Once upon a time, @slatestarscratchpad talked about “Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory.” His particular take on this idea always struck me as a bit odd, for reasons largely having to do with its being super-focused rhetorically on one particular issue suite (distributive macroeconomics). Regardless, the dichotomy is a helpful thing to have available in your philosophical toolkit.
For general-purpose use, I’d suggest a refinement: replace “mistake theory” with, uh, let’s say “solution theory.” There are, roughly speaking, two analytical lenses you can use to examine a given debate. You can say “people are trying to figure out the Overall Best Solution [by whatever criteria], and their arguments represent either empirical disagreements-of-fact or genuine disagreements over the values that determine the Best Solution.” Or you can say “people are trying to advance their own interests against the conflicting interests of other people, they have formed alliances and coalitions in order to do this more effectively, and their arguments should essentially be understood as gambits and rationalizations within a power struggle.”
Each of these lenses is obviously going to be helpful sometimes, depending on the circumstances. Some people have a natural proclivity towards one, some towards the other, etc. We all know how useful conceptual dichotomies work.
It probably is “just how the world operates at a fundamental level” for a sufficiently narrow understanding of “the world” (globalized, atomized, multicultural)…and yet we used to be holding it at bay almost completely, and right now we’re definitely not.
Are you saying that on a local, small scale, people don’t say things they don’t mean in order to win at social situations? In my experience they absolutely do.
I want to talk about this more, but I have a hard time with words, and I need to go to work. @balioc, if you see this today, I would appreciate a replyto clarify what you meant in the quote above, and I’ll try to think of a way to explain my thoughts later
That’s not what I’m saying at all. You are entirely correct that people will say (almost) whatever they need to say in order to win their micro-scale social status games. That’s how humans have always been, and probably how they’ll always be.
This is a much more macro-scale point about the ideologies that have risen and fallen in public esteem, and the effects that this has had on our interactions (including by influencing “what will convince people” and “what you can get away with” in micro-scale encounters).
In the ‘90s, the conventional wisdom was that we should treat everyone the same – or, sometimes, that we should treat everyone as an individual – and that treating different groups differently due to perceived group differences was unenlightened and wack. It was the age of individual meritocracy, of colorblindness, of being too cool for labels. If you tried to get special treatment or special sympathy because of your identity label, you would get laughed at as a whiner and a weakling.
There were a lot of problems with this system. In particular, it was way more self-congratulatory than was justified and it liked to sweep its many failures under the rug.
But we weren’t in the business of handing out “Win an Arbitrary Fight Free” cards in the ‘90s. There were people who wanted such cards, from high-profile racial activists to women bitching about their mean ex-boyfriends, but…they basically weren’t available, not in a form that anyone would respect.
Now they are. Now, when you stake a discursive claim based on your race or sex or whatever, it gets applause rather than jeers.
If there were no taboos on any personal problems topics, casual conversation would be full of people talking about their personal problems, because it is a costless way of diverting conversational attention to themselves. There will probably be lots of people who don’t do it, but they’ll easily lose conversational priority to people who do. And talking to people would suck.
Maybe this is why the concept of ‘oversharing’ was invented – communities decide, somehow, here’s the stuff you can complain about and here’s the stuff where if you talk too much about it we’ll call you an oversharer and shun you. And lines are drawn in different places by different societies.
I think it may be impossible for a community to have zero taboos around casually talking about bad life stuff – if one tried, I think they’ll probably spontaneously reinvent ‘oversharing’ and start shaming people who talked about the now-rude topics.
I also think you can’t propagate separate norms about what to feel ashamed about vs what to feel ashamed about discussing – i.e. you can’t propagate “don’t feel ashamed about your alcoholism, but do feel ashamed about talking about your alcoholism to people not close to you”, but you can propagate “you should be ashamed of your alcoholism, and therefore not talk about it to untrusted people”.
If these things are true, humans as they exist now will never be able to create a society where no one is ashamed of their pain or misfortunes or mistakes. I’ve described a mechanism by which an attempt to create such a society will always fail
I also think you can’t propagate separate norms about what to feel ashamed about vs what to feel ashamed about discussing
I don’t feel ashamed about my bowel movements, but I also don’t talk about them in detail to my friends, and would (properly!) feel ashamed about doing so absent strong justification.
I feel like this relates pretty clearly to recent discourse about sex in public.
…no, seriously, what’s the clear relation? “Without social regulation in the form of taboo, people would always be fucking in public for the sake of getting attention?” The essential mechanics here seem nigh-unrelated.
Many different people in the discourse, coming from many different schools of thought, seem to find it intuitively obvious that having sex in public is morally wrong. (Indecent exposure presumably counts in the same category.)
I am very baffled by this.
I mean – yes, some people who see it are going to find it very unpleasant to witness. Probably a fair number of people will find it unpleasant. This is also true of things you can do in public like “holding hands with your gay spouse” or “being black” or “wearing clothing that features provocative political slogans.”
The only general solution that doesn’t seem to lead to endless social war, or to intensely repugnant conclusions, or to a melt-your-brain-into-slag level of mandated utilitarian calculation regarding the psychic preferences of untold numbers of strangers, is a basic deontological rule: other people do not get input into your visual presentation in public, and their opinions on the matter can be morally discounted to zero. Which includes the visual presentation that is “I am naked” or even “I am having sex with this other person.”
I mean, if you want to make the case that it’s distasteful or even possibly rude, I’m not hugely inclined to argue. I might well even agree. But “distasteful” and “rude” don’t amount to “unethical” under most schemata.
**********
…is the objection primarily about children who might see it? Because I don’t think that’s a very good objection either, but admittedly it requires a more sophisticated level of argumentation in order to address it, because children make everything ten times harder in the world of moral philosophy.
Not all public behavior can be reduced to “visual presentation”. Do people have the right to the “visual presentation” of openly carrying a gun? I mean, many people answer that question “yes”, but still, you see the parallel, right? Having your genitals out is incitement and not protected speech.
Before anything else: I am glad that you let this drift from public sex to indecent exposure generally, because I think that’s a much cleaner topic discursively. If anyone thinks there are important differences, we can talk about them.
Not all public behavior can be reduced to “visual presentation”.
Well, no. Some of it has significant components that are auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc. The difference actually matters, because I think it’s close to a human universal that some kinds of sensory input are much harder to shut out / ignore (hearing and [I hear] smell are much worse than sight, no one fucking cares what you taste like in public).
But much of it can.
So the gun parallel doesn’t work so great, unless you think that the problem is specifically with open carry and not with carrying a gun generally. Like, I’m honestly not sure where I fall on the wide spectrum of opinions about gun control, but at the very least I can sympathize with the outlook that says “it’s not a good idea for people to be carrying around weapons that can quickly and efficiently murder a bunch of people.” The problem with the guy openly carrying a gun, insofar as there’s a problem, is that he has a gun. Frankly, all else being equal, I’m glad he’s doing me the courtesy of announcing the fact.
I think we’re all pretty sure that the guy on the subway across from you does in fact have a penis, whether his coat is open or closed.
So the callow internet-pwn response to this argument is “yes, I’m quite sure having your genitals out is properly read as ‘incitement,’ just like when women are horrible enough to incite men by showing their ankles or mouths.” That’s…a close enough parallel that I do feel compelled to mention it, but also nasty enough that I feel compelled to call myself out on the spot for Bad Discursive Hygiene.
Speaking seriously, though, it’s pretty damn obvious that these standards are 100% cultural (which doesn’t mean “fake”), and flexible through the normal process of cultural evolution. There are places where a woman not-wearing-a-burka really is “inciting” the people around her, in the sense that she’s doing something that can be counted on to trigger a powerful aversive psychological reaction. In a liberal multicultural society, the general answer on which we’ve agreed – wisely – is “we don’t fucking care.” She can wear what she wants, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem. I see no reason that the same standards of liberty and courtesy shouldn’t be applied to the guy who wants to have his dick out.
But even that’s callow. I am, admittedly, kind of dancing around the real issue here.
Look. Imagine, for a moment, a hypothetical society where there were many fewer taboos surrounding public nudity. Do you have even a second’s doubt that there are thousands upon thousands of decent upstanding right-thinking guys, guys who under the current social regime would never once dream of committing indecent exposure, who would leap at the chance to make fashion statements involving an exposed penis? Have you ever been to Pride?
My imagined interlocutor, who may or may not share your thoughts, replies with: “Maybe, dude. But we don’t live in that world. In this world, men who expose themselves in public are creepy and threatening, and women benefit from not having to deal with them.”
Which is entirely true.
But this is not because there’s anything particularly magical, or “correct,” about the exposing-your-genitals taboo. It’s because it’s a widespread taboo. Period.
Taboos are, in some ways, like the culture-wide version of personal boundaries. Decent functional people generally don’t want to violate them; violating taboos makes people very uncomfortable (which decent functional people generally hate doing intuitively), it marks you as an unpleasant outsider (and decent functional people generally have some kind of prized insider status somewhere), it comes with very severe potential personal costs down the line (and decent functional people generally have a lot to lose), etc.
Some people have arbitrary, insane personal boundaries that make no sense. Some people even set those up deliberately! And yet it’s wholly accurate to say that someone violating a personal boundary should be read as a real red flag, no matter how arbitrary or insane the boundary is; that person is much likely to violate other boundaries too. Decent functional people respect boundaries, the vast majority of the time.
Same goes for taboos. Even if they’re arbitrary, insane, hurtful, or unjust.
Like, what kind of person is happy to do something that marks him as a serious norm-violator?
(1) An enlightened sage, a Diogenes-type who is just totally immune to what everyone thinks of him because he is so completely secure in himself.
(2) A hero of justice, who is actively trying to change the world by striking a blow against a bad taboo that’s doing damage.
Great. Those two kinds of people together are going to make up a tiny fraction of a percent of your population, unless you’re in the situation where there’s some kind of social movement going on and the hero-of-justice has a lot of followers.
But you’re more likely to get a lot of…
(3) People who have hit absolute rock bottom socially, who don’t mind being seen as perverted or threatening or disgusting or whatever because they have no hope of anything better, and so just do whatever they want with no filters.
(4) People who really really really want to do the taboo thing and don’t have enough self-control to stop themselves.
(5) Sadists who are actively seeking out the chance to hurt other people psychologically.
People in categories 3-5 are Very Bad News, generally speaking. Trying to filter them out of your life is a very sound strategy for avoiding awfulness. And that means that there’s a lot of good to be done by taking taboos seriously, whatever they are, and keeping well clear of those who violate them. It is good Bayesian practice.
The problem is that this kind of local-optimizing can justify literally any shitty rule, forever.
Like…a guy who’s willing to go out and blaspheme Allah, in the middle of a village in Afghanistan, is probably not a guy you want marrying your daughter. And that’s true even if you don’t believe in Allah yourself and you privately say blasphemous things all the time. What is that guy’s problem? I dunno, but he doesn’t care if he burns all his bridges. Maybe that mean’s he’s a freethinking hero. Much more likely it means that he’s an impulsive troublemaker who likes upsetting people and doesn’t have many prospects to ruin.
To take things in an even darker and uglier direction, what kind of person is publicly gay in mid-20th-century America? Someone who doesn’t mind spending all his time in sleazy, shady places on the wrong side of the law; someone who consorts extensively with criminals, many of whom are not just criminals-because-stupid-laws-about-homosexuality; someone who doesn’t care whether he can be blackmailed, or who is possibly subject to blackmail already; someone who has no ability to engage with a lot of the good, worthwhile institutions of the world. Good Bayesian inference would suggest that you should probably stay away from such a person.
But that’s fucking awful. I do not want to be held hostage, forever, to Afghani attitudes about blasphemy or mid-20th-century American attitudes about homosexuality.
So my ultimate response is: take the hit to your filtering ability, let the perverts have their brief jubilee before exposure becomes normalized, and tear down every arbitrary fucking taboo.
We spend year after year doing a thing we can’t do.
If this is what it’s gonna be all the way,
It makes more sense to quit today!
[RIFF]
Quit today!
[ALL]
Quit today, quit today,
Quit this very day,
Stop wasting our time and quit today.
[TIGER]
That’s an incredibly tragic story, and you should know that it’s not at all your fault.
[RIFF]
So can you explain it to my mom?
[TIGER]
Your mom? I’ll see that it gets explained to the world!
*****
[RIFF]
Dear kindly Princess Thinkpiece,
I’m so microaggressed;
The girls call me a twinkpiece,
Which makes me feel oppressed.
My ass gets beaten daily,
I’ve never had a date;
Leapin’ lizards, that’s what I call hate!
[SNOWBOY]
Ew. Look, Mrs. Krupke, just take him away:
His background’s no excuse for this abusive display.
His manhood is toxic, there’s no hope in sight –
At this point he’s basically alt-right!
[RIFF]
I’m alt-right!
[ALL]
We’re alt-right, we’re alt-right
Looks like we’re alt-right,
Like, Breitbart-reading 4Chan-posting right!
[SNOWBOY]
(miming typing)
And as my time with this deprived young man came to a close, my heart welled up with a tremendous flow of compassion, but I knew that something in his background had left his emotional and expressive faculties too repressed for me to achieve any kind of real communication. He has a lot of self-educating to do before he can really be called fit to interact with anyone vulnerable.
[RIFF]
Hey, hear that? I’m repressed on account a I’m oppressed!
[SNOWBOY]
I didn’t say that! I’m sure that the things that make you blameworthy have nothing to do with your race or class or anything sensitive!
[TIGER]
Look, you heard what she said, it might be best if we just…take you to your own kind. Maybe they’ll know how to help you.
*****
[RIFF]
My waifu is from Touhou,
My memes are super dank,
I’m going through life solo,
There’s nothing in the bank;
I’d like to be a winner,
I’d settle for respect –
Goodness gracious, please help me connect!
[ACTION]
Sure. Christ, Mrs. Krupke, go fuck off and die.
This Meeks don’t need our help – and if he does, he can fry.
His kind of sob story can always win fame
Through mainstream media acclaim!
[RIFF]
There’s acclaim!
[ALL]
There’s acclaim, there’s acclaim,
Media acclaim,
We’ll bask in mainstream media acclaim!
[ACTION]
Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, Chocolate Chad. Enjoy having degenerate sluts jump all over your jungle dick. We’re not fooled by your lies.
[RIFF]
…what?
[ACTION]
And go to church!
[TIGER]
Look, this was probably a mistake from the get-go. The mainstream media sounds like a much – saner – option.
*****
[RIFF]
Dear kindly Mr. Blitzer,
There’s no path to success;
Everyone’s a kibitzer,
And still my life’s a mess!
My brothers all are Nazis,
My best friends all are cucked;
Gloryosky, that’s how much I’m fucked!
[A-RAB]
Oy! Yes, Mrs. Krupke, it’s really so sad,
Without a real degree there’s just no jobs to be had.
Society can save him, if we act quick:
More college prep should do the trick!
[RIFF]
Do the trick!
[ALL]
Do the trick, do the trick,
It’ll do the trick,
Going back to school will do the trick!
*****
[JOYBOY]
The trouble is the teaching –
[SNOWBOY]
The trouble is his race –
[ACTION]
The trouble is your preaching –
[BABY JOHN]
The trouble is his face –
[A-RAB]
The trouble starts in summer –
[MOUTHPIECE]
The trouble starts in fall –
[ALL]
Krupke, this just doesn’t work at all!
Listen, please, Mrs. Krupke, we’re way too behind,
[RIFF]
The system doesn’t need us and we can’t change its mind.
One time a man died on the same day as his dog. And he went up to Heaven, and he came to the pearly gates. And there St. Peter said to him, Be welcome here; enter and be at peace. Your deeds and your heart are pure, and you are fit to enter Heaven. And the man made as if to enter, and the saint said, But of course, only men may enter here. Your dog must remain outside.
And the man therefore turned away, and he walked down the road until he found a humble cottage by the side of the road, and a woman standing in front of it, dressed in rough linen. And he said, What place is this?
*****
And she said, Oh, this is Heaven. And the man said, Wasn’t that Heaven down the road? And she said, Nonsense, that’s Hell. Hell is for people who would abandon their best friend.
*****
And she said, Oh, this is Hell. And he said, Then that down the road was really Heaven? And she said, Oh yes, of course. Past that door there’s joy and angels and music and every good thing you ever heard of. But they’ve got standards in Heaven. Nobody ever gets Heaven unless they wanted it more than anything. You always end up giving up something precious to get into Heaven.
*****
And she said, Oh, this is Hell. And he said, It sure doesn’t look it. And she said, Oh, you’ll learn soon enough. Beyond that door there’s fire and flame and torment and every bad thing you ever heard of. But Hell looks different to some people if their best friend is there.
Once upon a time, @slatestarscratchpad talked about “Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory.” His particular take on this idea always struck me as a bit odd, for reasons largely having to do with its being super-focused rhetorically on one particular issue suite (distributive macroeconomics). Regardless, the dichotomy is a helpful thing to have available in your philosophical toolkit.
For general-purpose use, I’d suggest a refinement: replace “mistake theory” with, uh, let’s say “solution theory.” There are, roughly speaking, two analytical lenses you can use to examine a given debate. You can say “people are trying to figure out the Overall Best Solution [by whatever criteria], and their arguments represent either empirical disagreements-of-fact or genuine disagreements over the values that determine the Best Solution.” Or you can say “people are trying to advance their own interests against the conflicting interests of other people, they have formed alliances and coalitions in order to do this more effectively, and their arguments should essentially be understood as gambits and rationalizations within a power struggle.”
Each of these lenses is obviously going to be helpful sometimes, depending on the circumstances. Some people have a natural proclivity towards one, some towards the other, etc. We all know how useful conceptual dichotomies work.
OK. All that said, let’s talk for a minute about the kind of collective-grievance-driven identity politics that have taken over mainstream culture for the past five years.
If you want to understand how these arguments are working for the people making them, and why they have the particular effects that they have, I think it’s very helpful to try looking at them through a conflict-theory lens.
Which is to say:
Identitarians make claims like “members of the Oppressor Class act in ways X and Y and Z, it totally sucks and makes us miserable, the world is so unfair, justice must be done.” And a lot of people – in particular, a lot of the sort of people who Take Arguments Seriously – read this as having its obvious surface meaning, which is something like “the current ruleset is bad for us, we should change to a different social equilibrium where a different ruleset is enforced, a new Overall Best Solution is hereby proposed.” In the saddest cases, this leads to bewildered nerds screaming, “PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I DON’T WANT TO BE A SEXIST CREEP / RACIST IMPERIALIST ASSHOLE / WHATEVER-IT-IS! I’LL DO ANYTHING! JUST LIST THE RULES I HAVE TO FOLLOW THAT WILL MAKE IT ALL OK!”
Which of course never works even a little, which breeds a lot of resentment. It especially breeds resentment because there doesn’t particularly seem to be a correlation between “people who make the identitarians mad” and “people who counteract the identitarians’ stated desires.” (As has been pointed out time and again, many of the most-admired men in feminist circles are pretty traditionally masculine, in exactly the ways that come up in discussions of “toxicity.” Visibly trying hard to avoid Doing A Racism will at best make you a punchline and at worst get you hit with serious accusations of actual racism, whereas people who breeze right through the stated norms with a cheeky grin often get away with it. Etc. etc.)
But – as @bambamramfan has recently noted, correctly – it’s dangerous, and wrong, to read that lack-of-correlation as an anti-correlation. It’s not like the confident jocular straight white cis asshole is safe from potentially getting slammed by the wrathful end of identity politics. He’s just as vulnerable as anyone else, probably more so, the moment anyone gets upset enough with him to make an actual move.
The only real difference is that, because he’s a confident jocular asshole and therefore conventionally-likeable, he’s not making people upset quite as easily.
This bizarre circle can be squared, and the facts of the world accounted for more cleanly, if you drop some of your discursive charity and put on your conflict-theorist goggles. All those arguments about oppression, all those claims about what exactly the Oppressor Classes are doing in order to make the world horrible for the Oppressed Classes, are…beside the point. I’m not even commenting on whether they’re right or wrong, I’m saying it often doesn’t matter, because the people making them often don’t really care except insofar as they can win points by convincing people through logic or sympathy.
The actual “claim” underlying it all is something like: In conflicts between Oppressed People and Oppressor People, the Oppressed People should get to win more often and more easily. The very-generalized justification is something like, “life is overall very unfair to Oppressed People and therefore they should get to win more.” And there’s a real argument that the very-generalized justification is true, at least to some extent.
(…but of course it’s impossible to separate “I believe I should get a handicap because life is genuinely unfair to me” from “I believe I should get a handicap because, well, I’m a human being with cognitive biases and therefore it seems intuitively obvious that life is unfair to me.” At some point the justification stops working, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that that’s the point where it will stop being employed.)
Anyway. Most of the time you can’t just say “I should get a ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ card,” because that doesn’t play well, everyone knows that justice doesn’t work that way. You have to say “I am being wronged in these specific ways and the following changes would make it better.” But of course the changes mostly won’t make it better. If that were the actual effective medicine, then people who sedulously followed the alleged rules would be rewarded for it. The actual effective medicine is –
“ – I get that job/promotion/award I want so desperately, instead of one of the other people who might get it, many of whom are white/male/straight/whatever.”
“ – when my boyfriend and I break up messily, everyone agrees that he is worthless slime and I am a Very Tragic Heroine.”
“ – when some hopeless loser displays too much interest in me, I can extract myself from the situation cleanly without having to feel mean and without having to put in too much effort.”
“ – when I get into an argument at a party, everyone will know that I am very wise and enlightened and that my interlocutor is a hopeless bigot.”
Or, in other words, “I should get some number of ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ cards.” That is what conflict theory looks like, on the social micro-level. That is claiming your share of the spoils, not because you can somehow prove before God that you deserve them, but because you’re going to stand up for yourself and your own and it’s not like those assholes in the other tribe deserve them any more than you do. Don’t you get the short end of the stick way too much already? Isn’t life just one long testament to that?
This is actually really bad.
I realize that, by putting it solution-theory-versus-conflict-theory terms, I’m kind of implying “this is just how the world operates at a fundamental level and we should wise up to it” – but, no, it’s a cultural disease, and we’re already infected, and finding the right antibiotics is critical. It probably is “just how the world operates at a fundamental level” for a sufficiently narrow understanding of “the world” (globalized, atomized, multicultural)…and yet we used to be holding it at bay almost completely, and right now we’re definitely not.
It’s really bad, in part, because it poisons the well of discourse. If your opponents don’t mean the things they say, if they’re just trying to rack up enough sympathy to get another ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free’ card, eventually you’re going to notice and stop paying attention to their arguments; and then, on the occasions when they’re actually right and you’re wrong, everyone is screwed. Debate is important if we want to fix the problems. That means we have to be able to have it, for real.
But even more so, it’s really bad because there’s no obvious place for it to stop once it starts. This is how group grievance politics work generally; this is why Lee Kuan Yew sold his soul to the devil to ensure that Singapore would not divide politically into the obvious ethnic factions. The goal is peace and harmony and stability, but individuals are always going to feel aggrieved in ways that can be theoretically traced back to group membership, and we’re not going to find a [viable][compromise] equilibrium so long as people think it makes sense to keep pushing for more spoils. Which in the end is equivalent to total war.
So…solutions? What does the antibiotic look like?
Shit, man, I don’t know. If I did, I’d be out saving the world, not writing this Tumblr post.
The best I can give you is: don’t let yourself get sucked into this game. Don’t honor anyone’s claim to a ‘Win an Arbitrary Fight Free” card, and don’t ever think that you yourself deserve one. If someone proposes a new social rule, follow it or don’t as your conscience dictates, but don’t imagine that doing so will actually mollify anyone. Try to evaluate right and wrong by the standards of the actual rules/principles/virtues/whatever that you espouse, not by simple demographic heuristics.
And if you’re reading this, you probably didn’t need me to tell you any of that. So great.
It’s worth putting in an addendum to say:
At this moment, as it happens, the cultural left has the particular kind of dominance that allows it to play identity politics and actually accomplish things sometimes. But it’s not as though the right hasn’t been positively eager to play the exact same horrible games when the constellations align differently…or as though the slimier parts of the right aren’t trying to play the exact same horrible games right now.
The thing is, I’ve seen boys have shipping arguments over anime waifus, but mostly they’re just memeing at each other, and I’ve never seen one do something like the “antis” do. I’m not ruling it out, I just haven’t seen that particular flaw from them.
…if I’m using the term “antis” correctly.
I’m pretty sure that the psychic and cultural incentives that drive anti-ness are not going to be found, in force, at all, amongst any population of men or boys.
@balioc elaborate?
1. The sordid cynical part:
Anti-ness is a part of fandom drama, and like every other part of fandom drama, a lot of it is about status-posturing and winning sympathy points. Cf. MsScribe and all that.
In general, this particular universe of status-posturing works much better for women than for men, which is one of the reasons you see them engaging with it so much more vigorously. And that’s doubly true for the anti strategy in particular. Being an anti essentially means being willing to say “I am hurt, I am offended, this nasty thing has triggered my delicate sensibilities and you should feel very sorry for me” – and as a baseline, a woman who makes that kind of claim is likely to find a receptive audience and may even find her status raised because of it, whereas a man who makes that kind of claim is likely to be seen as a pathetic, melodramatic weakling.
In forums where anonymity is not carefully maintained, men are really very likely to adopt a stance of “I am, personally, much too cool and strong to have serious problems.” That doesn’t mesh well with the kind of hyperbolic presentation of trauma that you need for most anti-ness.
2. The genuinely sad part:
To the extent that anti-ness is a “real” thing rather than a stupid status game, I think it comes mostly from one source: the desire to control one’s own sexualization, and exposure to sexual material, in a world where this is increasingly difficult (and increasingly hard to justify through the classical ideological channels).
This is more a concern for girls than for boys, by like orders of magnitude, because – as we know from Feminism 101 – women are the Sex Class, and femininity basically is sexuality for most intents and purposes.
Look. Different people have very different preferences regarding the amount of exposure they want to sex (in various ways), particularly when they’re young. In the late 20th century and even the early 2000s we used to have a much more repressed culture overall; in particular, there were only a few channels through which sexual content could spread, and they were mostly things that required you to seek them out actively. In that world, the hip rebellion youth culture was a lot more gleefully sex-positive, because it could have an ethos of “give us the stuff that’s being hidden from us!” – and if you didn’t want that, well, you could be a Good Girl and the world wouldn’t do very much to push it on you.
Now it’s basically impossible to escape sex wherever you go. And you can’t try to sequester yourself from it with old-fashioned claims about purity or maidenly virtue or whatever, not unless you want to relegate yourself to the ranks of the contemptible fundies.
But! Our present mainstream liberal culture, while it’s relentlessly sex-positive in the abstract, does have all sorts of rules about what kinds of things constitute Bad Shameful Sex. So if you can make a case that the things that are particularly bothering you fall into those categories, you can maybe get rid of them, or at the very least you can have some cathartic lashing-out.
[It’s also, to be clear, not a binary sex-good-versus-sex-bad kind of thing. People who are interested in exploring whatever-it-is may nonetheless not want to be immersed in a culture that is overall going at a much faster pace.]
Sometimes, “Ship X is problematic” means “I like Ship Y better, and I am going to call upon the totemic forces of victimhood to strike a blow in that conflict and maybe raise my profile.” This is, pretty much by necessity, a woman’s gambit.
Sometimes, “Ship X is problematic” means “I really really don’t want to see things like that in my beloved pure fandom, and if I ask you nicely to stop it of course won’t do anything, but maybe with the right accusatory rhetoric I can make you stop.” This is much likelier to be a problem for [young] women than for men. Men can certainly be made uncomfortable by sexual content – I was very much a prude in my younger days – but they probably aren’t going to feel like the whole universe is an array of hostile forces on that front.
The real key here, to my mind, was the popularity of the “nineteen-year-olds and early-twenty-somethings are basically kids, for purposes of interest in them being equivalent to pedophilia” meme. From the standpoint of human biology or of any historically-extant human culture, this is too bizarre for words. From the standpoint of a young woman who mostly just doesn’t want to deal with sexual interest, and who knows that she can’t push that desire in the abstract…
The thing is, I’ve seen boys have shipping arguments over anime waifus, but mostly they’re just memeing at each other, and I’ve never seen one do something like the “antis” do. I’m not ruling it out, I just haven’t seen that particular flaw from them.
…if I’m using the term “antis” correctly.
I’m pretty sure that the psychic and cultural incentives that drive anti-ness are not going to be found, in force, at all, amongst any population of men or boys.
It always weirds me out when people talk about how no financiers went to jail for the Great Recession. No doubt there was lots of unpunished fraud, but a recession is not a crime. You could have a downturn even if everything was totally on the level, but people act like the recession was sufficient proof of felonies all by itself, as though bad events necessarily imply the existence of a guilty party.
I agree.
One thing the past couple of years have convinced me of is that we need to do a much better job of cracking down on white-collar crime. And on a surface level I have a common cause with a lot of people on this.
But everyone seems to jump to “for instance, no one went to jail over the recession!” And I’m not sure what crimes people are actually talking about there.
(That doesn’t mean there weren’t crimes committed. And I think we should do a much more serious attempt at enforcement and investigation than we historically have done. But “Making stupid loans” is perfectly legal, and should be.)
Sigh.
Anyone remember “shadow banking?”
Without any commentary on whether or not anyone should, on the object level, have gone to jail:
I think that the anger is actually less about the crash, as such, than about the bailouts. I think there’s a general understanding that there were regulations in place designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing from happening, that these regulations were evaded by most of the major players due to some combination of regulatory incompetence and regulatory capture and straight-up fraud, and that there’s a good chance this will keep happening so long as the risk-hunters at the top of the financial system believe themselves to be immune from downside consequences.
Something something “if we have to bail out your fucking bank in order to save the country, you had better suffer terribly over it, otherwise the message is that when your bets don’t pay out the government will cover them and you will still be fabulously wealthy.”
Man’s self image and emotional self-worth is found in crushing our enemies, seeing them driven before us, and hearing the lamentation of the women. Remember that time that Homer was one of the earliest pieces of literature in Western civilization?
Not toxic, Just masculinity.
Masculinity is strength. To call it toxic is to desire weak, ineffective men who cannot resolve their own issues.
>Illiad as a source of men of strength Achilles mopes like an emo and Ajax literally tosses himself onto his sword because he didn’t get good loot.
Hilariously trads and the Tumblr branch of feminism hate the fuck out of dudes who actually try to open up and resolve their issues, characterizing them as weak and whiny. You desire dudes to be repressed, emotionally stunted mongs who just nod along to your schizo politics.
I’m sure that attitude exists, probably in force – no movement is a monolith, the internet is a weird and wild place, etc. – but that’s honestly not what I’ve seen from the trads.
The more enlightened ones tend to take a stance like “you should make sure that you can entrust the whole of your heart and soul, including all your vulnerabilities and doubts, to your lawfully wedded wife; and you should make sure that you are prepared for her to entrust the whole of her own heart and soul to you.” Which may be a little heavy on the relying-on-one-specific-person for some folks’ tastes, but it’s a far cry from “men shouldn’t have feelings, those are for women/babies/fags.”
The…other ones…tend to take a stance like “WICKED DECEITFUL FEMINISTS want you to JUST SHUT UP AND SUFFER AND DIE rather than EVER BURDENING ANYONE WITH YOUR PROBLEMS because they hate white men and anything you might conceivably need will be called ‘emotional labor’ or ‘oppression’ or some shit, so you should definitely STICK IT TO THE DEGENERATE MODERN MATRIARCHY by being as EMOTIONAL AND NEEDY AS IS DAMN WELL APPROPRIATE FOR YOUR SITUATION.” Which is actually a totally reasonable stance once you strip out all the tribal-oppositional fnords.
Honestly, I think the “real men don’t have feelings” thing is essentially part of Unconsidered Basic Normie Ideology, and anyone who goes to the effort of being weird in any direction is likelier than average to break out of it.
Many different people in the discourse, coming from many different schools of thought, seem to find it intuitively obvious that having sex in public is morally wrong. (Indecent exposure presumably counts in the same category.)
I am very baffled by this.
I mean – yes, some people who see it are going to find it very unpleasant to witness. Probably a fair number of people will find it unpleasant. This is also true of things you can do in public like “holding hands with your gay spouse” or “being black” or “wearing clothing that features provocative political slogans.”
The only general solution that doesn’t seem to lead to endless social war, or to intensely repugnant conclusions, or to a melt-your-brain-into-slag level of mandated utilitarian calculation regarding the psychic preferences of untold numbers of strangers, is a basic deontological rule: other people do not get input into your visual presentation in public, and their opinions on the matter can be morally discounted to zero. Which includes the visual presentation that is “I am naked” or even “I am having sex with this other person.”
I mean, if you want to make the case that it’s distasteful or even possibly rude, I’m not hugely inclined to argue. I might well even agree. But “distasteful” and “rude” don’t amount to “unethical” under most schemata.
**********
…is the objection primarily about children who might see it? Because I don’t think that’s a very good objection either, but admittedly it requires a more sophisticated level of argumentation in order to address it, because children make everything ten times harder in the world of moral philosophy.
If someone is in a position of weakness, I expect them to welcome peaceful dialogue that gives them the opportunity to improve their lot. If someone who claims to be weak nevertheless prefers hostility (whether literal or metaphorical), they may see themselves as powerful enough to gain from it, so I question whether they’re as weak as they depict themselves.
“I’m weak, let’s fight” is a weird thing to say.
I think this is true in a broad sense, but there are a lot of “buts”; it really gets nickel-and-dimed to death on the way to specific situations.
You have to make a distinction between tactical violence and cathartic-but-self-destructive violence, because stuff like running amok is definitely not an expression of power, and I guess there’s also weird stuff like civil disobedience where it’s like, okay I’m going to get my shit wrecked here but it will arouse public sympathy. And of course there are cases where a preemptive strike from a position of weakness is still better than waiting, like if you have a strong belief that you’ll get attacked in a worse position later on.
But okay, those are kind of edge cases. The broader problem you run into is that “position of weakness” is really contextually subtle because it involves a huge number of overlapping and interlocking contexts, and we’re strong in some and weak in others and we may misjudge which of those contexts is more relevant. Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger than society in your house. So even when the principle applies it may not extend to a slightly different context.
More generally, this doesn’t work well as a way to tell whether people are actually strong or weak even in a specific context because it’s actually telling you what they think, which has similar failure states to assuming people know what they’re doing if they act confident. This should be obvious insofar as initiating hostilities is not a great predictor of winning. It’s common for rabble-rousers to motivate people in a position of weakness by convincing them that they have some “secret advantage”, like they have a superior national character or God is on their side or whatever, and honestly people readily come up with those beliefs on their own. But that’s just the really egregious cases; more common is simply that the overlapping contexts are so confusing that nobody really knows where the ultimate power rests until it’s been fought out – there was a case here recently where the city flip-flopped several times on a minor construction issue, with media wars and citizen groups and multiple levels of government involved, and I’m still not completely sure it’s settled; I’ve seen that sort of thing go to the courts or the provincial government.
So it’s complicated. But one thing that can be done immediately to improve the model is to think not about hostility but about costs and benefits relative to other options. The world is full of opportunities for dirt cheap hostility, and when you’re mad about something hostility is highly therapeutic while peaceful dialogue is infuriating, and that in itself explains 99% of what happens online. In a broader sense, a lot of the stuff I mentioned above makes more sense when you view it in cost-benefit terms rather than in terms of “hostile or not”.
Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if
they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an
opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger
than society in your house.
…it kinda does mean that, actually.
Like, sure, it’s a metaphor and the metaphor has limits. It doesn’t translate to something stupid like “you can take on an arbitrary number of armed federal agents so long as you’re within your home.” But it does mean that, to anyone for whom “your house” represents an important resource, your opinions matter more in some ways than do the contrary opinions of other people, even many other people combined.
This is most obvious when you’re talking about children. A parent with eccentric or widely unendorsed opinions, who is willing to take a hard line on those opinions, can do an awful lot to make his kids suffer if they don’t play along – even if literally everyone else in the world disagrees.
But it’s also important to remember when you’re talking about normal adult social circles. Your little band of five like-minded misfits, despised outcasts though you are, nonetheless probably has all the power in an interaction taking place on your turf. If you want to humiliate someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you probably can. If you want to scare someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you can probably do that too – maybe in theory he has some kind of recourse, maybe he can call the cops or try to summon up a Twitter mob or whatever, but those are unreliable weapons in all sorts of ways and there’s a reason that people don’t reach for them casually.
There’s always a bigger fish. There is also always a smaller fish. And the relationships are not linear. Context is king.
But that’s a quibble.
The broader point, of course, is: if someone’s logic and rhetoric is dependent on the claim that he is an oppressed underdog who deserves sympathy and support for being so weak, but he’s nonetheless obviously spoiling for a fight, this is in itself good reason to treat his argument with suspicion. Either he’s irrational and running amok, in which case he’s hurting both himself and others and you shouldn’t be contributing – or he’s rational, and deceiving you about his level of weakness in order to accrue allies or status in preparation for a fight that he thinks he can win, in which case you should treat him the way you would treat any other deceptive agent.
still really tired of “you’re only allowed to be an atheist if you’re not white and/or not of a Christian background, because if you’re both then all relevant axes are contaminated and everything you do is oppressive, sorry I don’t make the rules”
As I said I have my issues with feminism but if somebody was like “*I’m* a feminist, but white western women can’t be feminists unoppressively” I’d fight them.
Hard same
The latter doesn’t even make sense; doesn’t being of a Christian background mean you’d understand even more what bullshit the Christian god is? Because that is what happened to me.
the logic is that the harder you reject Christianity the more Christian you must be (cf. the shit about “Christian atheism” following a similar universalist, evangelical soteriological logic to Christianity, smh)
I appreciate the attempt at an explanation but sadly I am not smart enough to understand the latter half- wait I just reread it and I think you mean like, atheists who were former Christians apply some of the Christian philosophy to their atheism, like believing in a kind of afterlife?
And the first part still kinda baffles me because like, my mother has bluffed locking me out of the house until I told her my religious beliefs (I only told part of the truth) and forces me to go to church on threat of throwing me out of the house because she’s scared for my soul and thinks this will fix me. Also pretty sure she thinks I’m gay.
So like, how would that make me more of a Christian? The logic doesn’t follow.
So it should be noted that I am very cranky at the moment for non-discourse-related reasons, that this is very uncharitable, and that you should take it with all appropriate salt.
That said –
In order to make any sense of this kind of outlook at all, you need to understand that your conceptual starting place has to look something like:
The defining trait of “white Western Christianity” is that it endorses and supports the superiority of white Western Christians and their white Western Christian lifestyle. It is all about establishing this one oppressive group of people as ineluctably superior, while simultaneously serving as a memetic weapon that makes infinite demands of all other people and seeks to control them to an infinite extent.
All the religion’s actual explicit content, all the claims it makes about cosmology and ethics, all its rituals and practices, must necessarily be subordinate to its role in large-scale cultural politics.
This is, as it sounds, incredibly stupid. But once you’ve already swallowed it, you can get: the purpose of “white Western Christian-derived atheism” is to establish white Western formerly-Christian atheists as being superior to everyone else (probably in the sense of being “smarter” or “more rational” or something), while simultaneously serving as a memetic weapon that makes demands of other people and seeks to control them (probably in the sense of making them give up their distinctive community-defining cultural practices, or at least undermining those practices). Therefore it’s basically just a different flavor of white Western Christianity.
I have a theory that every social group has two sets of values: Mythic Values, and Folk Values.
The Mythic Values are the qualities of that group’s exceptional members, its heroes, the semi-mythical figures that everyone in the group more or less aspires to emulate.
For example, the Mythic values of Catholicism are about emulating Christ and the Saints, their self-sacrifice, their faith, their not-of-this-world-ness. The Mythic values of nerd culture center around figures like Nikola Tesla and Steve Jobs, the archetype of a Mad Scientist/Captain of Industry hybrid. Scientific knowledge, inventiveness, not giving a fuck about what the muggles think. The Mythic values of movement Conservatism are embodied in the archetypal cowboy and archetypal soldier. The physical strength, the physical courage, the combat ability, the sheer animal dominance.
Folk Values, on the other hand, are the qualities of that group’s average members.
Nerd culture’s folk values center less on scientific knowledge, more on nerd trivia. The key question is “how devoted a fan are you?” Are you an Old School D&D player? are you a Hardcore Gamer? Have you memorized the entire screenplay of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Conservative folk values are about liking country music and spaghetti westerns, and complaining about hippies, reciting the republican talking points. I haven’t spent enough time in Catholic communities to know what Catholic folk values are, but i suspect is has something to do with celibacy and Chesterton quotes.
In a sane world, we’d recognize folk values and mythic values as two separate things, and use them to differentiate the members of a community from the leadership of a community. But we don’t.
Instead…. we invest the practice of Folk Values with a… talismanic property. a kind of sympathetic magic, where the symbolic qualities of one thing are supernaturally transferred from one entity to another. Do you think wearing that ten gallon hat means you’d survive a day on the Frontier?
I am not a man of singular integrity. I didn’t realize any of this until circumstance forced me to.
It was kind of like… dreaming. like in some superstitious way I thought I was laying the foundation for something real. All I had to do was hold on to the Folk Values hard enough, and for long enough, and one day the Mythic Values would simply pop into existence within me. When the time came, I would suddenly transform into the man I wanted to be.
But of course the time never did come.
Once you understand on a visceral level that mourning John Wayne doesn’t make you John Wayne, you can’t really be a conservative.
You’re either a Soldier or a Civilian. A Cowboy or a Tenderfoot. A Hero or a Bystander. there’s nothing in between.
Once you understand on a visceral level that Fucking Loving Science has nothing to do with possessing scientific knowledge, you can’t really be a science nerd.
You’re either a Scientist, or a Layman. A Morlock, or an Eloi. there’s nothing in between.
Once you realize that there is no connection whatsoever between the folk values and the mythic values, so many cultural milieus become off-limits to you. But what’s more, you realize that… everyone around you is holding themselves to despicably low standards. Every subculture– or at least the ones with a lot of subcultural pride– starts to look like a bunch of puffed-up chest-beating macho bullshitters who’ve made a secret pact to never call each other out on their bullshit.
(“I’ll pretend that you posting all those Neil DeGrasse Tyson memes means you actually possess scientific knowledge if you do the same for me.” “I’ll pretend that you owning every Rage Against the Machine album means you’ve actually contributed to Anarchist politics if you do the same for me” “I’ll pretend that your encyclopedic knowledge of Clint Eastwood films means you’d survive a real world shootout if you do the same for me.” )
You start to realize that the act of sympathetic magic that makes participation trophies work is the same magic act that holds society together. The magic that says “You can be one of the Good Guys even if you’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
@raggedjackscarlet has a way of writing posts that prey on the mind, and this one is no exception. Which, I guess, is how I came to be dwelling on it now.
The division between Folk Values and Mythic Values is real, but it’s not inherent to human nature, and it’s not found in every context. It is an outgrowth of particular forms of social organization.
If you look at the myths of hunter-gatherer / horticulturalist / primitive-agriculturalist tribes – and my best source for this is Native American myth, but maybe people who know more than I do about other tribal societies can chime in here – you don’t see it at all. The mythic heroes are pretty much just the folk of the tribe, writ very large. Your legendary paragons are, like, a really good hunter, a really good shaman, a really good mediator, etc.
Which is not surprising, given that we’re talking about cultures that have basically no role differentiation apart from “community leader” and “community priest.” What else could their heroes possibly be?
Things get a bit wonkier when you start looking at the stories of class-differentiated late-agriculturalist societies, but in a predictable class-based kind of way. Achilles and Arjuna obviously can’t serve as role models for everyone, but they’re perfectly capable of serving as role models for wealthy warriors, and there is in fact a real class of wealthy warriors for whom such stories are likely to prove illuminating.
…fast-forward to now, when we’re really not very far from having a maximally differentiated society, with literally every single person having a unique job requiring unique skills. How the fuck are mythic values supposed to be accessible, in such a world? How are you supposed to emulate the great Steve Jobs – “be really into phone phreaking during the days when computers are just starting to get big?”
That’s an unnecessarily snarky frame, of course, but it’s not hard to see what the actual problems are.
(1) It’s actually really hard to be a Great Scientist or a Great Tycoon, much harder than it ever was to be a Great Warrior. One-in-a-hundred talent isn’t nearly enough, not in a globally-connected world of billions dominated by the superstar effect. Hell, talent of any magnitude isn’t enough; past a certain point, if you want to be splashily successful, the most important factor by far is luck. (Also, social/marketing skills generally do more work than actual task-oriented skills once you’ve hit a certain tier of competence, even for scientists and writers and so forth.) And “local greatness” is close to meaningless in mythic terms, because the myths are structures such that they have to be played out at global scale.
(2) More importantly – being a Scientist or a Tycoon, at all, is very hard. It requires some heavily-gatekept credentials, and (again) a lot of luck. Your average folk aspirant can’t meaningfully put himself on the mythic-hero track, even at the very bottom rung.
I confess that I think much less about the “mythic values =
being a rugged cowboy / Green Beret / etc.” memeplexes, but I imagine
you get similar difficulties. The world doesn’t actually need very many
rugged cowboys or Green Berets. Chances are that you’re never going to be rewarded for pursuing those paths, you’re never going to be called upon to save the women and children with your muscle and grit, so either you devote your whole life to pointless toughness-grinding or you give up and accept that you’re a tenderfoot.
In any case…you get cargo-culting of the kind described here. You have to connect with your values somehow.
You want to fix this? Find some worthy myths that can work in parallel to our infinitely-complex social infrastructure, without actually being embedded in it and without piggybacking off its demands.
I agree that there’s a certain “sympathetic magic” conflation between the folk values and the mythic values.
But hard disagree about there being a sharp boundary between Mythic and Regular people with nothing in between. And that makes your analysis wrong and actively harmful.
Learning to use the Mythic values is actually possible, and potentially helpful and enriching, even if you never become a Mythic figure. The world doesn’t need many Green Berets, but if the Myth of the Green Beret inspires you to start exercising, you’re better off for it. If hearing “go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” inspires you to give a little money to the poor, you’ve actually helped someone even if you fall short of Christ-like perfection.
You just have to make sure you’re chasing the actual Mythic values, not falling into the trap of following the Folk values and hoping that Mythic values will follow.
There’s not even necessarily anything wrong with Folk values either, if you’re enjoying them for their own sake instead of hoping they’ll somehow transmute into Mythic values.
I think @balioc is missing that there’s a big gulf between “be Steve Jobs” and “be a cowboy or a Green Beret” because you could actually be a seasonal ranch hand or join the reserves at least. Like, the blue collar hero archetypes are still fairly accessible. You might even get called up to help with disaster relief and get to literally save some people.
Heck, when I started as a security guard, I spent a lot of time thinking, “What would Captain America do in this situation?” because I was totally thinking of myself as being on the bottom rung of the ladder that Cap is on the top run of.
I kinda wonder though, does the OP even check out, on a folklore/mythology level?
Also, didn’t we have this discussion before, about car fancy and skill with guns? Let me check and mod this post in a moment.
Often, the folk values serve directly as feeders to the mythic values. In Catholicism, the goal is for everybody to embody the mythic values to the degree that that is possible.
Nobody cared about St. Jaime Barbal until the Spanish Civil War started and the Anarchists were able to murder anybody they wanted.
Modern rural conservative culture seems to be more than a bit decadent, but the older/better parts of it are probably far more useful for i.e. joining the army or forming a militia than the alternative, and that matters. Also, OP seems to have focused unnecessarily strongly on what I would consider shallow aesthetics rather than meaningful stuff at the everyman level.
…OP seems to have focused unnecessarily strongly on what I would consider
shallow aesthetics rather than meaningful stuff at the everyman level.
– that’s not an accident.
Or, less glibly: I think most of the discussion here has done a good job missing the OP’s actual point. Which, in fairness, is a problem exacerbated by @raggedjackscarlet‘s somewhat-too-thoroughgoing willingness to separate out the mythic heroes from the folk.
But it’s only a little too thoroughgoing.
“Folk values” (as defined here) are a thing. Practice, or imitation, of the “mythic values” is also a thing. They are not the same thing.
Look, let’s be maximally charitable here:
Any “tacticool asshole” who sees fit to hit the gym and bulk up and learn to shoot straight, so that he can come closer to living up to his Green Beret idols, is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being a real actual Green Beret. Any devoted Christian who works hard at cultivating faith and hope and love, so that he can come closer to the standard of the saints, is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being a saint. Any self-consciously-intellectual nerd who bothers to learn some real science is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being Newton or Einstein. Any would-be billionaire who actually goes out and creates a business, any business, is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.
There are, of course, lots of people who do all those things. But doing those things doesn’t define the cultures that idolize the associated myth-heroes, not even a little. The toughness-worshiping folks are not, mostly, proto-Green-Berets. The members of the Christ fandom are not, mostly, proto-saints. Etc.
In fact, I’ll be even more cynical than that, and say: at this stage in our cultural evolution, practicing the “mythic values” of a culture, at any scale, is unlikely to be particularly well-correlated with belonging to that culture at all.
Instead you have OP’s “folk values.” The people who use Green Berets as a totem recognize each other, and connect to each other, through certain patterns of speech and certain political leanings and certain shared media and so forth – none of which remotely resembles “trying to become a Green-Beret-in-minature.”
It’s even worse than that, in fact. Sometimes the culture actually manages to latch onto an honest-to-God practice of the mythic heroes and use it as a mass-participation ritual for the folk…and this almost immediately results in an otherwise-maybe-worthwhile practice being perverted into useless spectacle, because the folk aren’t in the business of sincerely trying to be like their mythic heroes, they’re just trying to signal cultural affiliation. This has been the complaint about prayer since, well, at least since the Gospels were written, but you sure see plenty of it now. The grotesque thing that political protest has become, for the hip lefty set that considers protesting to be an important personal experience, is similar. I’m not even going to start talking about the self-identified intelligentsia’s endless hunger for “studies” that give its moral beliefs and values the imprimatur of Science.
I have a theory that every social group has two sets of values: Mythic Values, and Folk Values.
The Mythic Values are the qualities of that group’s exceptional members, its heroes, the semi-mythical figures that everyone in the group more or less aspires to emulate.
For example, the Mythic values of Catholicism are about emulating Christ and the Saints, their self-sacrifice, their faith, their not-of-this-world-ness. The Mythic values of nerd culture center around figures like Nikola Tesla and Steve Jobs, the archetype of a Mad Scientist/Captain of Industry hybrid. Scientific knowledge, inventiveness, not giving a fuck about what the muggles think. The Mythic values of movement Conservatism are embodied in the archetypal cowboy and archetypal soldier. The physical strength, the physical courage, the combat ability, the sheer animal dominance.
Folk Values, on the other hand, are the qualities of that group’s average members.
Nerd culture’s folk values center less on scientific knowledge, more on nerd trivia. The key question is “how devoted a fan are you?” Are you an Old School D&D player? are you a Hardcore Gamer? Have you memorized the entire screenplay of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Conservative folk values are about liking country music and spaghetti westerns, and complaining about hippies, reciting the republican talking points. I haven’t spent enough time in Catholic communities to know what Catholic folk values are, but i suspect is has something to do with celibacy and Chesterton quotes.
In a sane world, we’d recognize folk values and mythic values as two separate things, and use them to differentiate the members of a community from the leadership of a community. But we don’t.
Instead…. we invest the practice of Folk Values with a… talismanic property. a kind of sympathetic magic, where the symbolic qualities of one thing are supernaturally transferred from one entity to another. Do you think wearing that ten gallon hat means you’d survive a day on the Frontier?
I am not a man of singular integrity. I didn’t realize any of this until circumstance forced me to.
It was kind of like… dreaming. like in some superstitious way I thought I was laying the foundation for something real. All I had to do was hold on to the Folk Values hard enough, and for long enough, and one day the Mythic Values would simply pop into existence within me. When the time came, I would suddenly transform into the man I wanted to be.
But of course the time never did come.
Once you understand on a visceral level that mourning John Wayne doesn’t make you John Wayne, you can’t really be a conservative.
You’re either a Soldier or a Civilian. A Cowboy or a Tenderfoot. A Hero or a Bystander. there’s nothing in between.
Once you understand on a visceral level that Fucking Loving Science has nothing to do with possessing scientific knowledge, you can’t really be a science nerd.
You’re either a Scientist, or a Layman. A Morlock, or an Eloi. there’s nothing in between.
Once you realize that there is no connection whatsoever between the folk values and the mythic values, so many cultural milieus become off-limits to you. But what’s more, you realize that… everyone around you is holding themselves to despicably low standards. Every subculture– or at least the ones with a lot of subcultural pride– starts to look like a bunch of puffed-up chest-beating macho bullshitters who’ve made a secret pact to never call each other out on their bullshit.
(“I’ll pretend that you posting all those Neil DeGrasse Tyson memes means you actually possess scientific knowledge if you do the same for me.” “I’ll pretend that you owning every Rage Against the Machine album means you’ve actually contributed to Anarchist politics if you do the same for me” “I’ll pretend that your encyclopedic knowledge of Clint Eastwood films means you’d survive a real world shootout if you do the same for me.” )
You start to realize that the act of sympathetic magic that makes participation trophies work is the same magic act that holds society together. The magic that says “You can be one of the Good Guys even if you’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
@raggedjackscarlet has a way of writing posts that prey on the mind, and this one is no exception. Which, I guess, is how I came to be dwelling on it now.
The division between Folk Values and Mythic Values is real, but it’s not inherent to human nature, and it’s not found in every context. It is an outgrowth of particular forms of social organization.
If you look at the myths of hunter-gatherer / horticulturalist / primitive-agriculturalist tribes – and my best source for this is Native American myth, but maybe people who know more than I do about other tribal societies can chime in here – you don’t see it at all. The mythic heroes are pretty much just the folk of the tribe, writ very large. Your legendary paragons are, like, a really good hunter, a really good shaman, a really good mediator, etc.
Which is not surprising, given that we’re talking about cultures that have basically no role differentiation apart from “community leader” and “community priest.” What else could their heroes possibly be?
Things get a bit wonkier when you start looking at the stories of class-differentiated late-agriculturalist societies, but in a predictable class-based kind of way. Achilles and Arjuna obviously can’t serve as role models for everyone, but they’re perfectly capable of serving as role models for wealthy warriors, and there is in fact a real class of wealthy warriors for whom such stories are likely to prove illuminating.
…fast-forward to now, when we’re really not very far from having a maximally differentiated society, with literally every single person having a unique job requiring unique skills. How the fuck are mythic values supposed to be accessible, in such a world? How are you supposed to emulate the great Steve Jobs – “be really into phone phreaking during the days when computers are just starting to get big?”
That’s an unnecessarily snarky frame, of course, but it’s not hard to see what the actual problems are.
(1) It’s actually really hard to be a Great Scientist or a Great Tycoon, much harder than it ever was to be a Great Warrior. One-in-a-hundred talent isn’t nearly enough, not in a globally-connected world of billions dominated by the superstar effect. Hell, talent of any magnitude isn’t enough; past a certain point, if you want to be splashily successful, the most important factor by far is luck. (Also, social/marketing skills generally do more work than actual task-oriented skills once you’ve hit a certain tier of competence, even for scientists and writers and so forth.) And “local greatness” is close to meaningless in mythic terms, because the myths are structures such that they have to be played out at global scale.
(2) More importantly – being a Scientist or a Tycoon, at all, is very hard. It requires some heavily-gatekept credentials, and (again) a lot of luck. Your average folk aspirant can’t meaningfully put himself on the mythic-hero track, even at the very bottom rung.
I confess that I think much less about the “mythic values =
being a rugged cowboy / Green Beret / etc.” memeplexes, but I imagine
you get similar difficulties. The world doesn’t actually need very many
rugged cowboys or Green Berets. Chances are that you’re never going to be rewarded for pursuing those paths, you’re never going to be called upon to save the women and children with your muscle and grit, so either you devote your whole life to pointless toughness-grinding or you give up and accept that you’re a tenderfoot.
In any case…you get cargo-culting of the kind described here. You have to connect with your values somehow.
You want to fix this? Find some worthy myths that can work in parallel to our infinitely-complex social infrastructure, without actually being embedded in it and without piggybacking off its demands.
This is only going to get worse. Alienation will transform into isolation and then desperation, and ultimately, resentment. If you can’t see a civil war on the horizon, you aren’t looking hard enough.
FREDERICKSBURG, Pa. — It was minutes before the end of the first shift, and the beginning of the second, and the hallways at the chicken plant swarmed with workers coming and going. One pulled a hairnet over her curly hair, giggling at a joke. Two others exchanged kisses on the cheek. A woman with a black ponytail hugged everyone within reach. And a thin, ashen woman, whom no one greeted or even seemed to notice, suddenly smiled.
There he was. Standing near the lockers. Tall and crew-cut. Her boyfriend.
“Hi,” said Heaven Engle, 20.
“Hey,” replied Venson Heim, 25.
They met every day at this time, before he started his shift as a mechanic at Bell & Evans Plant 2, and she started hers as “I don’t know what they call it; I just check the chicken.” It was the hardest moment of her day. She knew she was about to go at least eight hours without speaking English, or probably anything at all, in a plant where nearly all of the workers were Latino and spoke Spanish, and she was one of the few who wasn’t and didn’t.
She slowly took out her earrings, nose ring and lip ring, placing them into her knapsack, and he turned to leave. “I got to go in 10 seconds,” he said, and she grabbed onto him. “Why are you trying to act like you want to leave me or something?” she said, and the two held the embrace, swaying slightly, their world outside the plant’s walls — white, rural, conservative — feeling distant in this world within, where they were the outsiders, the ones who couldn’t communicate, the minority.
In a country where whites will lose majority status in about a quarter-century, and where research suggests that demographic anxiety is contributing to many of the social fissures polarizing the United States, from immigration policy to welfare reform to the election of President Trump, the story of the coming decades will be, to some degree, the story of how white people adapt to a changing country. It will be the story of people like Heaven Engle and Venson Heim, both of whom were beginning careers on the bottom rung of an industry remade by Latinos, whose population growth is fueling that of America, and were now, in unusually intense circumstances, coming to understand what it means to be outnumbered.
They didn’t know the heavy burden of discrimination familiar to members of historically oppressed minority groups, including biased policing and unequal access to jobs and housing. But some of the everyday experiences that have long challenged millions of black, Latino and immigrant Americans — the struggle to understand and be understood, feeling unseen, fear of rapid judgments — were beginning to challenge them, too.
Venson let go of Heaven. He told her he had to clock in. She watched him disappear around a corner, then stood there for a moment, alone. She pulled on a winter hat, a wool scarf and a thick coat, knowing how cold the factory can get, then went to a different clock-in station. In the nearly vacant hallway, she watched the clock, waiting for her shift to begin at 3:20.
Seven minutes left: Employees gathered around Heaven, first three, then four, then six.
Studies have shown how some whites, who are dying faster than they’re being born in 26 states, react when they become aware of a tectonic demographic shift that will, with little historic precedent, reconfigure the racial and ethnic geography of an entire country. They swing to the right, either becoming conservative for the first time, or increasingly conservative — “politically activated,” explained Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, who among others found that white Democrats voted for Trump in higher numbers in places where the Latino population had recently grown the most.
Four minutes left: Heaven, looking at the floor, heard laughter and jokes exchanged in the rapid Spanish of the Dominican Republic.
They feel threatened, even if not directly affected by the change, and adopt positions targeting minorities out of “fears of what America will look like,” said Rachel Wetts of the University of California at Berkeley, who argued in one study that recent calls by whites to cut welfare were born of racial resentment inflamed by demographic anxiety, even though whites benefit from the social safety net as well.
Two minutes left: Heaven pressed closer and closer to the wall in a hallway that was now filled with workers, all Latino.
They empathize more deeply with other whites — a sense of group identity ignited — because “they feel like ‘We’re part of a threatened group, and we need to band together,’ ” said René Flores, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Chicago who has analyzed how whites reacted to the growing Latino presence in rural Pennsylvania.
And they feel as Heaven did now, clocking in, then following the others out onto the production floor: Either she’d find a way to fit in, or she’d find a way to get out.
Irrepressible anger at this entire article.
The Satanic glee of the journalist at our destruction can not be understated.
All right, apparently a number of people have seen fit to reblog this, so I’m going to ask –
Where are you getting “Satanic glee” from? What makes you think that this article is anything other than melancholy, and indeed sympathetic? There’s no explicit author’s-voice commentary on What Should Be Done, anywhere, and the portrait of Venson and Heaven makes them out to be woobies and #relatable (if maybe kind of dim).
…is this really just seeing what you expect to see from the Post, and not reading?
"hey, parents! do YOU have fantasies about your kids being more conformist? does teen fashion just make you want to vomit? is their 'self-expression' interfering with YOUR image? well, do we ever have a solution for you!"
How else am I supposed to incentivize kids to study hard and perform well if I can’t sell them more interesting school uniform parts as DLC??
Think before you speak, Argumate!
what kind of absolute dipshit thinks conformity comes from clothes, instead of use and fear of social power
well…I have a lot of feelings about clothes reifying power/lack of power. Clothes aren’t just symptoms, they carry and create meaning as well.
And if everyone has the same clothes
because there is a uniform everyone wears
then clothes cannot reify power and lack of power
and clothing is less of a channel for the use and fear of social power
and the cruelty of human beings that assails every possible surface that may reveal weakness, has one less surface that may reveal weakness
one vicious way in which conformity is perceived and enforced and removed
and yet it is obviously, contemptibly bad to do that
because it’s “conformity”
Look, I know I’m a weirdo nobody butting in from nowhere on someone else’s takes, but BrazenAutomaton is absolutely correct here
the point is that the incentives for schools when it comes to uniform policy are very different to what they typically tell the children to justify said policy.
also if you think that strict adherence to uniforms reduces bullying then I can only gesture vaguely at the army, the navy, the long and not particularly proud history of British boarding schools, and just about every other institution.
although you could say that the sheer ingenuity with which children can come up with ways to signal and enforce differences while technically still conforming to the uniform code is itself a lesson, of sorts.
Thinking that school uniforms will erase class distinctions is like thinking that a poor defendant in court will be assured of a fair trial if he wears a suit and has no visible tattoos.
But I’m genuinely curious. Is there ANY reactionary, right-wing, or conservative position @brazenautomaton won’t argue is actually what’s best for the vulnerable, poor, and downtrodden, and any liberal or progressive position that isn’t actually virtue-signaling by elites who hypocritically intend to actually edify their top position in a class hierarchy, not undermine it?
see this?
this is why I am constantly begging you people to NOTICE THINGS GOD DAMN IT
see the thing that fills your field of vision no matter what way you orient your eyes
well, not quite; again, this assumes that it’s all about the kids.
a better pitch might be “parents, are you terrified that you might be a bad parent and your kids will fail at life because of you? well, just get a load of this school uniform! don’t they look smart?? now, would a bad parent have kids that looked like this? I don’t think so.”
YOUR ENTIRE WORLD IS SOCIAL POWER
EVERYTHING
No. Not everything.
There is more than one thing. Really.
For example, in addition to being social power, there is also actual top-down coercive power. That is also a thing.
The most basic argument against uniforms (in whatever context) is the same as the baseline individualist/liberal argument against any kind of restriction or regulation. “People want to do this thing. We’re therefore pretty sure that there would be value generated by allowing them to do it, both in the abstract sense that it is good for people to do what they want to do unless there’s a compelling reason they should be prevented from doing so, and in the concrete particular sense that they’re likely to know what they’re talking about when they talk about inputs to their own welfare.”
With school uniforms in particular, you can add in the usual arguments about the people imposing the costs not being the same as the people who suffer the costs in any way, and therefore being well-positioned to ignore massive amounts of value-destruction for the kids in order to achieve small aesthetic benefits for themselves. Also the usual arguments about child agency being very widely ignored in all contexts.
The “it’s conformist!” line is more than a little unsophisticated, sure, but…in fairness, people who want uniforms do often expressly advance the argument that it will make the uniform-wearers more conformist in their outlook, and that this is a good thing. “Sartorial uniformity will make the [kids/soldiers/etc.] feel that they’re part of a hierarchical collective, it will encourage them to respect channels of official authority as part of their identity, it will encourage them to bond with one another and to separate from non-uniform-wearing outsiders.” So it seems perfectly reasonable to respond with “to the extent that this is true, it is actually a bad thing, or at least not uncomplicatedly a good thing.”
(As a general matter, people who claim to be individualists are often actually my-subordinates-should-be-perfectly-obedient-extensions-of-myself-ists, and I am very much in favor of discursively calling out that particular form of sleight-of-hand.)
All that said: on the other side of the scale, there are a number of good arguments for uniforms, including school uniforms. One of the best of which is “school culture often involves a lot of social pressures and high-stakes status games revolving around clothing choice, and eliminating all of that by coercive fiat can be a great kindness to the people who would otherwise find themselves enmeshed in that.” The thing you’re saying is important. It isn’t wrong, even a little.
Except for the part where you claim that it’s everything.
