setting him on a path.  He will have learned, from you, what is deserving of pride and what is deserving of shame.  He will have learned, from you, what he wants to be and what he definitely doesn’t want to be.  You won’t have a ton of control over the proceedings – maybe you’ll be a role model, maybe you’ll be an aversive bogeyman, maybe everything you say will get interpreted in some crazy sideways fashion – but your actions will be responsible for the shape of his thought.  And that’s culture.  There is no way around it.  There is only the question of what the culture does and what it fails to do: whether it actually creates victory conditions for the challenges it sets, whether it supplies sufficient grist for the intellectual mill, whether its values are compatible with human biology, etc. etc.

…this sounds like some glib silly reductio-ad-absurdum shit, I know, but it really is important.  There is no unmoved-mover homunculus inside us who gets to make all our decisions from the vantage point of Perfect Free Will.  We are made up of our influences, even if our minds perform some unknowable alchemy on those influences before they become part of us, and we are all influenced from the very very beginning.  The Free Decider is a phantom, and once you realize that, “let’s figure out what influences are actually doing the shaping” becomes a much more interesting and worthwhile project than “let’s try to have there be less influence overall somehow.” 

II.

…but of course, once you’re a functional self-willed human, you actually have a lot of intellectual and emotional freedom.  (Even if you’re ultimately driven by, ultimately made of, cthonic determinist forces you don’t fully understand.)  You can accept or reject influences.  You can seek out new influences of many different kinds.  You can Construct Yourself to a really very astonishing degree.

Let me say: I am super in favor of people doing this.  I am basically obsessed with this on a personal level.  A lot of my major projects involve finding new, off-the-beaten-path methodologies for doing this.  I am implacably opposed to any society that prevent people from doing this (by punishing them harshly for deviating from their culturally mandated identities, by denying them information and tools, etc.).

Let me also say: most people do not actually want to do this to any significant extent.  Also, they are very bad at it. 

Which is no surprise!  It’s hard work!  It’s socially-unrewarding work, at least compared to building up bonding identity with family members / allies / sex partners!  Making it pay involves a lot of living inside your own head, which is not really how most people function! 

If you tell people “go figure out the Good Life for yourself” – ninety-five times out of a hundred, they just don’t.  They try to copy each other, or act on impulse with zero reflection, or follow Good Life scripts from decaying obsolete half-understood Good Life philosophies.  They fall into anomie and madness, making themselves and each other miserable, failing to accomplish very much of worth. 

And you can stomp your feet and demand that they comport themselves like philosopher-kings, but this will not actually help them, or anyone. 

silver-and-ivory:

jadagul:

balioc:

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

I’ve said this before, but, all the main political ideologies in the West since 1945, communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism, etc., have denied or ignored the importance of cultural identity to people, instead treating us as no more than individuals, or else members of an economic class. This is not to say that all those ideologies are wholly wrong, only that they are all deficient.

The Alt-Right is the return of that repressed, naturally in its most pathological and extreme form. From now and for the foreseeable future, the most pressing ideological/political task is the rehabilitation and restoration of the importance of cultural identity in society, guiding it somewhere healthy, in balance with all other concerns.

It’s going to be awkward, with alliances and positionings and denunciations and guilt-by-association and whatnot, in amongst the actual progress. No doubt a lot of political glass will get smashed in the process: what was unimaginable today will be commonplace tomorrow. And the Left will certainly not let up screaming blue murder throughout.

2016 is just the beginning.

I would prefer to say they have defeated the importance of cultural identity. Mostly.

Now we just need to finish the job.

True, but…this is a project to be approached with care and thought.

Cultural identity of the old-style pre-packaged you’re-born-into-it style is terrible.  But people want certain psychological, social, and spiritual things that it offers.  They really, really, really want those things.  They will do what it takes to get those things, one way or another.

And none of the ideologies mentioned in the OP is capable of providing those things, on its own, in the long term.  Hedonic liberal welfare capitalism certainly isn’t. 

So you’d better have some alternative plan in place.

I mean, that’s sort of what I’m declaring war on.

The desire for cultural identity, meaning, and belonging. That’s what I want to defeat.

Are you opposed to even the really facile Theme Park Versions of culture, like songs and traditional pottery crafting styles and secular holidays? If so, why?

@balioc I think American liberalism has and is offering a very compelling culture of its own, which people do identify with, sometimes to extreme degrees. I’m not sure if you think this hasn’t been successful?

Short version:

Liberalism-on-its own isn’t, and can’t be, a culture.  It contains some culture-like norms and structures, but they’re very incomplete, and most of them are designed to prevent other cultural structures from arising to fill in the gaps.  (Here I refer to meta-rules like “you can’t use most kinds of coercive punishment for anything, unless you’re the government” and “you can’t do anything that would prevent money from being an infinitely flexible tool.”)  An ideology with a foundation of “people should generally get to do whatever they want” has a lot of value, but it is very bad at telling people how to live, which is culture’s primary function. 

That said, American liberalism has a variety of different cultures embedded within it.  The liberal context and its restrictions means that it’s harder for those cultures to do their thing, but some of them manage pretty well regardless.  A lot of them fail horribly. 

I’m not sure which one of those cultures you’re talking about.  It’s worth noting that “people identify with a culture” != “that culture is successful at providing those people with cultural goods.”  Some things are very good at demanding fervent, highly-conscious affiliation without actually making you feel like you know what you’re doing in life, or even making you feel like you understand what’s important.

jadagul:

balioc:

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

I’ve said this before, but, all the main political ideologies in the West since 1945, communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism, etc., have denied or ignored the importance of cultural identity to people, instead treating us as no more than individuals, or else members of an economic class. This is not to say that all those ideologies are wholly wrong, only that they are all deficient.

The Alt-Right is the return of that repressed, naturally in its most pathological and extreme form. From now and for the foreseeable future, the most pressing ideological/political task is the rehabilitation and restoration of the importance of cultural identity in society, guiding it somewhere healthy, in balance with all other concerns.

It’s going to be awkward, with alliances and positionings and denunciations and guilt-by-association and whatnot, in amongst the actual progress. No doubt a lot of political glass will get smashed in the process: what was unimaginable today will be commonplace tomorrow. And the Left will certainly not let up screaming blue murder throughout.

2016 is just the beginning.

I would prefer to say they have defeated the importance of cultural identity. Mostly.

Now we just need to finish the job.

True, but…this is a project to be approached with care and thought.

Cultural identity of the old-style pre-packaged you’re-born-into-it style is terrible.  But people want certain psychological, social, and spiritual things that it offers.  They really, really, really want those things.  They will do what it takes to get those things, one way or another.

And none of the ideologies mentioned in the OP is capable of providing those things, on its own, in the long term.  Hedonic liberal welfare capitalism certainly isn’t. 

So you’d better have some alternative plan in place.

I mean, that’s sort of what I’m declaring war on.

The desire for cultural identity, meaning, and belonging. That’s what I want to defeat.

Those are three different things, all of which are going to play different roles in the way that this kind of thing plays out.   

If your actual endgame is the orgasmium-tiled universe, I doubt you’re going to get very much traction. 

jadagul:

polyaletheia:

I’ve said this before, but, all the main political ideologies in the West since 1945, communism, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism, etc., have denied or ignored the importance of cultural identity to people, instead treating us as no more than individuals, or else members of an economic class. This is not to say that all those ideologies are wholly wrong, only that they are all deficient.

The Alt-Right is the return of that repressed, naturally in its most pathological and extreme form. From now and for the foreseeable future, the most pressing ideological/political task is the rehabilitation and restoration of the importance of cultural identity in society, guiding it somewhere healthy, in balance with all other concerns.

It’s going to be awkward, with alliances and positionings and denunciations and guilt-by-association and whatnot, in amongst the actual progress. No doubt a lot of political glass will get smashed in the process: what was unimaginable today will be commonplace tomorrow. And the Left will certainly not let up screaming blue murder throughout.

2016 is just the beginning.

I would prefer to say they have defeated the importance of cultural identity. Mostly.

Now we just need to finish the job.

True, but…this is a project to be approached with care and thought.

Cultural identity of the old-style pre-packaged you’re-born-into-it style is terrible.  But people want certain psychological, social, and spiritual things that it offers.  They really, really, really want those things.  They will do what it takes to get those things, one way or another.

And none of the ideologies mentioned in the OP is capable of providing those things, on its own, in the long term.  Hedonic liberal welfare capitalism certainly isn’t. 

So you’d better have some alternative plan in place.