Landlords’ and renters’ rights

https://youtu.be/mQPsSGf9hfk

To flip the argument just given, the renters also don’t have to live at that specific location. There’s no God-given right to be able to live in someone else’s property rent free. And assuming the obligations of a renter is part of the responsibility you take on when you sign a contract and become a renter. That’s literally the same argument she just used, in reverse.

Apparently people don’t have a right to their own legally gained property or income, and have no right to expect people to ahere to legal contracts, or to expect society to enforce them. If that’s the situation, then you’re looking at the end of the entire system of property and contracts and mutual obligation. That’s a bad thing. That ends in individual violence.

It’s the duty of the state to take on the role of enforcement, if individuals won’t honor contracts, to prevent individual violence or theft or repossession. You can build all sorts of protections and processes into that system to guard it and try to make it fair. Fair, meaning, in such a way that if you didn’t know which position you might end up in you would be willing to agree to those rules. So landlords have to give enough options in contracts and legal process rules so that tenants have recourse. And tenants have to grant the same. That’s necessary for a mutually binding contract that both parties would agree to to let them share their goods.

Obviously, if landlords thought that renting out their properties meant that they would lose the legal rights to them and to the value, savings, work, cost, and income they represent, they wouldn’t rent them out. All the same, if tenants thought they could be evicted for no reason, if they had fulfilled their obligations, they wouldn’t want to rent from those landlords. So you put processes and rules in place to protect both, and you enforce the contracts fairly, with due process. Because the law cannot assume a prejudice in favor of one or the other. The laws, and the people who make them, must approach the question of regulation as if they didn’t know which side of the equation they were standing on, but are instead negotiating a system of checks and balances and tradeoffs and mutual surrenders and obligations that protect and benefit both. It seems silly to point it out, but that’s the whole basis of the law and property rights and legal obligations going back to Hammurabi. But apparently modern people are less well acquainted with such things and with how the world and how society works than the Babylonians.
Often there is a great temptation to break the rules that govern our most basic social institutions for the sake of some special cause. And it is entirely understandable that people feel that way. But such systems exist for a reason, and you may be unleashing dangers that were kept chained and contained by those very institutions. You may be undermining essential systems for productive living that those institutions were generating. That doesn’t mean that these systems won’t generate some results you don’t like. But they’re there for a reason, and that reason is to create a defined, navigable system of mutual action, trade, and benefit. It is not merely to protect exploitation, as some would imagine. And your efforts to undo the system may end up producing exploitation and harm (against others, and likely against those you seek to benefit), if you have not first sufficiently understood the value and function of the system you’re attempting to remove.

This particular girl is young and idealistic, but she is also hopelessly ignorant and naive and prejudiced. You cannot hope for a system with no unhappy outcomes for some people on either side of an issue. All you can hope for is a game where the rules are clearly understood and enforced and sensible and compelling, regardless of how play actually proceeds. What you want is a game that both sides will want to play and that both can benefit from, and in which both sides have some protections, some opportunities, some obligations. And they are understood and are maintained. That’s what keeps the whole game going. And there are some games we need because the alternative is much worse for everyone.

On a side note, it’s also in the general interest of society to create systems that have some general tilt toward providing benefit for such qualities as consistency, faith-keeping, lawfulness, honesty, etc. You want your system to inherently reward some ways of operating in favor of others. Because all actions and all modes of being do not lead to equivalent outcomes. So the right criticism of a system isn’t that it produces unequal outcomes; all natural systems produce unequal outcomes. Systems should produce unequal outcomes, that’s their whole point, to produce the largest quantity of the desired outcomes and avoid the largest number of undesirable outcomes. Unfortunately, you don’t really even achieve that by focusing myopically on the outcomes. Life is complex and interconnected, and individual examples, though poignant, may not be representative, or may not represent what you think they do but rather are a function of some other factor, or may be misleading in a hundred different ways. And you can’t adjust whole systems just to fit or benefit individual stories.

So what then? Outcomes matter, they provide useful data. But what matters most is the qualities that produce (or are most likely to produce) those outcomes. That’s what you actually want to identify. And fortunately those are the sorts of things that virtually all humans have known and cared about, everywhere, since history began. And you can abstract them out of the most successful systems.

What kind of human capital tends to produce good results, even under incredibly unfavorable structural conditions? Conditions vary widely, people vary widely, systems vary widely. Are there any qualities that humans can invest in and develop that seem to confer as close to a universal benefit and efficacy, regardless of all other conditions? Are there qualities that help you succeed as a tenant as well as as a landlord, across multiple domains? In wealth and in poverty, in power and in slavery, in good seasons and bad? And does your system encourage and reward those qualities?

So what is the right way to criticize a system? The correct criticism is that a system fails to sufficiently favor the desirable qualities, or fails to discourage undesirable qualities, that are most determinative of good or bad outcomes. This is a delicate matter. But your goal is to fine tune a social system so that, in general, people benefit within it from being competent, honest, productive, and consistent. Those are qualities, game conditions, that benefit everyone as a whole, regardless of individual people, situations, or moments in time. *

– A further note on the alternative offered.

In the system this girl imagines, it’s hard to see how those important qualities would be rewarded rather than eroded. Keeping people honest would require enormous amounts of infornancy and spying on one’s neighbors. Because there wouldn’t be much individual benefit to being honest or productive or consistent, or individual penalty for failing to be any of those things. And there would likely be a strong benefit to being dishonest about others, as well as about yourself. And there would be no special benefit to doing your best, if it conferred no specific or identifiable individual results, and plenty of incentive to do just a little less. By removing the competence hierarchy, as well as its downsides, you also lose its benefits. You unhook life from the mechanisms of cause and effect and make life and the process of learning and refinement of nature and action incoherent and insensible.

In fact you would get exactly the situation that actually arose in the soviet states when such an experiment was tried. Everybody lied, everybody cheated, everybody informed on everybody else. There was no special advantage to really working hard or being honest or being law-abiding, other than avoiding punishment. And there were obvious benefits to avoiding honesty and excessive effort and rule-following. So in turn the state had to assume massive power over its citizens, to observe them and punish them if they did not do all they should. And that power itself became it’s own problem.

It’s a sad fact, but it’s been decisively proven that it’s much easier to demotivate people than it is to motivate them. It’s much easier to remove incentives than it is to create them. And since people can’t live or act or direct their effort without incentives, the soviet government had to provide an alternative bureaucratic structure of rewards and punishments, a substitute for the natural system. And it’s easy to see how that went.

One particular problem with the system this girl proposes in place of the entirety of the personal property market is that it favors dishonesty. There is a clear disadvantage to being dishonest in such a system, and an obvious benefit to dishonesty. The closer I can keep my apparent income to 0, the less I will actually pay. And you lose incentive for producing more, because your obligations will only increase in line with your production, with no increase in benefits. So there’s no obvious reason for being either slightly better or worse off than you are, productively. And since production and honesty and being law abiding do carry an inherent cost, and the commensurate benefits have been negated, why not reduce that cost to yourself? You end up in what’s known as a race to the bottom.

I’ve seen it happen in my own business, when one employee starts to slack off. The others notice. The other workers do, even if I don’t at first. And if they don’t perceive any inherent feedback or penalty or disadvantage to doing less, then they start wondering why they’re bothering to do any more. And those people who naturally want to strive and accomplish more, your best employees, will fail to see the benefit in their own strategy and become resentful and unhappy. And you can destroy them and what’s great about them this way. You can fail to honor your obligation to justice, as an overseer of these people. And you don’t want young people, especially, to learn that there’s no value in being really hard working and honest and having initiative, and that there’s no harm in being dishonest and lazy and letting others take the load for what you don’t feel like carrying.

It’s a kindness to enforce justice, to convey the proper consequences, even to the people who get chastised. Because when you tell them the truth, you protect what’s good in them and resist what could harm them and harm others around them. And if you don’t do it, the whole system that benefits everyone could fail. Even though I didn’t see that one person slacking off at first, my workers did. And if I don’t learn about it or do something about it quickly, pretty soon the infection starts to spread. Everyone sees the benefits of the reduction in personal cost by reducing quality of your labor, and infers that there is no benefit to increasing the quality of your labor. So pretty soon the whole raft starts drifting lower. And that’s when I start to notice. When it’s become systemic. When the whole system has become a race to the bottom. What is the minimum I can put in and get away with it? This is when the whole ship starts to come apart and is in danger of collapse (whether it’s a business or a whole country).

I’ve seen this unhappy result occur. My own father failed to address a problem employee who wasn’t doing their work, despite the complaints of his good employees. And he underestimated the damage that one person could do to the whole enterprise, as well as to the faith and effort of his good employees. He ended up having to sell off his whole business, in no small part because of that one failure to enforce justice. He wanted to be nice to her. And he wasn’t willing to pay the price of confronting this problem (and preferred to focus on his own very important work, never imagining it could endanger even his work). But he failed to comprehend the cost of sacrificing the justice of the system, even for kind reasons. He didn’t appreciate what the system was protecting all of them from.

* When the Jewish hero Joseph ends up in slavery and then prison, he doesn’t say “My God and his laws and the way I follow him are of no use to me in these conditions.” His life was a yo-yo of constantly changing circumstances and conditions, from favored son to slave to household servant to prisoner, to government official. He went from a tribal land of herders to the wilderness to the greatest urban kingdom those days. But he always knew how to conduct himself, he followed his God, and in every circumstance his diligence and wisdom and competence and honesty made him someone people would rely on and trust and value. He had a kind of human capital that he carried with him and that benefited him, regardless of his situation. And that kind of story has helped power the Jewish approach to life and its changing circumstances across the centuries, with no small result.

A final letter to KXYZ

You have lost me as a viewer permanently. This special is not news, this is political re-education.
These “bias” trainings have not been shown to be effective, in fact there is a great deal of evidence that they cause and perpetuate the problems they intend to address. They are not based in a well-grounded or coherent system of psychological thought or ethical thought. They are very fashionable and bring a glamor of religious do-goodery, but as a news organization you should be ashamed for pursuing such baubles when you have such an important role already.
Moral and political re-education has traditionally been the role of the media in tyrannical states where it serves as the arm of political power. As a local news organization, you have hardly earned the right to play such an ecclesiastical role in the lives of your viewers. But I perceive that media outlets such as yourselves and our educational institutions are currently in a race to become the new first estate in America. “Diversity and inclusion” are perfectly pleasant sounding words that carry much currency in the new race for moral capital and authority, but play a deceptive cover for their underlying meaning of “morally pre-determined acceptable outcomes”, which is a category you cannot delineate, especially along racial divides, without participating in the fundamental essence of racism and tyranny itself.
It is not the job of your station to act as thought police or as my parent or my religious authority, policing my soul and telling me about my hidden sins and how to make the proper sacrifices before the gods to be pleasing before them. The amount of moral and religious power that must be granted to an institution in order for them to tell me what I can or cannot think or feel inside my own head, or be told what I secretly do think and feel even if I don’t appear to, is far, far to much power for any organization to wield, much less a local news station and college.
I appreciate that there is a need to seek to heal racial divides and address racial issues. That is a good ambition. This simply isn’t the way, makes the problem worse, and is a blight on the legacy of great leaders like MLK. Good intentions are not a sufficient cover for such misguided activities. They set a dangerous precedent for news and educational institutions as they attempt to exert religious authority. And they do a great disservice and disrespect to the people they claim to honor, the black community, who are no less human or less capable than anyone. Malcom X and MLK would be humiliated to be patronized and fetishized in this way, made into idols of sacrifice and obesience so religiously ambitious white people can raise an incense to make themselves smell sweeter at the expense of actual black development.
No people in history has ever been raised out of poverty or won themselves honor by such means. But if you’re looking for the fastest way possible to make everything in life about race and make all decisions racially arbitrated, the opposite of MLK’s dream, for the sake of a new priestly class of professors and media pundits, then you have got it.
Sincerely hoping you find a better path,

A children’s guide to Marxism

I recently read a summary of Marx’s ideas in a philosophy book for children that summed up his cultural and intellectual contributions thusly: He really cared about poor people, he was unpopular for his ideas, but his ideas ended up being very influential, so maybe they weren’t so wrong after all.

That was pretty much the whole summary. Marx was a kindly figure like Jesus who said that we should all care for the poor and was shunned and maligned and crucified by the world, but was revered and vindicated by history. The end.

Half the problem is that this in no way does any justice to Marx’s actual theories, and in fact ignores them completely, preferring instead to editorialize about what (some) people thought or think about him. The other half of the problem is the very selective nature of the opinions offered and the very selective treatment of the historical facts about the application of his ideas. His ideas were popular and were applied broadly. His ideas of being nice to the poor. Is that all there is to say about them? I don’t gain any real information about what his actual ideas were or how they were applied, except for those two assertions. So what idea of Marx should I be expected to take away from this summary?

If all we’re doing is making judgments about whether someone was right or wrong or had good ideas or bad ones based on past or present opinions or historical popularity and application, then it’s probably worth mentioning that Marxism resulted in more mass slaughter than any idea ever conceived in history. Literal hundreds of millions, whose deaths still remain largely unacknowledged by history.

It’s also worth noting that Marx himself evinced very little “caring for poor people”. He didn’t go around like Mother Teresa, serving the poor. He lived the life of an entitled aristocrat, living off the money of others and preferring to spends his time writing essays and giving speeches. And few people beyond his own children (not counting the one he never acknowledged) would describe him as kindly or cuddly. He had a habit of insulting and belittling and using slurs against anyone he didn’t like or agree with.

If your goal is to describe Marx according to opinions about him or the popularity of his ideas, these facts are at least somewhat relevant. If that is the core of all you seek to address about Marxism. Marx himself considered his ideas to be not merely analytical or theoretical, but historical and empirical. He said that he was accurately describing history: past, future, and present, not merely elaborating a theory.

Marx’s actual idea was that all history was a process of class struggle, that the upper classes did not produce, but rather stole their wealth from the actually productive lower class (parasitically), that gradually this process of abusive theft would worsen and worsen to further extremes (until workers got nothing and elites got everything), and that the workers would eventually throw off this oppression, seize the means of production and wealth from the oppressor class (either by taking what they had or by eliminating their parasitical existence altogether), and a new utopia would be born where property would cease existing, everyone would be happy, wealth and wellbeing would be unconstrained, productivity would be unshackled, government would become largely unnecessary, and a new age would dawn. And this was all about to happen. And history would prove it.

What actually happened is that half the world tried communism, and in almost every case the worker’s paradise was bought at the cost of the blood of millions, and yet still the hoped-for paradise failed to arrive (and they got famine, waste, and corruption instead; those that died from famine alone across the socialist states in the 20th century number in the tens of millions). Socialist states, far from resulting in less government, became all government, with the most controlling tyrannies of the modern age. The socialist states ended up being some of the least free and most unstable countries in history, as well as having records of human atrocity unmatched in history, lategely against their own people. Their atrocities and terrible results were ignored, suppressed, and painted over, because it would all be worth the sacrifice in the end when paradise arrived. It was all a justified and necessary part of the process. Except paradise never arrived.

China today is perhaps the closest thing to a successful socialist state, but the actual present government and economics of China are so far from Marx’s ideas and so similar to the historical pattern of government and revolution in Chinese history that it can only be considered socialist in name. It succeeded as a socialist state by giving up on socialism and focusing on being a single-party autocratic state with immense capitalist ambitions. All the other socialist states, as a Chinese leader once remarked, became poor, while those that went with America and its system became rich. So China would follow America and get rich. Of course, poverty is harsh, and wealth is nice, but considering the cost in blood and tyranny that Marxism produced, the fact that it also left the countries poor and dysfunctional and corrupt and tyrannical made the sacrifices and moral compromises even more senseless.

The fact that this happened again and again and again has some relevance, considering how Marx viewed his own ideas: as historical, not theoretical. And the fact that the capitalist states enjoyed the greatest expansion of wealth and wellbeing in history, the immense amount of reform to labor and pay standards and conditions, the protection of worker’s rights and the advancement of medicine, technology, and property rights to the benefit of so many, all were completely contrary to the predictions of Marx.

Radically contrary to Marx’s claims at the end of his manifesto, socialist governments proved that the workers of the world had plenty to fear from the dawn of socialism, and as well capitalist economies proved that they had a lot to offer and hope for. Maybe not utopia, but a more human and realistic kind of opportunity. Marx argued that there was nothing to lose with socialism, no bad results to expect, only good; and that there was nothing to gain from capitalism, no good results to expect, only bad.

Of course the immediate response you hear from everyone, for the last hundred years, is, well, maybe it wasn’t his ideas that were the problem (despite being disproved on his own terms), maybe the problem was the execution. His ideas sounded so good. Maybe people didn’t really do it right, or didn’t really try. This is an extremely tired response. But it has to be answered because it is trotted out any time anyone brings up the fact that Marxism was, historically (which was Marx’s main interest), an unmitigated disaster.

There are two main responses. The first is to question exactly how many failed states and how many bodies it takes, and how many instances of things turning out exactly the opposite of how Marx said they would, to disprove Marx’s historical thesis. Socialism got tried a lot. A lot a lot. And it returned the same results across dozens of countries, dozens of cultures, dozens of races, dozens of situations, again and again and again like clockwork. Blood, tyranny, instability, corruption, fear, dishonesty, poverty, and ruin. Not just mild examples, the biggest examples of each ever in history, it can be easily argued.

And they didn’t inflict these results on the weak and corrupt and fragile capitalist states, they inflicted these results on themselves. Socialism is a “scientific” philosophy. And according to the science, according to the results of the experiment, repeated across time and across as many different and diverse conditions and populations as you could possibly hope for in our world, it yielded the same results again and again. So yes, it was a very pleasing hypothesis, but it has not been borne out.

Although not affiliated with Marxism, even the Nazi party was a socialist platform. As with other countries, the Nazis’ identified a specific group that exploited and manipulated the economy, a parasitic class that did not earn but rather stole their success at the expense of the real productive class. Their substantive difference was in associating this parasitic and oppressive class with a specific race (the Jews), and the oppressed and productive class with a specific race (the Germans).

In each country where socialism was tried, some group, some demographic (Jews, other ethnic groups, city dwellers, landed gentry, peasant landowners, economic middle men, foreigners, aristocrats, etc), was identified as belonging to the corrupt and parasitic class and was subsequent disenfranchised or destroyed. And yet still somehow the productive paradise failed to arise. In fact one could argue that, but for its overextension and defeat in the war, Germany was the most successful of these attempts at a productive revolution that sought to overturn the existing social and economic structure and unleash the expansion and dominion of the oppressed class (as they defined them).

So, to sum up, the problem isn’t that Marxism hasn’t been tested in a historical or practical sense. It’s been tested a lot. And so have opposing theories. And the scientific results have been overwhelmingly bad for Marxism. People really did try to bring in the workers paradise. They tried hard. Again and again. And it never arrived. That’s a historical fact, and not at all the one that Marx predicted. So how many oppressor classes do we need to experiment with wiping out before we realize that it won’t fix the world?

So, Marxism was tried, and it didn’t do what it said it would. That leads us to an implied follow-up objection, and the second response. The implied follow-up objection is that Marxism still isn’t to blame because Marxism wasn’t really tried, it wasn’t tried in the right way, and so Marxism can’t be blamed for all those bad experimental results. Despite the scientific and historical evidence, there is no internal necessary connection between the ideas of Marxism and the actual historical results. Proper Marxism (whatever that is) wouldn’t have had those results, because those results aren’t what Marxism predicted.

Well, for one thing, that kind of objection could just be referred back to the first response. Just how many experimental attempts do you think you think you need, how many contrary results have to pile up, before you’re willing to accept their validity? If your stated condition is that only results that affirm your thesis are valid results, therefore all the many and various attempts are invalid and not to be counted, then one might wonder exactly how scientific and historical and empirical your theory actually is. An experiment that only accepts positive results and ignores an enormous and consistent data set of negative results can’t really be said to be truly experimental.

But there is a legitimate question under all this, a disbelief. Surely, there must be some version of Marxism that doesn’t entail all the mass murder and tyranny? It sounds so good, has such noble intentions. Help the poor, right the world, and fix history. Surely the fact that there is so much mass murder and genocide in the Marxist experiments proves that they weren’t really Marxism, which is all about caring for the poor and bringing peace and prosperity to everyone? And this is a powerful existential argument. It’s an argument of intuition and hope and feeling. And one to which I can only give a simple answer.

No, there isn’t a version of Marxism that doesn’t entail this and doesn’t end this way. It’s a truly painful tragedy that speaks deeply to the difficulties of human condition. But there it is. There isn’t a version of Marxism that doesn’t end in revolution, murder, terror, and tyranny of one kind or another. It’s baked in. It’s earned. It’s implicit in the relationship between the ideas and their actual execution in the world we live in. It’s inevitable.

This fact has been proven many times over according to the scientific terms Marx himself favored, that Marxism necessarily ends this way. And it has been shown by many others how, purely as a theoretical construct, Marxism necessarily entails these ends. Marx himself never shied away from the necessity of revolution, including bloody revolution, even if he preferred comfort and ease himself. There isn’t a nice version of these ideas that doesn’t land you at the same end point. It may not seem obvious on the surface, especially if all your thoughts are focused on the hoped-for promises of utopia. But the utopia has never shown any signs of arising, and the tyranny and murder and instability have been proven time and time again.

Why? Well, there is no short answer for that. It has to do with the complexity of the real world, instead of the fantasies of utopias and the easy blame for who is preventing you from getting there.

You simply can’t mandate equality of outcome without a system of absolute governmental tyranny. You can’t encourage a conception of the world that defines it according to oppositions of oppressed and oppressor and encourages resentment, revolution, and seizure and expect a result that doesn’t eventually end in abuse, terror, resentment, and murder. You can’t build a system without property and expect everyone to be happy, just, fair, or honest. And you can’t correct for the problems that arise from these facts without tyrannical control, suppression, and abuse.

These are just a few of the practical problems, but there are many technical ones as well when it comes to ordering societies and economies. There are all kinds of major problems with Marxist theory that people have long pointed out, and those problems have a long history of being proved valid in practice.

You can’t separate Marxism from its historical outcomes. Partly because that’s how Marxism is constructed as a theory. Partly because its outcomes are perfectly earned and valid extrapolations of its content. If you believe in Marxism and you really want to try it, and you take it to a country, this is what you will do and this is what will result. It’s consistent both theoretically and empirically. You can’t get the paradise without the revolution, and you won’t get the revolution without the blood and tyranny. And, we’ve learned, you also won’t get the paradise. And you’ll have to get even more draconian and make even more sacrifices to try to cover it up or fix it.

Is any of this worth appending to the summary “Marx cared about the poor and was treated badly, but his ideas later became very popular”? Is any of this relevant? I have to think so. I have to think that the bodies of the hundreds of millions that died by imprisonment, terror, and starvation for the sake of their countrymen’s socialist dreams at least deserve that much respect.

A bad outcome or bad execution does not necessarily prove that an idea was itself bad. That’s a fallacy. But if you structure your idea as a prediction of what will actually happen, and are proved drastically wrong again and again and again, then maybe that actually is a result. At least it’s worth mentioning. And if there are good arguments that explain why those bad results are a necessary component of the fundamental ideas, and those arguments have been borne out in practice across dozens of cases, then that’s also probably worth acknowledging in a summary that trades in perceptions, popularity, and results (rather than actual ideological content).

In a way, perhaps this children’s philosophy book is daring us to answer its question, “No! ” An idea becoming popular and fashionable does not mean it is a good idea. A person becoming influential does not necessarily mean that they had good ideas. No, you have to dig into the idea and its premises and assertions, as well as look at the real results if it proposes to be a scientific and historical description, to see how good a theory it is. You have to do the work, you can’t rely on fashion.

And so I have to conclude that, on these grounds, the book does do a very good job of teaching you to think, if you’re up to the task of meeting its challenge and investigating and defending your answer to this question it asks. Errors and omissions often make for the best teaching opportunities, if you’re up to the task of truly meeting them and making them better than they are. You’ll learn far me from exploring and correcting an error than you will in being given a correct answer.

A dream of the pantheon

I had a strange dream. Ignoring the events that led up to it, there was a gathering of powerful people, and I was among them. There was going to be a great ordering and striving to see who would take what position. Everyone had strengths and abilities. There were men and women. Some I knew, some I didn’t. It was like a pantheon of gods was gathering and were were going to see how things would be ordered. I was not especially strong. I was just myself. And among the other men there were people like my brother in law, very tall and much bigger than me. There were other men, much bigger and better looking. And one with the strength and appearance of a handsome wolf.

Among the women, some were plain, some were beautiful, some were alone. There was one particular group of impressive looking women gathered into a private group. They talked quietly among one another. And there was one with long dark hair and a knowing, confident face who spoke little outside her group. And she eyed me sidelong. Everyone was able to give up the abilities they had to a great pooling, and then out of the joining each was given their power. You could try to take, to sieze something out of the mixing, or you could surrender your portion in hope to make room for something surging back or drawn out of the pooling.

I let it wash over me, not understanding how the mixing worked, not knowing what to expect, and not expecting much. And then it was done, and each person took their place in a line based on what they felt their ordering was. It was the duty of all to discover and test their abilities to their best, so that the order of powers could be determined. Many took their places in the middle. Some drifted after some discussion and examination and struggle to the end. Some few stepped confidently into the top spots, including the handsome, wolf-like man and the dark haired woman. Her ladies in waiting took their places just below, with other powerful male figures.

I didn’t know where I belonged. So I went to the bottom end and approached someone, wondering if that was where I belonged. I placed my hands against theirs and we struggled to see who could push and wrestle the other back. And they gave way. I was surprised at my strength. So I went a bit further down the line, amused, and tested again, and again they gave way. The others jostled one another, but found their places like a line of kings and queens. I tested myself now against people I had thought I had no hope against, men far taller than myself who I should not be able to overcome. But the powers they had couldn’t stop me.

Bit by bit I moved my way up and wondered how this was possible. The group near the top had not yet tested themselves against one another, but only eyed each other. The wolf-eyed man watched what happened. He watched to see how things went as I approached my tall, composed brother in law. And he eyed the others around him. The dark haired lady and her ladies in waiting eyed me. And although they didn’t say anything, I understood. They were watching a ritual play out. This lady, and her maidens, had made me strong. They had chosen this, chosen to give me strength, so I could face these others. They had given up physical strength and directed it into me, invested power in me, so I could subdue these others.

And so I worked my way at last to the wolf. He was strong and handsome and confident and ruthless and noble. And he had great strength. But he only had his own strength. And I had the strength that had been given to me, the strength of many, small and ordinary as I was. And I threw him back, amazed.

Now there was only one left, the dark lady. And I wondered. This was her strategy. Not to outright defeat all the others by force herself, but to raise up and imbue another to defeat them all for her, to set them in place below me, a tool she knew she could wield and could surely defeat. So what, then, had she kept? If she did not keep her strength, what power had she kept in silence that she knew would give her victory over me? How could she be overcome?

She never said a word, but waited patiently, never revealing her secret, but smiling a little, queenly and unperturbed. And I knew that she must have me trapped and beaten. What could she have kept, what could she have gathered, that would give her that certainty? What did she have that made her know I would have no chance against her, that I was her pet creation to order the powers beneath her? How could I possibly win against her?

I approached, but I did not raise my hands as I had with the others. She kept her hands folded in front of her, as always. Then I knew that there was only one way to conquer her. And that was to surrender and pledge myself to her. So I bent my knee to her and declared my love for her and service to her. And at last she spoke and said that that she was overcome, and she reached out and took my hand, but we did not struggle, nor strive to test strength as I had with the others. And she lifted me up, and I took the place next to her, at the head of the line, hand in hand with her. And our hands were locked together and were like one. And she smiled. And I understood.

In the dream all this took little time. There wasn’t much overt thinking. It was just known. Verbalizing it takes so long, but the images and feelings and experiences were very simple, passing in moments.

Creating false demand, with an aside on evil

In response to the idea that markets are distorted because suppliers have created artificial demand that didn’t exist. From this discussion.

https://youtu.be/ndehWd9N9Z4

This is the wrong way of viewing things entirely. You cannot literally create demand. You can hijack it, you can confuse it, you can subvert it, you can alter it, you can divert it, you can exaggerate it, you can do all kinds of things to it except create it. So to speak of the creation of demand by the supply class is similar to speaking of creating energy or creating matter. You cannot create it, you can only transform it. There is no ex nihilo creation of demand.

So if they aren’t creating false demand, what are suppliers doing? Most likely, hard as it is to believe, supply-side providers see a (at least potential) demand and are trying to fill it. They may be misunderstanding it. They may be ignorant of larger concerns beyond their own desire to succeed. They may be well-meaning or malevolent and selfish. They may simply see the easiest and most profitable way to fulfill a demand in some shallow sense without fulfilling it in a deeper sense (and not care about or recognize the difference). Or maybe they don’t have the imagination to see or the conscience to care that filling it at the expense of other valid demands (or to the degree to which they’re trying to fill it) runs counter to other needs and demands that have holistic significance for human flourishing.

There are so many things that are likely going on, some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them thoughtless or neutral or ignorant or merely confused or mistaken. But none of it is so simple as supply creating “artificial” demand by some infernal artifice. That is merely an amusing fiction that plays a useful or pleasing role in a narrative we are spinning based on our prejudices. It’s up there with Marxist doctrines and anti-Semetic doctrines that argue that the middle-men class doesn’t actually do anything or produce anything but simply steals everything from someone else. It doesn’t belong in the realm of the serious science of economics.

Even the greatest of evils cannot create. It can only distort, only misuse. People figured that out across many cultures thousands of years ago. Even our most central concept of evil, sin, does not refer to a thing that has being in itself but rather to something that has missed what it was aiming at. The positive capacity is in there somewhere, giving the process its power. It’s just gone astray.
Sin, or evil or injustice or distortion (however it pleases you to label it), is less than parasitic because it has no life to it except that which it piggybacks on from its host. Sin itself produces nothing, only the unbeing and ungrowth and undevelopment and unarrival of whatever it was that you were actually trying to aim at or create. Loss of meaning, loss of order, loss of purpose, loss of result. Death, in other words. The dispersion of the creative and purposive process. It produces the not-the-result. It doesn’t create. I don’t intend to get all mystical. This is just a basic fact of human behavior that’s been long recognized by vast swathes of humanity but that us clever moderns with all that knowledge at our fingertips have somehow forgotten. It applies to economics as it does to all aspects of human creativity. Economics is a domain of human creativity.

Why does this matter? Mostly I think it’s a matter of proper framing. How you frame what is happening affects your ideas of what is possible and how you interpret the actions and motives of the people involved. If you think people just created something fake and false from nothing, that it has no place, no reality or value to it, out of malevolence or greed, you’re going to take a different attitude to it than if you think there’s some complex process at work that has some sort of grounding in reality (however distorted).

Partly, this positioning forces you to work harder to explain why and how something is distorted or got distorted, since you can’t just dismiss it as “purely” artificial. In addition, it changes what your options are for action. Let’s be honest, these aren’t just academic questions. People, including non-academic individuals, will develop opinions and feelings and plans for action based around ideas like these. If the construction in question is purely artificial and evil, then you are probably justified in simply destroying it or outlawing it without asking any further question questions. Removing it wouldn’t hurt anyone. It’s a pure parasite.

But, if there’s something real under it all, if the thing you’re dealing with is a diseased but still important part of the patient, then you have to be a bit more careful in your operation. It also opens up the possibility of cure, of redemption, as an option. You’re forced to develop a more powerful positive theory of what that underlying living mechanism is supposed to do and what it could be for. And you can try to figure out how to help it grow into that rather than just amputating it. That doesn’t mean that amputation isn’t sometimes necessary, at least as a temporary solution, to prevent the cancer from spreading and the disease from taking down the whole organism. Even with children, sometimes we take away certain freedoms and keep them for a later time because accessing them at that stage of life consistently leads to disaster. But the key fact that differs in the position is that, when you see artificial demand as a distortion rather than a creation, you’re forced to recognize, whatever you may end up having to do, that there is something underneath it all, and there is some nonzero possibility that it could be redeemed and corrected and made healthy again.

Many people fear this approach because they don’t have a sophisticated enough idea of good and evil to be confident that they could tell the difference between them or be able to take the necessary action if they don’t reduce them down to simple categories with completely different natures. Having a simpler idea of both frees up your ability to identify and label both and act toward both.

Just because this to her perspective opens up a more complex view of good and evil doesn’t mean that it’s less robust though. In fact I would say that the idea of evil being a purely separate or artificial thing from good is too weak a conception of its reality; it doesn’t do it justice. Evil as a distortion is a far more robust concept of what it is and explains its power and genesis far better than the ex nihilo (those are just bad things and bad people) approach. Evil has real power because it comes out of something good, something vital. But evil itself, in itself, is also so much less than an alternative to good. Take away the good from it and you’ve got less than nothing left. It is entirely dependent in nature. It is a hell that would not leave a taste in the mouth of a flea.

And that explains why we must wrestle with it, with evil. Because in some sense we are wrestling against good. Good gone wrong. There is real power behind both sides. And simply destroying the other won’t yield any real long term victory. Only the victory from within, the victory that can find what it is that has gone wrong and what it means to go right and separate and realize them is a true victory. Evil that is not defeated by becoming goodness cannot truly be defeated. It will simply take another form.

This is also why the attempt to defeat evil so often results in the ascendency of some new evil. Because the distortion was never truly confronted or cured. We simply set up an opposition and smashed what seemed false to us. And sometimes that is what needs to happen, in that moment. But you have to be very wary of those who offer to help fight and cure the evils that confront us but lack a sufficient conception of the good that they are pursuing and hope to realize even for their enemies. Someone who sees only enemies, only the bad, is unlikely to have a sufficient conception of evil to be able to confront it on any but the most basic and obvious levels, and the power that you have to grant them to do it is quite likely to just create a new abberation in the process of defeating the old one.

Again, I’m not saying that confrontation on the most basic level isn’t something that doesn’t need to be done, but that it comes with some serious inherent risks, if that is the limit of your understanding. And the failure to comprehend that evil is a danger that lies in the heart of every person, including yourself, leaves you vulnerable to becoming the evil you defeat. Thinking you stopped it “out there” and taking the power to yourself necessary to do so are two of the most powerful preconditions for your own corruption. They’ve brought many a person, many a political leader, to ends they and others could scarcely have imagined. History’s truly great tragedies have often been the work of heroes. Their power for good was what gave them such great potential for evil and harm.

Nazi Germany, to pick an easy example, didn’t accomplish what they did because they were so barbaric and unsophisticated, but because they were so incredibly orderly and clever and industrious and focused and civilized. And the Nazi party gained ascendency by vote, because the people raised them up to confront and resist other perceived threats and dangers. And many of those perceived threats had a real basis. The Marxist and Maoist and Cambodian revolutions were also themselves attempts to raise up the power of good to confront evil. So what went wrong? They learned the danger and the cost of empowering people with an insufficient conception of the good, of their own proclivity for evil, of the distorted goodness that underlies evil (so you must take care), and of the possibility of redemption.

From a letter to a newspaper

As a news organization, the positions of any given national politician should not be characterized as an attack on people. Words aren’t attacks on people, they are statements of positions. We can agree and disagree with words, statements, and positions. They can be analyzed and falsified. But half the problem that prevents any kind of meaningful discussion on many topics is the tendency of everyone to always characterize (because it makes a good headline) anything anyone says as “an attack on X”. And to use the language “X attacks Y’s daughter” is the most disgusting kind of manipulative, exaggerative, emotional reporting I could possibly imagine.

Please attempt to maintain some semblance or journalistic integrity. Also, the extensive reporting on social media feuds between congresswomen is a lot more like gossip than meaningful reporting. “This person said this about this person, this person got mad, this person slagged them back, what a b#$%!” is essentially the nature of this whole story and this whole genre of reporting. These aren’t events, these aren’t meaningful debates. This is just people antagonizing one another and squabbling on social media, posturing and denigrating and shaming one another.
This isn’t news. And your obvious use of it to attempt to compel your readers into a political position on proposed legislation is reprehensible. Your job is to report the news, not interpret it. People are capable of making their own judgements about the information, which it is your job to present as cleanly and fairly and without bias or exaggeration or attempts at story-making as possible. That is the role of the press in a liberal democracy.
If you feel compelled for monetary and social currency reasons to report on this kind of gossipy non-story, the least you can do is attempt to keep your headlines and reporting more professional and neutral. Does that make for a less exciting and clickable headline than “X attacks y!”? Yes, it does. But it also make you sound less like a gossip rag and more like a real news organization.
I am a long and loyal patron of your channel. But if this is the direction that your reporting is going, I will have to add you to the pile of sites that have lost their mission and lost my respect and interest. I understand the temptation. I used to be a journalist myself. The question being asked now is, “Who can win the race of advancing the narratives and become the voice of the nation?” But there is still real value in old-fashioned journalism. Yes, everyone is running toward becoming editorial and entertainment news and having the juiciest headlines and most sharable perspectives and topics. But that only shows their desperation and degeneration and loss of belief in their role and mission. And it does not serve the public interest.
Your role, your value, is in detailed reporting on local events and non-partisan reporting on national events. That’s where you can succeed and have real value. That is where you can be a precious and increasingly rare resource. Reporting. Not gossip, not exciting reactions, not advancing a cause, not jumping on juicy stories, not exaggerating, not characterizing. Just reporting. It really is worth it. Your readers will respect you for it.
I want to raise this warning for your own sake, to save you from the natural temptations that many, if not most, media outlets have fallen to. All you’ll do is to take away one more source of neutral information from your readers. Which will just drive people on the other side of the editorial slant into the arms of opposing value-laden reporting. And that’s not a good end for them either. Value-laden reporting is the problem on both sides, regardless of editorial prejudice. Don’t deprive your readers of what you could offer. We need good media outlets so desperately.

From a conversation with a journalist

Hello, I had some concerns about the reporting in this story.

I’m going to assume that this story is not completely unidimensional, and that there are people other than those who say it is all racism, although that is not apparent from the story itself. I am not saying, myself, that using such mascots and names isn’t potentially racist or offensive. But I assume that there are a variety of views. That some people don’t care, that some have arguments for keeping the names and symbols, that some agree with some of the points but disagree on what should be done about it. I just assume there is more than one perspective that exists on this issue.

Therefore, as a news organization, not a political action newsletter, I would assume that it’s your responsibility to report on that debate and let your readers go through it in their own minds and make their own decisions and come to their own conclusions. And that your readers would respect and appreciate you for doing that.

“Racist schools!” is a juicy headline and story body. But good reporting demands slightly more work than extensive quotes from a single person or single position in any serious debate.
Your decision to report it as if there were only a single story to tell is a signal to me that you are not actually interested in reporting the news, but in provoking sensation and engaging in editorialization. Please extend your reporting to cover the actual breadth of thr issue, not simply one hot take on it.

If you truly believe in the process of liberal democracy and reasoned debate, then furthering understanding of and further reporting on that debate and process should help, not harm, your personal political goals. If, on the other hand, you see your purpose as either simply forcibly advancing a viewpoint or goal, then you’re not a news organization, you’re a political action organization. Or, if you see your purpose as pushing forward the most exciting and sensational and morally and emotionally compelling and most reductive and least detailed and nuanced versions of a story, for the sake of popularity, then I would argue again that you’re not a news organization, you’re a popular entertainment venue.
What I would really love, though, and appreciate, would be a news outlet. Please strive to remember the difference.

The reply:

Thanks for reaching out with your concerns, as a journalist I always strive to include different perspectives in my stories. Unfortunately, I reached out to a few of the Cheyenne Mountain School District alumni who didn’t get back to me in time for the piece. I only have a few hours to turn the story, so since lawmakers worked with the tribes on this bill I focused on what they wanted to see with the measure and their hopes for the future. Thanks again for reaching out.

My reply
Thank you for your words and thoughts. I do appreciate your position and see your point, from a professional and institutional point of view. You’ve got a job to do and you need to discharge it in the most efficient and most commercially productive way possible. Why delay it or complicate it?
But, two dozen schools worth of students and administrators and parents going back a hundred years each and you couldn’t get one source to tell you why all these racists were confortable with maintaining thier position (either in the past or currently)? I’ve worked as a reporter, I understand the daily churn, the deadlines. But that open question seems like a fairly large oversight worth pursuing at least one quote. Apparently all those thousands of people (who we haven’t even been introduced to) are just all huge, inveterate racists, and that’s the whole story. And all the lawmakers and all the tribal members are in agreement. And that’s just all there is to the story.
Back when I did reporting, making that sort of claim carried a higher cost and required a higher burden of proof, as well as more representation in the public discussion for the people in question. Even rapists get lawyers and rights and journalists will use words like “alleged crimes” if the case hasn’t come to trial yet. But now all bets are off, it seems, and you can only benefit from advancing such arguments without allowing any recourse.
I know that “unbiased” reporting isn’t in vogue any more and possibly isn’t even believed to exist any longer. I know that that kind of reporting carries a cost and often weakens the narratives and stories newspapers want to tell. But it still has value. And I only bring it up because it seems to be an art that is being sacrificed for the sake of expediency and narrative convenience. Nuanced, balanced, and complex reporting doesn’t mean sacrificing the position you hope for, or that others hope for, although it may mean sacrificing that platform in an individual story for the sake of the process and institutional standards. But the victories won under those conditions are victories worth winning, and playing a part in telling those stories with integrity that can be respected by everyone (regardless of their initial position) is truly a job well done.
Thank you for your time and your dedication to your work.

The job of government

The job of government is to codify and enforce the rules of fair play, not ensure equal or specific outcomes. So government needs to make sure that the rules are uniform (which produces freedom and opportunity), not make sure that the results are uniform (which virtually always involves injustice and tyranny, even when well-meant). Private citizens are allowed private prejudices, values, strategies, and outcomes. Individuality. Efficacy. Agency. That’s what the neutral system protects. The right to produce both good and bad outcomes.

And the correct amount of force to use is whatever the minimal amount is. Because although private efforts may produce bad results, those results are at least contained and individual or group-individuated, not universally mandated. And you have the most amount of flexibility in receiving and responding to those outcomes, positively and negatively. But mandated and established government programs are slow to learn and even slower to adapt or change.

“Small enough to fail” is the great benefit of individuality and private enterprise. Government programs are almost always too big to fail, and so are unlikely to learn or adapt, and rely almost entirely on their value and the risk being worth it by them having been established as massive net positives beyond a shadow of a doubt before being enacted (in an ideal situation).

It is not a the job of government to decide that some people or some businesses “should” succeed. That’s overreach. That’s harming the very people you’re trying to help by making them dependent and fostering unnatural conditions, distorting reality, as well as propagating unfair treatment on everyone who you haven’t decided to give special preference to.

It doesn’t really matter who your prejudice is for, this side or that side. It’s the attempt to mandate results a priori that’s mistaken and results in bad ends, false conditions, injustice, dependence, and dishonesty. The government’s proper job is to resist such attempts and establish neutral codes that apply equally to everyone, regardless. Codes that everyone could agree to if you didn’t know which side of them you would be likely to end up on.

Playing the role

The great lesson to be learned from casting is that you won’t always get the role you wanted or expected or deserved, and you can waste your moment being resentful or disappointed about that. What you really can and should do is to make the most of the moment you’re given and play the part to the best of your ability. That’s something you can control and can always be proud of.

And really, that’s what life is about. That’s where you’re really tested, not in getting to do exactly the thing you thought would be best for you. Challenge and adaptation is where your real quality is developed and revealed. So don’t walk off the set. Don’t deprive yourself of the greatness you could have and could develop because you didn’t get the easy greatness you preferred or thought you deserved.

There are so many people vying for those great chances, those perfect roles. And each of them can go to just one person. And it might not seem fair if you aren’t perfectly placed for a certain part, but it’s also not the director’s fault. It may be their job to convey those disadvantages.

A real professional can make gold out of any part. That’s how you recognize them. They’re always the best part of whatever they’re in, even if the play or movie is terrible. When you make a movie, there’s so much that isn’t dependent on you. They’re a collaboration with hundreds of people. And you often can’t really tell what it’s going to turn out like in the end. You just hope to get into a production where the other players are really excited and passionate about doing their best.

There are some Teflon actors out there. They end up in some real turkeys, but it doesn’t hurt their reputations, because they just prove again and again why they’re so good.

Trump and conservatism

From a fiscal perspective, Trump probably did more damage to the conservative role in government than all the liberal presidents put together. He accomplished what no democratic president could ever do; he ran the fiscal conservatives out government. Far from it, the presence of an opposition president often galvanized conservative leaders. People like Paul Ryan survived and even thrived during the Obama administration, but couldn’t survive Trump.

Trump pushed out most of the traditional conservatives (who had criticized him and that he resented and who he considered to have mixed loyalties) and made it so only personal loyalists could survive. That was possibly the worst disaster to ever befall the Republican party in the last hundred years.

People like Thomas Sowell have warned about a certain tipping point that gets reached with certain policies. I think it was Trump that actually pushed America over that tipping point. He was the unanticipated danger. The danger from within. He didn’t really care about conservative values or positions or leaders. Only whether they served him. And once he was in the center of the party there was no stopping him.

The movement that survived decades of the ups and downs of power, decadence, opposition, and humiliation was brought low in four years by their own dog. I don’t even know what the conservative party believes in any more, except opposition to Democrats, regardless of the issue. Trump promised to eliminate the national debt and instead increased it faster than any democratic president and pushed out fiscal conservatives like Paul Ryan. He put that branch of conservatism in a grave. He didn’t lower taxes and decrease spending. He didn’t increase taxes and increase spending. Instead we got the worst possible combination, the worst of both worlds. He decreased taxes and increased spending.

So in a way Trump made both sides happy by giving them what they wanted, but without the hard part of both positions that would at least have made the nice part somewhat workable. Which is actually the worst possible strategy. Getting everything you wanted isn’t a realistic solution. Trump, perhaps, was the punishment God ordained for the Republican party when it crossed this line of compromise. To be hounded out by its own dog. To see its goals spoiled and its battle for the culture sunk to its lowest low. Now there is nothing left to do but pay the price.

College for all?

The idea of college for all is tricky. For two reasons. First, a huge amount of money is already being wasted on college for people who take it for granted (especially those who aren’t paying for it) and don’t have any good reason to be there. They see it as an extension of high school, waste their time on useless majors with no job prospects, spend their time partying and playing the social game, and have no real practical plan for why they’re even there.

So there’s already a huge amount of wasted time and money and useless, undirected effort already being put into college. It’s already arguable that a lot of people who are there shouldn’t be there, or at least are largely wasting their time and money for a certificate of dubious provenance. So the people who already are going to college possibly don’t need it, and many aren’t really making use of it properly if they do need it. Some, of course, do. And some never finish. The college dropout rate is actually quite high. But even those who finish college often don’t know what to do with their degree. If this were a negligible fraction, then it wouldn’t be a matter of much concern. But compared to other educational institutions like trade schools and apprenticeships, college is a far more chancey investment.

The second problem is the cost. College is already ridiculously expensive and is getting more expensive every year, meanwhile the extra earning value of a college degree decreases every year. So every year a college degree (in the general sense, specific majors have exceptions) is worth less. And the college debt burden is already catastrophic, meaning that a huge amount of people paid tons of money for college degree that don’t actually have enough earning value to pay them back. So the people who already can afford college apparently don’t actually get enough benefit from it to pay back its cost. Meaning it was a failed investment they can’t pay off. So they’re asking for debt relief.

So, considering all that, our solution is to send everyone to college, for free. Which really means that everyone has to pay for it, even people who don’t go and who don’t send their kids. The government will make you pay so everyone can have the chance to do something that is already notorious for having too many people there who don’t need to be there and is such a bad investment that huge amounts of the former customers are complaining about it and demanding their money back.

Is it in any way possible that doing this, making college universal, might inadvertently exacerbate these problems? Among the stated benefits of college is the slightly (always decreasing) larger lifetime earning potential of a college graduate. But is that because college increases your earnings, or because the sort of people who go to college are, on average, already the sort of people who are more likely to earn more?

Considering that intelligence is one of the largest predictors of positive life outcomes (including income), and college attendees are not at all a random sample of the population but are virtually all in the upper half of that measure (as well as in the upper half of other social and demographic groups and classes), these are already the people we should expect to earn more. The sort of people who go to college on average may have greater lifetime earnings. But does that mean that making everyone go to college would distribute similar gains to everyone? Considering that college is already a problematic financial bargain for a growing number of the people? Considering you just saddled the entire country with the cost burden of college for everyone? And let’s not forget the time burden. College takes time that could be spent working and building specific job skills and experience.

Does distributing that cost of money and cost of time to everyone in the hope that it will confer the same universal benefits on everyone make sense? And since college is already so unaffordable and financially incapable of generating a return on investment, we also need to bail out all those failing degrees already being generated by subsidizing them and having the government (ie the citizens) pay off the debts that their degrees couldn’t.

The government’s money doesn’t come from nowhere. The money comes from the people. It gets invested in programs that you hope will serve an essential need or generate a return on investment in some way (in the way that the interstate road system generates returns through taxes on increased interstate commerce). In order for college for everyone to pay for itself, it has to be clear that the money invested in paying for so many extra people to get degrees will actually be returned in the form of greater possible earnings for those people, enough to repay, through taxes, the cost of paying for those degrees. But that’s not even a clear prospect on the private side. The private side is already asking for government bailouts. What makes anyone think that nationalizing the whole industry will make it run more efficiently?

Government programs tend to have catastrophic levels of waste and fraud. Every single family in California is going to need to pay $2500 just for the amount of unemployment fraud that occurred just in 2020. So, yeah, the ideas were good. They wanted to get the money to the people who needed it, and in the process the people of the state of California lost more money on just this one thing than the entire national budget of 173 of the world’s 250 coubtries.

Government tends to be very wasteful and inefficient, and government programs are typically extremely ponderous, slow to respond to change, difficult to adjust or modify, weak at responding to feedback, prone to corruption, and mired in beauracracy. They’re very inaccurate and fire across the whole country, hoping to hit the right targets. And if something is wrong with them, it takes them forever to respond and adapt or correct, if they can at all. They’re insulated from the usual feedback mechanisms that drive the private sector. They can’t just go out of business because they’re inefficient, insolvent, or fail to produce and any meaningful results. They have to be voted in and laws have to be passed to make even minor changes, because they’re the product of national fiat.

The postal service has been losing money hand over fist for years, but they don’t even have the power to adjust their pricing to try to make up for the cost of their service. If the treasury was a business, they would have stopped making pennies years ago. No sensible business would make a product worth negative value. But you can’t stop making pennies because there are too many institutional barriers and institutional incentives and political barriers that prevent the change. Those are just two of the most absolutely simple and uncomplicated examples. Once something is funded, it’s very hard to unfund it, for any reason.

That’s why it’s supposed to be hard to get things passed. Because government programs have this inherent weakness, and because if you spent money on everyone’s ideas and desires there would be enough total boondoggles among them to sink the whole ship, it needs to be fairly hard to get something invested in at a government level. It needs to be something that’s been so thorough tested, thoroughly argued over and contested by everyone, and has still made it through with such broad approval and proved bulletproof enough that the majority is convinced its a good investment and will vote for it.

Those are the sorts of things that you can create and invest in at a national governmental level and be fairly sure that it’s a good idea. Because if it isn’t, you might never be free of it. You might be throwing money at it thirty years from now, still waiting for it to produce the desired results, and be completely unable to amend or remove it without making a thousand different groups that have come to depend on it angry. The answer, no doubt, is that it just needs more funding.

Of course, once you face the fact that there’s a limited pool of funding, an unlimited amount needed to resolve the issues of all the various programs created, and there are a thousand different programs all competing for a slice of that finite pie (you can only increase absolute allotment to one by reducing the relative allotment of another), and you’ve got a real problem. So you don’t want any more things competing for a slice of that pie than those that have actually proved themselves to be worth it, net producers. Because if you have enough competing programs vying for that money, but a large enough amount of them are net losers, you’re going to slowly strangle and upend the whole mechanism.

As with most businesses, there are probably only a few departments that are really pulling their weight and generating a net positive. But those few can only carry the weight of so many other programs. And that’s why it’s important to hard to add new programs. It isn’t the case that you can’t add new programs. You just need a testing process (as well as a strong evaluative and auditing proccess for old legacy programs) that is really robust, so you minimize the amount of loss leaders you allow to accrue in the system.

That’s also why government should be hardest at the national level and easiest at the local level. The local level is more tailored, more informed, more specified, more subject to feedback mechanisms and oversight. It’s less vast and distant and cumbersome.

If the federal government is like a bomb you drop on whole nations, local government is like a surgical strike force. And if it does go wrong, the negative effects are more contained. A local experiment may sink the local economy, but at least it’s only the local economy, and the scale of it is likely to be far smaller and more manageable than that of a federal disaster. And by having higher systems around that weren’t exposed to those risks, there’s the chance of outside intervention by anaffected state or federal government to help the locality recover, after the problem has been clearly identified and dealt with (which is at least more likely, since other cities in the state will get to have a say in giving out those funds, and other states will.

Who has sexual advantage?

Men and women both have advantages and disadvantages in their respective approaches. It’s very easy to see the disadvantages of your approach when you’re dealing with the other, when you’re on the other side’s turf, their domains of special competence (whose very existence some people would no doubt deny today) and out of your element.

As much as we may deny it, most of us are in our back foot and can’t move easily into opposite sex dominated arenas, and often feel incompetent, isolated, and under judgment. And if women won’t admit to it, then I as a man will. I’ve definitely felt that way, felt quite intimidated and out of my element, frankly. And I’m not a man who generally feels confident around other men. But as much as I prefer the social company of women, when they’re in a group working together, in their element, I don’t feel welcome or like I fit in.

It’s a perfectly understandable feeling. Men’s and women’s work spheres used to be much more separate, and our competitive and dominance structures were separate. We competed with our sex, and we competed for the other sex, but we didn’t compete with the other sex very much. And it’s still something we haven’t quite figure out how to manage. We’re really playing separate games, with differing rules, and while it’s structurally very easy to lay them on top of one another and make them share the same space as if they were the same thing, there is a host of attendant interpersonal complexities that crop up.

Women seem to be a bit more flexible and able to adapt to different social structures and situations, and that seems to be reflected in their neurological structures. Men, however, often seem completely mystified by female-dominated structures, completely out of their depth, unsure of how to act, and become like frightened animals, aggressive and dangerous. They lack the skills to feel secure or to understand the territory they’ve entered. And they’re generally less adaptable. Or they may make a play at male bravado, the sort of displays they would use when competing for women, not with them, and confuse the dynamic in a whole other way.

The way men deal with the adaptation problem seems to be based around taking different strategies to their extremes, then watch the less successful ones perish or be selected out. High risk, high reward. You figure out what works and what doesn’t, but at a higher cost. And you also need someone to pick the winners and the losers, and that’s where the shift competition within a sex to competition for sex occurs. The price is high, but men have generally been willing to pay it.

For women, there is a natural prejudice on the part of nature to preserve their lives and maintain stability, in part by making them more flexible and adaptable within their range. And with men there is a prejudice toward instability and extremism to heighten the strength of the possible adaptations, at the cost of flexibility and stability, and with a less concern for preserving their lives. As a result, humanity can have its cake and eat it too, being both stable and unstable, slow and fast to adapt, conserving and risking, by investing them into different sexes.

Humans are more than just their sex, of course, and vary individually quite a bit. And at certain levels and in certain jobs and areas of life those differences emerge less. But in others they emerge quite a bit, particularly as people have the freedom to self select into the areas in which they differ. At the moment, society has swung from putting too much emphasis on sex differences to acknowledging them far too little, and seeking to eradicate rather than reinforce them. Neither extreme is particularly sensible, but while trying to push all men and all women to be just the same sort of men and women will particularly hurt those at the extremes of the curve, attempting to push men and women not to be men and women will hurt a the whole middle quite a bit and deprive many of a fundamental pillar of their

Biology has chosen to make men more chancey, more experimental, more committed to single approaches and investments, more willing to go all the way with something, more extremist. And as a result they gather up and when rate a disproportionate amount of all extreme outcomes, both positive and negative. Women make up the bulk of all college degrees these days, but men make up the larger portion at the highest extremes of very advanced degrees and advancement. They also make up the bulk of the lower end of education and society, with far more dropouts, learning and behavior problems, and of course make up 90% of the criminal population.

Even within shared professions, men and women don’t behave the same, particularly when you approach the extremes of those professions, the least common and most demanding positions. Because at that point you’re not dealing with average men or average women. It takes something of a crazy person to reach certain levels within highly competitive fields. There are far more male suicide bombers, as well as CEOs. And women, given the choice, have a smaller proportion of truly crazy, obsessive, single-minded extremists. Their bell curve has a very large middle with shorter tails. And men have a narrower middle with longer tails.

It’s not at all the case that no women are willing to sacrifice everything to reach the top. And it’s not the case that all men are. But there are more women than men who will attempt to maintain a more balanced and nuanced approach to their lives, and there are, at the extremes, more men who will go completely all in and invest everything into one strategy or field. And both sexes do this, largely, because of personal voluntary choice, because that’s who they are. And the more freedom they have, the more exaggerated the differences become, not the less.

Which is it really better to be? Well, if you only see value in being the top, the elite, then I guess it’s better to be like men. On the other hand, it’s not all tea and crumpets. Let’s not forget that long tail at the other end of men’s bell curve. That’s part of the price. Males live 20% shorter lives than females across the entirety of the animal kingdom, because nature has made all males more fundamentally chancey. So there is a price to be paid. And there is a price being paid for being at those extreme ends, even the “good” end.

It’s not clear that being an extremist is a great overall life strategy. It can be helpful for the species as a whole, but often burns out and makes insecure and unstable the life of that particular individual. Male suicide (as well as male victims of homicide) is catastrophically higher than women. And suicide, or some kind of involuntary suicide, is a very common end for extreme figures, at both extremes of life. Being an extremist, even a successful one, is a dangerous strategy, because life in general (and the needs and dimensions of human life) is pretty complex, not unidimensional.

Nature seems to think males in general are a little disposable, worth risking on the chance of a few good outcomes. It’s ok if a lot of them burn out and die or fail, so long as a few make it through. You don’t need near as many men to keep a species going as women. So you can invest in maxing out some traits, even juicing up some physical traits at a long term cost to survival rates, and it will be fine.

Women seem to be built (neurologically and physically) for the long game. Their brains are wired in a more flexible and distributed architecture. Their body arranges their hormone and muscle and fat distribution in ways that are more sustainable for the long term and less likely to cause damage and burnout. And as a result their overall mortality is much lower. So once you get to 85 there are roughly double the amount of women than there are men, despite nature having juiced the male pool by producing, on average, 105 boys for every 100 girls. In America, men start out outnumbering women, but by age 40 women have already caught up and passed the men. And every five years you go further down the line the proportions shift more and more, until men pretty much fall off a cliff in the 70s.

So there are some real costs to being extremists, and there are some real benefits to being more balanced. On the whole, I think we, as a species, can be thankful for those crazy extremists, since we’ve benefited a lot from their contributions, men and women, without feeling the need to all be extremists.

As I said, the way that men (or rather some extreme men, of which there are more of) are might seem better if all you value or care about is the few people who reach the extremes of a field, the celebrities and history makers, a group that includes people like Albert Einstein and Ghandi, but also, let’s not forget, also includes people like Hitler and Stalin and Ted Bundy.

Suicide, covid, and women

In response to the claim that the reason for the general increase in suicides (in Japan) during covid was due to women being stuck at home with abusive men.

I asked, do they have data in that, or is that speculation? To which I received a very frosty glare and the rejoinder that people who work with the abuse victims have said that covid made things a lot worse for some people. Case closed. Which generated the following response.

The reason I wanted to ask, “Do they have data on that, or is that speculation?” is actually a good one. First, it’s a very serous allegation. If you have a huge rise in deaths, and you can lay the blame clearly at someone’s feet, “It’s because of a plague of abusive men,” then that’s a pretty big accusation. It’s a big problem, it’s a big indictment that justifies great intensity of judgment against men and significant action.

And since men aren’t a small subgroup of a society, they’re half the population, that means charges are being brought against a very large group. So it’s a big charge, not one to made casually or to be minimized or exaggerated. It calls for precision. When anything gets that big or that serious, involving death and a large sector of society, it requires precision and care.

I have no doubt that it is indeed one hundred percent the case that for those women dealing with abuse, that Coivd probably made it much, much worse, intolerable, inescapable. But if the assertion is that that for a lot of women being stuck at home with abusive men is the problem, if we’re generalizing, and that its a major factor causal in the increase in suicides, I would like to know more. We can gather data to back.up this claim.

How many more suicides overall occurred to previous years, how many of them were in shared homes, and how many of those cases were indicative of abuse? How do they compare to male suicides in the same period? How big is this actual problem, if it’s not just some specific women that were in that situation but if it was, instead, a lot of women, a general causal factor in this result of a generalized spike in suicides? If it truly was a global explanation.

Tell me more. How serious were the lockdowns In Japan? Were suicides up for the whole year or just for a specific period? Did coivd affect the total number of people who committed suicide or just when people committed suicide? How closely do male and female suicide rates track when charted over the last two years, and do the same explanations apply to both sexes? These are the things I wonder about, that probably matter, but might not make great headlines.

Stories that involve abusive men make for very compelling anecdotes. They elicit anger and disgust and pity and outrage. But as much as those anecdotes stand out, and they are certainly true, they might only be part of the whole truth. There might be a larger story. Does that matter? It might be the difference between saying that there’s a big new problem, and the cause of the problem is abusive men, or that there’s a big new problem and some of the problem is some abusive men, or that there’s a big new problem and this specific part of the problem is these specific abusive men. Since we’re taking about a very large group of people, and a relatively small number of cases, we probably need more information. Abuse is terrible. Suicide is terrible. But however emotionally harrowing they may be, that doesn’t give anyone the right to explain global phenomena and make sweeping generalizations about very serious matters without having to provide convincing proof. Existential immediacy isn’t a substitute for analysis.

Even completely true and powerful anecdotes don’t on their own make for an effective and accurate general analysis (but they’re likely to generate an impression of one). The problem is that we don’t know which of these three possibilities we face without some good data. And giving the impression that we do know which it is because we’ve tagged some very viscerally compelling examples doesn’t really help, and can create its own problems.

So it’s not wrong to ask how much good data there is, if only to find out the real extent of the problem, because it would be very helpful and important to know if this is a good general explanation. It’s risky to assume that it is based on a limited set of anecdotes that might have been selected specifically for their moral/emotional qualities (that drive newsworthiness).

I don’t know much about this story, so all I can do is ask for more information. At a guess, my limited knowledge of Japan suggests fewer people in Japan are entering into relationships, and many young people live alone. And so that could be (I don’t know, I would need more data) something that the covid shutdown would exacerbate, and that women deprived of their social networks would suffer more than men. That’s one alternative possibility to men. Eating women into suicide.

Coivd also might affect many other factors, i(ncluding abuse cases) and exaggerate and make them suddenly much worse and much less managable. It might make generalized fear and anxiety worse (something women already suffer from disproportionately, whereas men suffer more from aggression-regulation disorders, which might instead manifest in more crime). There might be cultural factors and incentives.

I assume that even with female suicide up that male suicide still tops it and has increased also, since men were probably affected by covid too and men are much better at effecting lethal means. And those deaths and stories and their causes, one assumes, matter just as much. Or do they, when it comes to making a good story? Does anyone care if male suicides go up if there isn’t anyone to blame or accuse over it, or if we don’t really care about or feel sympathy for men?

The second reason it’s worth asking about for more information in a case like this is that some blanket explanations are just too easy to give. Or rather, some very good particular explanations are too easy to turn into large, general explanations that drown out other (just as important but less arresting) explanations. They have an inherently compelling structure, a hook. In this case: bad effect happens, women affected more, bad men responsible. It fits the cultural narrative and reinforces the cultural mythology. There’s little social cost to making it, and a lot of empowering social currency to it. It’s a popular explanation for problems (regardless of its status, very good or more marginal, as an explanation for any particular situation).

Combine those two causes for concern, and at the least, even if it this explanation is perfectly true, it’s not the sort of thing you should just toss out as a general explanation casually, or decide upon as established without some due process. You should provide more information than mere assertion to back it up.

The idea of asking for more information isn’t to suppress true stories. It’s to be careful that certain kinds of advantaged stories don’t overwhelm and suppress other equally true stories. And unfortunately this happens quite often. Within the science of fear, certain types of stories are given more and others given less weight. So the process is very important.

For example, let’s say that you have a problem, say, low black enrollment in a medical school, and someone asserts, “Well, it’s because Asian people are taking all the good spots.” That might be a very appealing explanation to some people. It might even be true. But it might not be the whole truth. It might have lower total explanatory power than its appeal indicates. And people who like that explanation might be very upset if anyone tries to question that explanation, that you’re denying the injustice being perpetrated on behalf of Asians against blacks.

Similarly, you might notice a problem like high rates of black incarceration. And within certain circles (for whom it aligns with their narrative), you could offer the explanation, “It’s because of the excessive criminality of the black race.” Now, that fact may actually be true as a factual reality. But the degree to which it is accepted readily as true, and as fully explanatory of the problem, needing no further interrogation, can depend very heavily on how it fits into and is amenable to your grand narrative.

How something contradicts your grand narrative (if it does) can also play a large role in whether you think it’s a completely unacceptable explanation to consider, one that needs nothing but interrogation and refutation. There’s a strong negative selection as well as a positive one. And both are a problem. One makes you too easily accept an explanation, one too easily makes you reject it.

In reality, if you want to deal with a problem, not merely reinforce narratives, especially in very charged and weighty cases, you need to be very cautious and specific and take the time to go through the dialogue and make Damone all the facta. It’s likely that all of the explanations I mentioned do have some explanatory power or causal weight in those situations. But the question is, how much? Can you clearly establish it? What else does? Is this factor a final cause or is this also itself an effect? How can we properly target the problem without inciting an indictment of a whole group? It’s very easy to look at a problem and just say “it’s the immigrants” or “it’s the jews” or “it’s rhe men”, and have it feel like it’s a good explanation if it fits your narrative. And it might even be right. You can’t rule that out. The important thing is just to take care and ask for details and not rule out or rule in any explanation in any greater proportion than it truly deserves, and to not establish it as a more total explanation than it really covers.

The question, “What portion of the total outcomes does this factor actually explain?” is one that’s worth asking, if it’s a very serious outcome and a very serious accusation that might require serious personal judgements and collective actions. Are there any other significant factors at play? Are there other more consistent and universal factors at work? Is the story overall just a much more complex and varied organism? Is it possible that this causal factor is just more agreeable and sensational and simple (in that it clearly makes you feel like the issue is explained because it identifies a clear villain and a clear victim), so that it makes us naturally favor it as an explanation? Does it make us feel like we’ve psychologically extracted the lesson that needed to be learned from the situation? It may in fact be the correct lesson. I’m not saying that such preferential selection of explanations is what’s happening, but that large, simple, and psychologically easy explanations carry this as a risk, and so when they have large potential consequences, they deserve to be given proper consideration.

And so it’s worth asking, what’s the data on that? Unfortunately, in today’s climate, simply asking such questions can be seen as a failure to support legitimate victims and siding with the enemy. If, in this case, the story really is that simple, then it should be known. And simply that the result shouldn’t be predetermined, that large scale indictments with large consequences should be made with caution, not casually, and that the process should be open to inquiry. That isn’t the same thing as being predetermined in favor of an alternative answer (and thus being on the side of the enemy). It’s a reluctance to repeat or take certain large assertions for granted and a desire for a dialogue that allows proper evaluation, so problems can be accurately assessed and addressed.

Other limits and dangers of explanations, and the need to inquire for more detail, can be seen in the case of white supremacy, when it’s advanced as a broad explanation for the inferior outcomes of the black population (as a whole, not in particular) compared to whites.

The obvious first question to ask is, what do you mean by white supremacy? And when you find out that the answer is not “deliberate and conscious actions of prejudice by whites against blacks to maintain unjust supremacy” but rather “the ability of whites, and in fact other white-adjacent races, to use things like math, science, social conformity (manners), family structure, and liberal government to produce artificial supremacy (because there is nothing inherent in certain government or family or social or even intellectual structures that is fundamentally better or more true, they’re all just arbitrary social constructions), then you have to pause.

We have to consider that we might not agree on our underlying assumptions and definitions of what white supremacy is, or what exactly it is that you want me to fight and confront. Because it sounds like you think the nuclear family, math, science, logic, manners, liberal government, and so on are white supremacy.

And in fact that is exactly what a lot of people do think. And so when they identify a problem and ask you to confront it, there’s a whole lot under the hood that they’re actually asking you to assent to, ideologically, and quite a project they’re asking you to embark on. You could be using the same terms as an explanation, terms that legitimately arouse great concern. But you might need to make sure that we’re actually talking about the same things.

This is the kind of thing, especially when people are asking you to get on board with a really big conclusion or course of action that affects a really large group of people, where a little inquiry is really helpful. If you just feel the desire to help black people, and feel a great moral weight to prove your support and prove that you truly care, you might be willing to go along with people’s assurances without further questioning. In fact, any interrogation might actually make people suspect you of being a racist, someone who is against black people, who is on the side of white supremacy.

And, upon further investigation into their real definitions of that term, for some people you might indeed be on the side of white supremacy (for example, if you hold that logic and manners and liberal government aren’t simply tools of white supremacy but are universally available and objectively valuable strategies that have nothing to do inherently with whiteness but have been useful for many people and cultures and could be useful for black people as well as whites, and would be so whether whites existed or not).

These theorists completely reject the idea of such “objective” value structures entirely. Your endorsement of them is white supremacy. But you might not even realize that you’re a white supremacist (on their terms) if you didn’t bother really checking into what they meant by it. And most people, because they obviously don’t want to be white supremacists, wouldn’t bother doing so (especially if such interrogation is likely to get you labeled as one).

Most people, in a show of good will and good moral instinct, want to help black people and will openly repudiate white supremacy without asking a lot of probing questions. Unfortunately, that agreeable and commendable positive instinct can be a vulnerability. And if the people who do go to the trouble of questioning things often fall into the categories of being somewhat disagreeable (and so less willing to easily go along with things and seeming less sympathetic and caring and willing to help), or if they’re people who are already prejudiced in favor of some other alternative position (for example, thinking that white supremacy isn’t bad), you will probably be very suspicious of that camp and want to avoid it.

And the small amount of people who might try to argue “Wait, white supremacy as they’re defining it isn’t bad, and I’m not sure that that’s really white supremacy. It’s the traditional conception of white supremacy that’s bad, this version isn’t remotely the same thing. ” Those people likely won’t be heard by either side, as it gets in the way of both of their projects. These days all the advantage is in favor of someone who primary goal is to build goodwill with one side or the other. People who genuinely want to find out the truth and develop solutions, regardless of how the chips fall, are the enemies of everyone.

This is just a followup, but I looked up the actual story in a Japanese newspaper, which had more raw data and fewer anecdotes and speculation. And although it makes a great headline that female suicides were up by a massive percentage, the statistical reality is that, that was only in October, and during the actual lockdown in the spring the rates were lower.

So for the overall year of covid, a very hard year, suicide rates were only up 2% overall. It’s significant because it’s the first annual increase in the suicide rate there in years. But this spring was actually a record low. A graph showing suicide rates for the last two years, as well as one listing multiple decades, showed male suicide rates always far above females, and the rates of both following the same general year to year and even month to month trends. Male female data tracked one another, showing no difference in trends over time, except that of male suicide being far more common.

Looking at this data set, it isn’t clear where the headline story about women is, unless you restrict your data set to just that one month of October and ignore everything else. Rates are down or mostly similar overall in the long term, men’s rates are much higher (but aren’t worth exploring), both sex’s rates track very closely (meaning the underlying pattern shows no sex specificity over any period larger than a month), the overall increase in suicide in 2020 isn’t that large (considering what the world has been through), and of that 2% increase there is no further causal data provided (what fraction of that 2% were women living with men, much less women living with men suffering abuse).

So how do we get to the conclusions behind the headline? How do we know that men, as a class, caused those suicides? Are we supposed to assume that any woman living with a man was likely to be suffering abuse, and a lot of those women who committed suicide were living with men? The Japanese press notes that the suicides took place largely among the young, and that they live alone at far higher rates than other groups (and more than any previous generation of young people). So being alone may by itself be a significant causal factor, and also means that cohabitation with men is less likely to be the common explanatory factor among the suicide victims. Surely some of them did live with men, but it’s less likely to be the thing that unites them and explains the outcomes.

Maybe the female suicide rate will continue to be elevated beyond just a single month. But at the moment that hasn’t been established. Male rates are up somewhat too. But as a population with far higher rates overall (but not one that makes a good story as a vulnerable population) maybe trends among both aren’t as comparable when it comes to single monthly variations, because men’s rates are subject to more variation overall. Male suicides shot up in early 2019 for a few months, and again in early 2020 (a difference comparable to that which occurred for women in October), but there’s no story in those sharp increases that only affected them.

So where in all that data do we get to the headline about the shocking increase in women’s suicides being caused by abusive men?

One headline I saw read “suicide rates for young women are increasing”. The BBC article introduced the crisis with the words “In one month, October, the female suicide rate in Japan leaped by more than 70%, compared with the same month in the previous year. What is going on? And why does the Covid pandemic appear to be hitting women so much worse than men?”

The article then immediately went on to spend the next twelve paragraphs (short ones, admittedly, dramatically structured) quoting the stories of two women suffering physical and sexual abuse from men, whose suffering has been exacerbated as result of coivd. This implies, if it does not establish, a logical causal link between the two. The question is raised, and this is the bulk of the explanation provided. Abusive men. Vulnerable women.

So that’s the meat of the story. That’s as far as most people will read. Down below all this, there are some quotes from researchers about how the increase in rates was very unusual, and also a bit about how there are increased suicides among women in the periods shortly after a celebrity commits suicide. And then the article ends. That’s it.

So there have been some very specific choices about how Western media chose to frame this news story and what direction to take with the article, based on the information available. Possibly, it has this particular structure because the writer knows that it will appeal most in this way as a dramatic human interest story. The information provided is accurate. But does it convey a false impression? Is the story all that they are selling it as? What is the real headline, and does it fit the data?

The entire article can be summed up like this I think: shocking sudden increase in female suicides, shocking stories about women being abused by men, researchers agree the increase is odd, celebrity imitation has an influence when it happens (only one actual case for this year is cited), draw your own conclusions. What would your takeaway from the story be? Women are a vulnerable class, and abusive men are making them kill themselves. That seems to be the implication.

I had noticed this sort of writing creeping into the BBC a while ago. A strong editorial slant. A desire not just to report the news but to dramatize it. To sell certain types of stories. Juicy I es. To make use of and reinforce popular narratives. So I sent them a letter of concern. Things seemed to be getting worse, and I realized I couldn’t trust them any more.

That’s when a news site stops becoming useful. When they’re just selling you a viewpoint and a story, instead of the news. So I dropped them from my feed about six months ago, and I was sad to do it. This article just reinforces my concerns. They’re making hay, profitable hay, from whatever they can. And it’s not that the stories they recorded of those girls weren’t true or important. They were. But they framed the story and drew wide-ranging conclusions in a way that reveals extreme editorial prejudice. They’re not really interested in answering the question they raised, or they would have included some of the data that the Japanese newspapers did include. Instead, they brought in their own anecdotes as a substitute. They sold a broad conclusion with a narrative, and sold the narrative with a powerful (and carefully selected, and quite true) personal story. It’s not that it isn’t tru, it’s that the general mechanisms for abstraction (which are based on taking a general sample of the most common data) have been subverted by excessive selection, skewing their operation.

Ravi and scandal

From a conversation about Ravi Zacharias and the revelations of his misdeeds with masseurs.

One note I should make first is that it’s very easy to have the right ideas and quite another thing to live by them. As much as I like to talk about the need for courage to face the truth and admit our mistakes, it’s much easier said, especially about someone else, than done. Most of us couldn’t bear for our failures to be seen or known. And most of us fear what it would cost us so much that we would be unlikely to do any better. So as much as I might have decided to back brave and lofty ideals, the reality is that I’m no better, and there but for the grace of God go I. In any case, the following discussion certainly reveals my own proclivity for pontificating.

X: “This Ravi stuff makes me sad. His wife denies it, but it seems like there is a lot of smoke there?”

Me: Yes, it does. I’m not one to be overly attached to the people behind a message. But this one is harder for me.

It brings to mind something George W Bush said, that there something about being at the top that’s just fundamentally corrosive to your soul. And men just have this extremely powerful built in biological weakness. And so corrosion sets in, and maybe you think “I can just keep it in this one little box in this one place and just let it take over this one part of me. I can give into it in this one way and it won’t matter. It won’t affect anything else.”

But, so often the problem is, it doesn’t stay in that box forever. Even if it isn’t in our own lifetime, it gets out. Sex is the easiest place in the world to let things go, but it’s such a deep and fundamental part of who we are and what we do that it’s actually one of the least likely places to keep the snakes inside it. It’s happened so many times, not just for Christian leaders, but for all men in positions of power and fame and success everywhere in every time, in every culture, so that it’s beyond a stereotype, it’s a universal. This is what happens. So much.

And as Christians we understand that everyone is a sinner and suffers the same temptations, but we hope for more. We hope that it will make a difference, that people will really strive to live up the position they’ve been given. But it’s very hard to be a leader before the world in any capacity, even in serving God, and not suffer the same fate as all other kinds of leaders before the world, in secular art, politics, music sport, business, and so on. Power removes limits on behavior, and it increases your ability to avoid scrutiny, and it’s always so tempting to think you could do or want more.

That’s why Bush said he actually valued his critics. Because for all that they were a thorn in his side and often accused him unjustly, he said they helped keep him honest too, because you truly don’t know who you could become if given the opportunity, and it made him work harder to be above reproach.

Still, it’s a great disappointment, all this. It really undermines the value of the message, because even if he thought it was all about the truth and the goodness of the message, not about him, which it is, it’s still the case that what many people tend to connect to is the person, not the philosophy. The stories matter so much to people. And these kinds of betrayals tend to rewrite the story.

And for the sort of people for whom the embodiment of the story really matters, it makes the message sound like lies, regardless of its internal soundness. I think that’s also partly why the right lost so many women in the last couple elections. The person matters more to many women. They can’t set that aside. It’s a reliable marker for them. So it doesn’t matter what the arguments were or how good they seemed, you just couldn’t get someone like my mom to vote for Trump. He was too leaky a vessel to carry the message, for her. And she might have a point.

People don’t have time to follow all arguments to their ultimate ends and dig into all the facts and all the disciplines. There’s just too much. So people look for a proxy to give them an idea of the integrity of an idea. And the easiest way to represent an idea to a person is with another person, to incarnate it. That works. But it has weaknesses. You can manipulate people with a false appearance of goodness that doesn’t really reflect the underlying ideas.

And you can genuinely try to represent good ideas but still fail as a human and as a representative, and people will impute that failure to what you were representing. People respond to people more than to ideas, I think. Or to ideas represented in lives. That’s why the ultimate embodiment of God isn’t an essay or a theological or legal document, however brilliant. It’s a person, and in fact a book telling about lots of persons, and their lives. I wish Ravi had been alive to face all this, at least. That would have helped.

I think part of the problem is that right now technology has gifted us all with immense power in this arena. Porn, birth control, std treatments, government aid, and general liberalization of sex, falling behavioral costs, mean that we all have access to opportunities that no previous generation had in this area. So we’re all facing opportunities and wield power that are equal to kings. We can have whatever we want for the asking.

That’s a really, really hard thing for humans to resist. And right now the argument of the world is: you can’t resist it, and why should you? We’re all kings now, take what you want. There’s a very strong argument being made that these things can’t be resisted, and that therefore it’s possibly even wrong to resist them. And it’s very annoying if anyone tries to resist, or tells us that we should and tries to abridge our power and freedom, our sovereignty. And it’s even worse if that person demands it and then doesn’t follow their own demands and standards.

If those preachy people couldn’t resist, and really wanted to, and they said that you should, then maybe they were wrong all along. Maybe it’s not possible and the world is right. Power and desire of this kind can’t be denied, and so they shouldn’t, because at least then we wouldn’t be hypocrites.

Consistency, practicality, and livability are often valued more than lofty but impractical and utopian ideals. Why chase an impossible and absurd standard? It’s not so different from the main argument against socialism. Yes, it would be nice, but you would have to change people and the whole world in such a drastic and tyrannical way that it’s really just empty dreaming and antihuman oppression. I think that is the counter argument being made against the regulation of sexuality.

At the very least, you hope that someone in that position gets caught during their lifetime so they can face it, prove themselves one way or another, and if guilty, admit it and repent. Ideally without being forced into it and committing lots of lies and abuses of power to delay the day of reckoning. There’s a real value in losing. It lets you learn. Because at least it lets you deal with the breach and reaffirm your position, despite your failings, by proving your commitment to the ideal by being willing to admit it and face the truth. By going yourself under the sword you set up.

Sometimes it’s better to lose honorably than to win or escape in dishonor. It may seem better for you personally to escape, but it harms your cause. Your cause would be better honored by seeing you sacrifice some of your own power and glamor for it willingly, than by seeing it preserved by lies and coercion.

It sounds like Ravi maybe made that mistake and argued with some people that they shouldn’t talk because it would harm the cause. And to a degree he was right. But the harm had already been done by him. Telling the truth would just reveal the harm he had done. But until you reveal the harm, it can’t be healed. And he had maybe come to believe too much in himself, that the integrity of the cause and his work was dependent on his own protection and preservation, including and up to hiding the truth. And that’s where self-deceit sets in.

The cause would have been honored more by an honest loss, it would have shown his commitment to the idea that it wasn’t him but the message that was good. And keeping up the lie forces other people to pay the price you weren’t willing to. The women involved, your family, your organization, the people who listened to you and found out after the fact. What will it force them to do and become? How will that serve God?

Ok, final thoughts, I promise. We’re all so focused these days on maintaining the case at any cost to protect the efforts of the team. And yes, because there is a lot at stake, and there are real dangers to confront and work to be done. But I think we lack faith in our own convictions when we’re willing to make so many conpromises for the team effort. As if all that’s standing between good and evil is our ability to brazen it out and win.

But our confidence isn’t supposed to be in those things, in those tactics, in the victories of tribes or kingdoms. Christ didn’t conquer Rome and free his people by getting voted Emperor. He became a criminal and was executed by the state. And as a result Christianity conquered Rome and his people were freed. The truth has to be enough for us, or we won’t have even that. And that’s a power worth sacrificing our own reputations for, our own powers and glamor and respectability, if need be. Because that’s not where our power or righteousness comes from.

So if we really believe, we should put our money where our mouth is and not fear failing and losing and being defeated and humiliated (including when we deserve it), so long as it is for the sake of the gospel. If we don’t, then our faith is still in the world, and in our own sin. We think God’s power is dependent on our ability to hide our sin and preserve our power and prestige. And that’s wrong.

Even in politics, maybe part of our mistake right now is thinking that true righteousness can be advanced effectively by worldly means (I think both parties make this mistake). But maybe there’s a real value in being defeated, because it forces us to question that belief and return to the true source and trust in that instead and do better in the future because we’ve seen our own frailty and inadequacy be revealed by that defeat. I think we’re all forgetting the power of admitting that. I just wish Ravi had had the chance to take that opportunity.

X: “Well said.”

False confidence

True confidence isn’t found by believing in yourself. That’s just ignorance, aggression, bluster, and self-deceit. You don’t steady yourself by grasping yourself tighter and tighter.

Real confidence comes from fixing your eye on something bigger than yourself, outside of yourself, and grabbing hold of that. If you’ve grabbed something big enough and solid enough, it will steady you and give you all the real courage and confidence you need.

You won’t find confidence by pretending at qualities you don’t possess. But you might develop it by pursuing something that demands it from you.

Who is the ideal modern feminist?

I heard a very curious argument from a transgender person today that is hard to respond to. He (or she, possibly, I’m going to assume he was intending to present as a she) was arguing that the whole point of feminism (as a movement) was to free the meaning of being a woman from the constraints of both biological capacity and sociological role.

Being a woman doesn’t mean being defined by having certain physical capacities and traits, like motherhood and breastfeeding, or a certain body composition or even DNA. Nor does it mean being defined by that sociological role, as mother and nurturer. That was the goal of feminism, he/she argued, to free women from those roles and constraints.

And that is why the future of feminism belongs to the transgender and queer community, he argued, because that’s its final fulfillment and maximal expression of freedom. That is the point where feminism reaches its apex, where being a woman is no longer defined by either biological capacities or social roles. So a transgender woman is essentially the ultimate feminist woman, because she is completely freed from those stereotypes and restrictions. They inhabit the identity purely, without any tyrannical or stereotypical or gender-biased restrictive connection to traditional physical or social roles.

I suppose in theory, then, the ultimate expression of feminism would be an extremely manly biological man acting in the most stereotypically male way possible, but identifying as a woman. That would be the woman least defined by and conforming to biological and social stereotypes. So the ideal woman would be Chuck Norris, or possibly Ron Swanson or Randy Savage.

One might wonder, then, exactly what being a woman means, if the end goal of feminism is freedom from the limitations of any traditional or even biological identity. If you remove innate biological and socially negotiated markers of identity, what markers and definitions are left? Merely self-identification? But what is it, then, that you’re identifying with, if not with a biological or sociological reality? And is it possible that, in a sense, women have essentially lost what it means to be a woman to men, by defining it so loosely? Have women, in their enthusiasm to explore the boundaries beyond femininity, given so much of it away that they’ve actually lost claim to it?

As transgender women start knocking down women’s sports records and moving into other protected women’s spaces and demanding equal access, as trans people win “woman of the year” and become feminist icons, as the moral authority of intersectionalism stacks up, essentially making black transgender women the ultimate locus of value and authority (with the least amount of privilege, and most deserving of power transfer), we can see that the balance of power around female identity is, indeed, moving into a new evolution.

Which raises some primal feminist fears. Who would want to be a woman, under such circumstances? What is the advantage of being a woman? Men, apparently, are just as good or even better at everything women can do, even at being women. They’re most authentic women, more heroic, less heteronormative, less chained to past stereotypes. And thanks to a recent presidential edict, ciswomen no longer have the right to maintain any protected spaces or territory that could exclude men seeking to inhabit that identity and occupy those spaces. By making gender terms essentially equivalent and purely self-referential, a matter of self-identification, not actual difference or essential inheritance, anyone who identifies as a woman can claim that identity. And thanks to the pushback against traditional gender definitions as immoral, exclusive, and prejudiced, arguably the people least able to claim female or specifically feminist identity are those who under the previous definition were “born female”.

Which brings us back to the difficult question. What is a woman? What does it mean, if it doesn’t mean something to do with biological capacities or social roles? Can women lose what it means to be a woman to men who want to inhabit that identity? How did men (men under the old definition) or trans women (women under the new definition) accomplish this? And did they do so according to women’s own rules and in keeping with their own demands? Did they win the game fair and square according to the defined rules and terms?

One of the problems with removing or blurring the borders of any concept is that that concept becomes more and more porous and vague and is less and less useful as a definition. It becomes less and less graspable for any meaningful purpose.

For example, if we have a simple term like “swan,” but we remove from our definition the idea that it necessarily designates a large creature that has webbed feet, uses feathers to fly, and lays eggs, what are we left with? What is a swan? How would you recognize one? As much as stereotypical category behavior or reviled and inauthentic for women, maybe it’s good for creatures like swans. Maybe we could identify a swan by swanlike behavior. But how do we know what swanlike behavior is if the behavior is also how we identify swans? That’s like using a ruler to measure itself.

What other options are there for confirming if an object is a swan? Feeling like a swan? What does that mean? How do we know rocks or tadpoles don’t feel like swans? How would they know that they feel like swans, if there isn’t some stable category of biologically stable or “legit” swans to inquire of to find out what being a swan means and feels like? If I bring you an animal and say that it’s a swan, do you have a basis other than self-reporting to confirm or disconfirm it? If you happen to be particularly set against the idea about using webbed feet, feathers, and eggs as ways to distinguish swans, that adds an extra level of complexity to our discussion. If you’re particularly set against using the traditional swan definitions, there are a whole lot of swans it’s going to be very hard for me to prove to you are swans. In fact our whole ability to sort and make use of the category will be in danger. And maybe that’s fine. Is there anything truly at stake in our ability to tell swans from not-swans?

If it’s not a big deal whether or not you can tell the difference between something being part of a category or not part of a category, then losing that category as an effective concept (the sort of concept that let’s you easily figure out which objects belong to that class and which don’t), isn’t a big deal. On the other hand, if, say, enormously complex and high stakes matters depend on your ability to tell swans from not-swans, if the future of your society might depend on that ability, then it wouldn’t be such a small thing.

I guess the question is, how important and how essential is the concept “woman”? How loosely or how tightly should be grip it? How useful and important is it to human life and identity, to history and society and relationships and social structures? How clear or how vague are the borders between it and other concepts? What do you gain or lose functionally by making those delineations clearer or more open to interpretation?

I suppose this means taking time to revisit the concept of “woman” and examine the work it is (or was) doing. The benefits and freedoms and costs and responsibilities it conveys. Is it a nothing term, something vague and self-defined? How much can it be used to advocate for certain duties, virtues, benefits, or territories if it doesn’t have a clearly understood character? All designations of territory come with benefits and limitations. By codifying that a certain piece of land is my property, my home, I gain a certain amount of power and rights within it. It becomes something I can control and express myself in. But it also limits me. It means that my territory extends this far and then has an end. My territory doesn’t extend into the next property over. By staking a definite claim to something that my territory is, I’ve also defined and lost what it isn’t. If I want to perpetually keep my options open and remove all possible limits on what my territory is, I can only achieve that by never actually saying what it is.

The practical upshot of all this is that when you define your terms on a certain basis, then that also defines what you can and can’t do with them and within them. Meaning affects utility. Meaning affects efficacy. As the terms of feminism and what it means to be a woman are currently set, unless some special new premises are introduced and agreed upon, some new conditions and rules, I cannot see any internal means of refuting this man’s (woman’s) argument, which is essentially that true feminism (and possibly true femininity as a category), with all its attendent meanings and territory, belongs to the queer and transgender community now, not the ciswomen.

I cannot see a way to refute this claim from within modern feminism, as it currently stands. And attempts to do so basically end up with you getting excoriated and labeled a TERF and a transphobe false feminist. It might be possible to look for ideological solutions outside of current feminist theory, but then you would get kicked out of being a feminist. And that would be quite a loss of status and community, a great abridgement of social currency. So I don’t think there’s any good option for going back. Back, for example, to something more like first wave feminism. We’re so far at this point from first wave feminism that being one is basically about as progressive as being a caveman. It’s patriarchy-adjacent.

What the patriarchy actually is, however, is no longer entirely clear to me, if the definitions of male and female are so arbitrary and porous. Perhaps there is only one generic sort of human creature, and you can identify freely as either, and to identify as male is simply to identify as the aspect of humanity that is violent and oppressive, whereas to identify as a woman is to identify as being good and oppressed. I don’t think you could make it more specific than that. The moment you start arguing for either identity as possessing certain specific traits you exclude from that identity those who do not possess them, or exclude those traits from your chosen identity.

That’s why you can’t say things like: women are humans who give birth or breastfeed, or men are the ones with penises. The moment you sieze any such territory, you exclude someone that has to be included. So you give up the territory. Men can get pregnant, women have penises, and men can breastfeed (or, more correctly, chestfeed). The primary features of sexual physiology and behavior become inadmissible elements of sexual identity. By refusing limits to your territory you essentially become unable to point to anything actually inside it. Being inclusive means you need to set your identity markers at the absolute minimum, lest your definitions become restrictive and oppressive and sexist.

One assumes that one of the goals of feminism is to avoid sexism at all costs. Sexism at the moment seems to mean the assigning of any traits to a group (or excluding any) other than those that are essential and acceptable under current gender theory. The holy text of femininity must not be added to or subtracted from. So what is still acceptable to be included in that text? What is femininity? The only acceptable defining traits I can actually identify meet those criteria are self-identification (I am a woman) and positioning in the moral oppression matrix (and I am good and oppressed by evil).

So you can only gain or lose female identity by identification, and you can gain or lose female identity by your position in the oppression matrix. So a transgender female outranks a cisgender female in authentic femininity, and a cisgender female who embraces elements of the patriarchal power structure can lose or betray their authentic feminine identity, or display a corrupt one, and be disbarred from feminism (just as those who don’t follow certain ideological elements of black or gay identity aren’t really black or gay, because that identity is fundamentally political, a matter of orientation to a moral power structure; you end up white-adjacent).

Thus the President can argue that if you didn’t vote for him, you’re not black. Because black identity means being opposed to the white power structure. By which token our apparently white president is actually himself black, or black-adjacent, because he self-identifies as being on the side of that power structure. Those are the working premises that allow a negative argument against someone’s black identity, in defiance of their innate biological inheritances, to be seriously advanced.

Logically then, this line of thinking must be equally valid (and I think is being advanced tacitly) when phrased as a positive argument. If voting Republican is identical to white belonging and voting Democrat is identical to black belonging, and voting the wrong way can remove you from those identities, then what you’re really arguing is that black identity essentially is democratic identity. It’s not about biological race, per se; race is a power structure. Race is a team, not an inheritance. It is defined by opposition to an opposing team and competing power structure. And, to bring it back to feminism, what does it mean to be a woman? It means to not be a man. To be on the side of women; it means being a feminist.

It’s a bit like a very amusing quote I once heard Dame Judy Densch speak. “What is a cat? A cat is not a dog.” It’s a wonderfully coy and confoundingly amusing statement, and she delivers the line with commendable seriousness. In point of fact, it’s not clear what a cat is, or what a woman is, or what a black person is. But a cat isn’t a dog, and a woman isn’t a man, and a black person isn’t white. And that all comes down to those two factors, self-identification, and position in the moral power matrix.

So, really, the best feminists can be transgender, and the worst are likely to be cisgender traditionalists who are still wrapped up in and tied to oppressive and non-inclusive and sheep-like patriarchal notions of biological or sociological inheritance or territory. The best representatives of blackness can be anti-racist white folks, and the worst are definitely black Republicans, the race traitors (although I’m not sure that’s a fair term, since you couldn’t assume blackness based merely on their skin).

So white people like Robin D’Angelo get to win at being black, they become the heroes of blackness, of black political identity and opposition to white supremacy (the white power structure, because black political identity is blackness). And people like Caitlyn Jenner win at being women; they become the heroes of feminism. Just being a “traditional” woman is to be a member of a herd (or horde), a stamped clone who has blindly accepted an identity based on false and assumed premises.

Since gender is a social construction, a power dynamic, not something tied to innate physical or sociological identity, but transgender identity is innate (a very well-defended position), then the only “real” women are the transgender women, as Douglas Murray has pointed out.

In this sense, transgender identity is in direct conflict and competition with cisgender claims to female sexual identity. And one could argue that political claims of racial identity are in direct conflict and competition with physical or genetic claims upon racial identity.

There are similar tangled webs when it comes to sexual behavior. Heterosexual behaviors, traditional and typical male and female sexual behaviors, are socially constructed and arbitrary and should and can be criticized and changed. Gender roles are constructed, not innate, and therefore could be constructed and performed differently. People can be criticized and blamed for them. Men in particular can be blamed and chastised for their toxic, macho, and heteronormative behaviors.

But homosexual sexual behavior is innate, and therefore is unquestionable and not subject to choice, change, or criticism. So, really the only people whose behavior is perfectly natural and innate, the only real sexual traditionalists, are homosexuals. And everyone else is someone who has made a choice and embraced an arbitrary, socially constructed, morally questionable, malleable, and deviant sexual identity. So you can be born gay or born a transgender member of a sex, possessing those qualities innately, unquestionably, and unchangeably. And those are the only people who actually hold those qualities innately.

This raises an odd conundrum for those who like to live on the edge of acceptable behavior and push the boundaries. Since (traditional) male and female identity and male and female sexual behavior are constructed, not biologically (or otherwise) determined and therefore subject to criticism, choice, and change, one could also argue that they are the only real frontier of creativity and rebellion and self-definition. So if you really wanted to be a deviant, being a cis-hetero man or woman is really your best bet.

These are just some of the curious features of modern identity theory. If you can live with them, if they don’t seem like a big deal, then they’re not a problem. But these are some of the logical conclusions one can draw from the foundational premises, and therefore some people will draw them.

We shouldn’t be surprised that we have arrived at this point where such arguments are, in fact, being made. In a way these outcomes are perfectly sensible and perhaps even necessary, as the ideas worked themselves out and bore fruit. Maybe it’s just taken this long for people to let go of the old ways and assumptions and habits and really take their own ideas seriously. I don’t think there is anything in these conclusions that wasn’t already contained in the premises, as the tree is contained in the seed but merely needs time to grow into full expression.

And so, as I said, I have to concede, under these terms, that the man (or woman if that’s how he or she identifies) making these arguments about the future of feminism was perfectly correct, so far as it goes. Whether that is a palatable result for all parties is a matter for further discussion. Some parties, the aforementioned TERFs, are already struggling with these results and seem uncertain how to proceed without provoking negative social and moral labeling, without appearing regressive, and without betraying their identity positions and feminist credentials (as well as some of their most powerful and persuasive arguments).

It all goes to show how challenging and complex a thing it is to lay claim to and define an identity. How do you hang on to the ground you want to claim without giving up claim on some of the ground beyond it? How do you set limits to keep in your territory without also limiting yourself by keeping some things outside it? It’s not an easy problem it solve.

One might also wonder what the practical function of identity concepts are at all, if all they boil down to is identification and opposition, other than to delineate and provoke and prolong tribal conflicts. Wouldn’t it in everyone’s interest to identify as women, if such a thing were possible? Wouldn’t it even be desirable and morally commendable? But why have differing identities at all, if they don’t describe any fixed or significant biological or sociological or conceptual boundaries?

If there is no underlying objective basis for identities, why prolong or promote them, except to provoke conflict? Unless, I suppose, you believes that conflict and opposition is all there is, and therefore in some sense they are desirable. Or at least inevitable. And if you’re going to have a hero identity, then you need villain identities. Maybe competition and opposition is the only sure means to identity and to power and success. A cat is not a dog. And it’s your duty to establish your cat identity by challenging the dog identity power structures whenever you have the opportunity.

I think the final lesson to be learned from all this is that all systems have unintended, unanticipated, and unexplored consequences. Ideas define and delineate certain conceptual territories and grant you certain powers, rights, and efficacy within them, and they also come with inevitable costs, limitations, and consequences. And when you make fundamental changes to deeply significant and pervasive concepts, you will also radically alter the territory and standing of people covered by it. All such changes are bought at a price. And with any ideological exchange, you need to understand what it is exactly you are purchasing, if you wish to remain satisfied with the bargain.

On a side note, I saw this video later, on the subject of the impact of transgender athletes on girls’ sports. Something to think about. Issues that will have to be talked about and thought through some time. It isn’t possible to have identity categories (that actually have any significant meaning) without some resulting territory disputes.

https://youtu.be/navQkMFvmDc

The instinct against liberalism

There is an argument to be made that liberalism was an experimental strategy, one that had never been attempted on a large scale before and so had no real proven track record, and other forms of social organization had and have a better one across time and differing conditions.

Liberalism ended up going pretty well and changing a lot of conditions and making a lot of things better for a lot of people. But of course it has its own endemic problems and side effects and cost and pathology. We’ve now reached the point in history where the pathology of liberalism has become more keenly felt (and understood and articulated). Partly this is bound to happen any time a system becomes the dominant or default or assumed manner of being. And now, after the initial rush to conquer the world with it, we’re left, in a sense, to just live with it and figure out where we’re going. And suddenly we start noticing that things aren’t perfect. And we become more and more aware of the disappointments and dissatisfaction that still remain in our hearts.

We’ve had some time now to think over the flaws that still attend our lives under liberalism, or maybe even because of it. We’ve seen the ways in which it can go wrong, the negative outcomes, and have the sense that it hasn’t given us everything we hoped and were promised, a failure to deliver, or perhaps we’ve come to feel that the costs are too high. And when you get that kind of tension in a system, people want to break out and start trying new adaptations to life to see if they might be more optimized to some internal urge of where they think the human race needs to go.

Maybe liberalism has made us weak and decadent, or maybe it has caused too many washouts to pile up at the lower end of the system, or maybe the psychic burden of everyone having absolute freedom to define the countours and meanings of their existence is just proving to be too much (considering people already have a lot burdening them).

Maybe liberalism doesn’t even work without some grounding, grand, unifying narrative, and once that narrative goes down or fractures into many competing and contradicting narratives the liberal system can’t function any more. Maybe the internal tension and variance goes beyond the tolerances of the system. Maybe people sense this and it makes them instinctively try to break the system, regardless of how necessary it is for everything they enjoy. We shake under the pressure of enforced unity in contentious diversity and desire a great reorganization and consolidation, or maybe even a great scattering (if anarchists could have their way).

There’s a natural instinct in humans, that once certain problems inherent to a system pile up sufficiently (even intangible problems, like depression and anxiety), they try to flip the board and reset all positions to zero. That’s the pattern you see in the book “The Great Equalizer”. Basically, that stability always produces inequality, which gradually increases inherent tensions in the system, and only a catastrophic resetting of the conditions of society resets it.

We have a great and powerful society, enormous and ridiculously complex. But it comes with massive costs, many of them tangible, and many of them intangible psychic costs. And since there doesn’t seem to be any way to prevent those costs from accumulating, gradually some people just get frustrated and want to reset the whole game.

Maybe they imagine the cost of the reset will be worth it; maybe they think those costs won’t really be that great and they’ll get to keep what they have in the reset (that’s another lesson from The Great Equalizer; great levelings are always negative, not positive; the only way that tensions get resolved is that everyone gets taken down to the same base level; it’s never been the case that things got eucatastrophically better for everyone, progress only comes positively in stable games, and always unequally).

I think a lot of people aren’t really thinking the matter through that deeply. They’re following their inherent moral and social instincts. And maybe in a way that’s an unavoidable and justifiable part of how human beings and societies are meant to work; as a dynamic and living and adapting and competing entity, not as some static, mineral edifice. Maybe our desire to crystallize the state of humanity into one form and one path is inherently frustrating and reprehensible to the kind of creatures we are. Maybe it is true, as someone once said, that if ever mankind could devise a perfect system, that there would always be those who felt the need, even the moral necessity, to break it, just to make something happen.

So maybe the instinct to destroy liberalism is inevitable. Maybe the sense of its limitations and injustices and inadequacies has just grown too great. But maybe, just maybe, those instincts are out of whack because people are ignorant about what the world really is or could be like, because they’re too sheltered behind our technological wall and the comfort and ease the system provides. And maybe they’re out of whack because our information gathering and evaluation systems were designed to work based on a narrow and proximate, intimate data set (like your home and immediate community), and we’ve reduced our involvement in those arenas and extended our data collection out to a massive (but shallow and non-intimate) extent through technology.

Maybe those moral and social instincts were never designed to receive their data from a constant stream of indirect, non-personal sources gleaned from a set of four hundred million people. Maybe the calibration of our moral emotions is no longer in alignment with reality simply because they operate best (not only, but best) at a certain specified level of intimacy, detailed and personal knowledge, personal efficacy, environmental limitation, and regulation. Maybe we make poor gods. Maybe seeing all, the gleaned moments of millions, isn’t something we are generally well adapted to do (without easily screwing it up and misinterpreting the data). Maybe it’s a psychic burden of scale we aren’t well adapted to carry and it forces us into a continuous state of lymbic arousal.

Maybe being able to do all, maybe wielding immense power over the lives of millions, is also not a burden we are well adapted to carry without a grave tendency toward error and miscalibration and misguided action. Maybe being in a state of constant hyper arousal and selective data immersion (because it is selective, most daily life data in our lives is fairly banal) makes wielding immense and nearly infinite power over others a very dangerous prospect.

Maybe that is why the form of the bottom up government of the United States was so successful, because it made it easiest to do things at the lowest and most local and specified and intimate levels and hardest and most complicated to do things at the largest and most sweeping levels. Maximum power was assigned to the smallest social units, individuals and families, and each step up from that point, each increase in distance, resulted in a drop in effective power and greater technical barriers to effective action.

At the highest level, the national level, the amount of checks on power, the number of contradicting stakeholders, the amount of hoops that must be jumped through, and the vulnerability of any action to being derailed or having its wings clipped, increases exponentially. It becomes extremely hard to wield power at that level, excepting global mandate (which is very unlikely). And maybe that’s a brilliant move. And maybe we’ve circumvented many of the protections put in place to help us avoid dangerous outcomes through our technology.

Maybe for all these reasons and more, that’s why the liberal order is in more danger than it has been in decades.

My application to the DEI board

As DEI programs become more commonplace across the country, it is very easy for such processes to become mired in political concerns and personal and social conflicts. It is easy for them to become reactive, focused on deflecting complaints and liability, rather than on the production of excellence in education. I believe that part of how we ensure that is to maintain an approach that balances the interests of parents, students, and faculty, and the outcomes that matter most for those stakeholders. And I believe that I am someone who is able to represent the interests of the parents and students, while also being able to listen to the concerns of the staff and community.

I have two girls in a DXX elementary school, I am a Calisota native, I live very close to our school, and I’m also a business owner who has employed dozens of students and graduates of the D20 system. I grew up in a small town in rural Calisota, which my family immigrated to from the Netherlands around 1895. As peasant farmers, life was very, very hard, and my own grandfather was an orphan who never attended high school. Among his children, however, one earned an M.D. and another earned her PhD. The transformation that occured in the lives of my family due to their education is blindingly obvious and very close to my heart. I myself have undergraduate degrees in English and Philosophy from XYZ and did my Masters in Philosophy at ABC.
With a DEI program, I have four strong values I think would contribute to making it a success. First, a focus on real outcomes and evidence-based practices. There is no utility in implementing programs that do not actually lead to better outcomes for the staff or student body. It is very easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be seen to be doing something, which is really about appearances and status, rather than facing the real challenges and needs that need to be addressed and the best ways to actually address them. It is also easy to fall into the trap of unitary or naive value biases, rather than maintaining an approach that seeks to balance stakeholder interests, desired outcomes, and administrative limitations. Any system can always be improved, especially with increased investment. But the costs as you approach optimization in your outcomes increases exponentially at each level, raising hard questions about what tradeoffs must be made to maintain the functionality of the overall system, as well as the limitations of the system itself. Those questions must be faced with courage, honesty, and concern.

My second value is, minimal disruption of student and staff processes. The correct amount of force to use (legislative, disciplinary, interpersonal, etc) in any situation is the minimum necessary amount. This approach helps us address problems at the most detailed and focused level possible without disrupting what is working in the overall structure, and helps to prevent over-generalization and abstraction from preventing meaningful engagement with the real problems (and causing distress to the involved parties). Solutions must be scaled appropriately to problems, or they risk becoming problems themselves. You don’t do surgery with a cannon, and you don’t plow fields with a fork.

Third, I believe it is in the interest of everyone in the district and in the community to foster an approach that promotes unity and avoids over-generalization. An approach to stakeholders that reduces them to mere caricatures helps no one. An approach that reduces academic freedoms and freedom of speech helps no one. An approach that pushes everyone into narrow boxes from which to oppose one another helps no one. An approach that allows no discussion or diversity of thought helps no one. I believe, in keeping with the words of MLK, that we are more than the categories we divide ourselves into. And the greatest differences often exist, not between groups, but within them. As such, the best level of analysis for any person (or situation) is that of the individual. And as individuals we are all united in our desire to see the schools and our students flourish.

Fourth and finally, I believe deeply in openness to criticism of all kinds and the value of honesty. As a scholar in the field of philosophy, nothing was outside our field of debate, and your willingness to learn was defined by your willingness to openly discuss and debate and test your ideas in an open collaborative forum. Did we always come to an agreement? Rarely. Did we learn from one another and learn how to compromise and balance our arguments and concerns against one another? Yes. Did we learn to respect one another, even when we disagreed, through the process of this free and open discussion? Yes. And I believe that is a skill that all meaningful policy discussions require. Learning how to argue productively is more valuable a skill than having all the answers.

What is respect?

I think there is a question of what it means to respect someone, or even to respect a whole people. Does it mean indulging them, protecting them? Defending or coddling them, making them comfortable, patronizing them? How should we view someone we respect? As a friend, as a child, as a pet, as a project?

Or does respecting someone mean fearing them, being willing to compete with them, not crossing them? Does it mean staying out of their affairs or territory, saluting them, learning from them, standing up to them? How should we view someone we respect? As another independent agent, as a potential friend or enemy, as a genuine rival, as a potential asset or concern?

I think if you talk to people, depending on who you talk to, you’ll come away with one or the other of these conceptions of respect. The two definitions seem very much at odds with one another and seem to be pushing in opposite directions. People may seek to treat people “well” or “fairly”, but might mean very siffer bt things in practice depending on which one of these approaches they subscribe to. In fact people who want one kind of treatment are likely to be quite offended at receiving the other. To one person, saying that “you need to respect me” might mean treating them like they’re somebody special. And for someone else showing someone respect could mean treating them just the same as everybody else. It might mean taking special consideration or it might mean making no distinction.

I think another way to view someone as being worthy of respect is to either see them as being worthy of special care and attention and consideration, or, conversely, as someone worthy of and capable of shouldering their own situation and responsibilities. Depending on your bent, you might think that showing someone that someone respect would mean guarding your language around them, seeking not to offend them, showing deference. Or you might think it means being able to speak to someone as an equal, honestly and forthright and without tiptoeing around their feelings.