The roots of confidence

Positive lies about yourself are no more secure a foundation for actualization that negative lies.

Understanding and taking responsibility for yourself as a particular individual in your own care is the beginning of actualization, maturity, and integration.

No amount of positive or negative self talk can paper over your essential nature. The underlying features of who you are will show through and affect your behavior wherever you go. Hiding them from yourself and from others will only make it easier to get yourself into situations where you don’t understand and can’t predict or control how you will behave or how others will respond.

Authenticity is not blindness and denial, nor is it blindness and assertion. Who you are is a negotiation between what you are made of, how you express it, what you could do, and who you could become. It is a process of awareness of and assumed responsibility for both the past and the future in the present moment.

Confidence cannot be built on knowing or controlling what other people will do, or what the world around you will present you with. This kind of confidence relies on naiveté and an assumption of control that you don’t have.

Regarding Dan Crenshaw

I don’t agree with Dan about numerous things, but because he has a coherent and rational intellectual system inside which those disagreements could be discussed and progress could be made, I know that I could trust him and we could work together productively to make progress toward both our concerns.

In other words, he has his own individual instincts, concerns, and approach, and so do I, and those don’t always line up. But those individual elements are nested within a larger coherent intellectual system of rationality that operates by certain defined rules. And I can play by those rules just as much as he can, meaning I might be able to prove some good points of my own on his terms, and he could prove some good points of his on my terms, because the terms themselves aren’t individuated but are common to us both. So we can have subjective differences and contributions within a shared objective framework, one we can both negotiate as individuals but can share and use to and come up with something larger and greater than our own individual opinions, concerns, and instincts.

So even though I don’t share all his positions, his relative perspective, I do respect and want to share in the larger nested rational process he is expressing those perspectives in. And that’s the basis for good government, for negotiation, for real problem solving, for validation, for testing, for compromise. That’s a system where you could learn from being wrong and be kept humble and restrained in being right. That’s the kind of system we need, but sorely lack.

Rights and opportunities

As Americans, we possess the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Note that we are not actually granted a right to happiness itself. That’s not a right someone can grant to someone else.

So what’s the difference? The difference is between granting a right to an endeavor, an experiment, an effort, a labor, vs granting an actual outcome. No one, least of all the government, has the authority to grant anyone the right to a specific life outcome. Especially such a great and difficult and important matter as “a happy life”. But it is the duty of the government to protect our ability to pursue it, to ensure we are able to engage in that creative effort.

These days I think we’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick and have misunderstood some key words in our founding documents. We think the government is our mommy and its job is to actually provide for us and give us everything we need to succeed and be happy. We believe that’s something we have a right to expect. That everyone should have a basic guarantee to the same outcomes of happiness.

But far from assuming we have the right to manufacture such a good for other people, I’m not even really sure that we can. Happiness isn’t such a low and easy fruit to grasp. The great thinkers of the past had a much bigger and deeper conception of happiness and where it comes from that makes it the sort of thing the government can’t provide. It’s the function of so many moving parts and fulfilled conditions, and most especially it’s a function of things about us that have grown into a proper set of functioning and useful and balanced and attuned parts. And it’s deeply bound up with our own sense of individuality and accomplishment and responsibility and struggle. It’s not just a feeling, it’s a state of being, an outcome of existential development. And you can’t give someone that. You can only protect their capacity to develop it.

So actual happiness can’t be guaranteed. But these days we seem to think that’s something we can and should do, ensure equal outcomes for all. But this present challenges. Guaranteeing happiness for someone isn’t just a matter of controlling conditions around them or providing for them, it’s a guarantee about who and what they will (or must) be. You have to make them into a happy person, in a larger existential sense. You have to engineer them as well as the world around them. And that is government overreach.

Moreover, the amount of control you would need over both the person and their environment would need to be exceptional, even tyrannical. It’s easier to do for your children in your own home, where you can be present and aware at all times and exercise despotic power over them and their environment by familial fiat. It would take far more power to accomplish such a task in the wide and wooly world of an entire nation. Ultimately, you would need to be able to control everything and everyone to make such promises.

People possess a right to the freedom to pursue happiness, but happiness itself isn’t the sort of thing we can guarantee them from the outside without assuming godlike and draconian control of the world and of the populace itself. Because so much of our happiness comes from within (and happiness maintains a complex relationship with external circumstances), relocating the mechanisms for its production outside of the individual will have a very likely result of: first, making the individual completely dependent on the state’s control of their circumstances, and second, depriving them of their innate ability to produce happiness within their own person.

By always trying to ensure that someone is happy, you create someone who loses the ability to make themselves happy, and whose only semblance of being so is reliant upon very specific external provision and control. You end up with spoiled children who can only maintain any equilibrium so long as their mother is there to forcefully remove all offending elements of reality and produce those comforts which soothe them.

But as that scales up you aren’t just talking about a small child with simple needs and tastes in a small confined environment like a home. If you take that approach out into the real world with all its vastness and complexity and danger and different forces and thousands or even millions of people and conflicting characters and purposes, you get an unmanageable disaster. You get some very unhappy and ill-prepared babies, and you get demands for a more and more powerful mother.

And that is a cruel result. It is just as cruel

to refuse the the responsibility to develop maturity and just as cruel to protect and refuse to confront that which produces sickness, immaturity, dependence, weakness, and unhappiness as it is to directly and deliberately cause it. It just looks better. It is a respectable cruelty because it is kind and accommodating in its tyranny and abuse.

The thief who walks in and assaults you and robs you and leaves you destitute is not really so different, in effect, from the caring and doting parent who deprives you of the ability build anything apart from them, to be completely subject to them and dependent on them and their provision and protection to have anything. That’s not care, that’s a kind of doting, indulgent, morally self-congratulatory slavery.

The parent who never allows you to develop the ability to face anything or produce anything, who lets you be ruled and determined by your circumstances and your own unregulated instincts, who leaves you subject to the worst and most unbalanced and unproductive elements of your own character, who never confronts them or shapes them into something capable of producing long-lasting and durable and adaptable happiness for yourself isn’t loving you. They’re enlarging themselves through you at your expense, and making themselves look like a loving martyr while doing it.

Both the thief who steals your past and the parent who steals your future are a danger. They will both devour you and leave you helpless. The former will do their damage quickly and catastrophically and very noticeably, but at least after they’ve done it they leave. They don’t hang around expecting you to thank them and look up to them for it. The latter will stay and keep you dependent and reliant on them, enslaved to them, coddling you like a babe whose neediness fulfills their desire to feel the pleasures of new motherhood, with the dependent child duckling at the breast. And while that is all well and good and necessary for the infant, in the grown human it is a cruel and devouring fate without much hope of escape. And I sometimes wonder if this is not being done at a whole societal level, to whole classes by whole classes, and by whole races by whole races. And like an unweaned infant we cry whenever the attention is not on us and we feel a need we cannot understand how to fulfill on our own.

I think on the whole we lack the insight to realize the depths of danger in what we perceive as kindness. That kindness may only be kindness to ourselves, in sparing ourselves the disagreeable task of confronting that which should and needs to be confronted, whether in others or in ourselves. We like being seen as the doting parent, the nice guy who cares and provides.

But as a parental strategy and as a life strategy, this simply isn’t sufficient, and it can be dangerous, even cruel and unjust. Both agreeability and disagreeability have genuine value. And this isn’t an attack in agreeability, or mercy or kindness or accommodation. All are entirely useful and needful. They are often right. But they are not universally right or universally good.

Neither is disagreeability universally wrong or universally bad. And the same can be said about negative emotions and experiences in general. We seem to have decided as a culture that we don’t need negative experiences. That they have no value. Which begs the question why the production of them and the resultant negative emotions should make up such a large part of innate human psychology. Why have them if they have no use? Why even have the ability to have disagreeable feelings and experiences if they have no utility? Why have disagreeable people if they have no utility?

We need to reorient our entire approach to people and to our feelings and experiences. Because it isn’t so simple as “These people or these feelings or these experiences are uncomplicatedly, universally good, and these ones are universally bad.” The real question comes down to purpose, function, balance, ans integration. Both spectrums exist, therefore both spectrums are supposed to exist. What then? Then goodness or badness isn’t so simplistic a formula, but is dependent on a higher calculus.

Agreeable feelings, experiences, and people can be bad for us. And disagreeable feelings, experiences, and even people can be good for us. I think what people would really like is to have a simple world where their most basic tastes can be wholly and unquestionably and unthinkingly endorsed and will always yield the right results. Where the distance between “I want it” or “I like it” and “It’s good for me” is zero. Where things are simple and don’t require a lot of thought beyond basic instincts and feelings, and even those can be reduced merely to the ones we prefer and enjoy on a most basic level.

We desire the simplicity of infantilism. We want to overlay that simplicity on the whole world and on ourselves and return to that easy experience where our mother is our whole world and we desire and are fulfilled as we suckle at the breast of provision and indulgence.

But that phase of life is, by design, temporary. Eventually, in all mammals, the mother must push the child away from the nipple. That is not a pleasant experience. That is not an agreeable act. So why must it be so? Why does agreeability serve so well in infanthood but so poorly in the growing adult? Why is merely being nice not enough of a long-term strategy for a parent? Why is being pleased not enough of a long-term experience for the child?

These are very deep questions that require even deeper answers. But it suffices enough for now to observe that it is, in fact, the case. We need more than just positive and agreeable experiences to become truly mature and truly happy individuals. That is why we have the right to pursue happiness but do not have a guaranteed right to happiness itself. Not because we are giving up, but because we are hoping for so much more.

A guarantee of happiness is only a guarantee for a very shallow and compromised and dependent kind of happiness. And we want more than than. We’re willing to risk some negative experiences to secure something better. Real growth, real development, real independence, real happiness. You can’t have it if you won’t be weaned. You can’t enjoy the pleasures of adulthood of you won’t leave some of the safe and predictable comforts of childhood behind and take on some responsibility and the possibility of failure and some real stakes in life.

That is the genius of the right to pursue happiness. It has the nature of the thing figured out right. It hopes for more for us than merely to be the content wards of the state. It risks making us into citizens, able to truly contribute. And that is a frightening and an inspiring prospect. It is more than a gift, more than kindness, more than equality. It is a call. To be something. To shoulder the burden and bear the consequences of our own lives. To learn. To grow. To take our place among the stars.

To quote an erstwhile god, “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.”

In praise of gridlock

It’s actually a positive feature of our government that it’s easiest to get things done, get laws passed, and get people elected at the lowest and most local levels, and it is at those levels that the government should most impact your life. At its highest levels, the government has the most restrictions, hurdles, checks, complications, and it’s hardest to get things done, get laws passed, and get elected. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Government is at its least relevant and least tailored and least individualized at the federal level. At the level with the broadest implications you stick to the most basic and general actions, and they must go through the most rigorous testing and negotiation. Which is why government by executive order has never been a central pillar of our legal structure, and why it never should be.

It is inappropriate for such large scale changes that have such massive implications to be made by a single person. The closer you get to a specified, distinct local level, the more individuated law can become. The more it can be tailored to knowledge and feedback coming directly from the constituents. The lower down you go, the less restrained it can be because there are other, effective feedback mechanisms built into the situation as proximity increases.

Of course, government can go wrong at any level, regardless. But structurally this is how government should be arranged to best navigate the inherent strengths and weakness of the spectrum from local all the way up to federal government. The most expansive authority and least safeguards can more safely be invested at the smallest levels, where they affect the smallest number of people whose situations are known and experienced in the greatest detail (the family being the most essential non-singular unit, and being a form of heriditary monarchy). And the least expansive authority with the most checks and safeguards belong at the highest level, where the most people are affected and the least detailed knowledge of their situation is present.

A letter to the superintendent 

I read in the newsletter about the DEI initiative. I understand that there is a big push in all public and private institutions to engage in a voluntary inquisition to root out alleged white supremacy and systemic racism, and I appreciate the need to address the concerns of customers or people who make use of a service.

Unfortunately, the results of these programs at other educational institutions have often been very negative. The destruction of educational standards, recontextualizing and criminalizing of childhood behavior, racially motivated hiring and professional treatment, erosion of the rights of some children at the expense of others. None of these are goals truly serve the children or help to provide for their future educational needs, least of all (ironically) the people these policies are often intended to benefit.

Politically motivated experimentation on children and schools tends to only hurt both of them, and only fuels the drive that pushes valuable students away from the public system and into charter schools, private schools, and home schooling. When schools become about providing an experience rather than an education, they lose their effectiveness as institutions.
Of course, real incidents where children have difficulty in their environment should be addressed in their context as effectively as possible.

Obviously, all the teachers and employees in the district are deeply invested in the wellbeing of the children and the performance of their duties. Unfortunately, DEI initiatives are often used as a tyrannical club to wring social and educational concessions from both faculty and students in the interest of improving the experience for those who perceive themselves as deserving of them.
I wish this were not the case, but often such assertions of rights are used to deprive others of rights. Such as the right of teachers to have certain behavioral and academic expectations of their students, the right of administrators to equally apply certain policies, the right of children to be treated as children and not as adults or criminals or participants in some consciously evil enterprise, the right of prospective employees to be judged and evaluated as individuals rather than as representatives of a racial (or other) subgroup, the right to the assumption of innocence (particularly when it comes to children and to dedicated staff members), and the right to be respected as inviduals capable of self-determination and responsibility.

If we grant certain special classes the right to demand certain experiences and certain outcomes, we will find that such rights can only be granted at the expense of others. Rights are, after all, something we assert outwardly, something that we demand from others. All students have various rights, as do educators, many of which are in tension with one another. The creation of special classes whose rights override those of other vested stakeholders (students, parents, educators, administrators, or other prospective customers or employees) has unfortunately been a frequent outcome of DEI audits.

Education comes with its own demands and its own rights, as well as its own responsibilities that we take on when we either engage in providing it or engage in seeking it. It is my hope that the DEI audit will not represent a step toward the degredation and politicization of education. But my experience with previous such audits has not been encouraging. Already the jingoistic use of such language in disctrict communications as “hate” (which is fundamentally connected to legal judgements against speech and behaviors), presumably in reference to the words and actions of students and faculty and potential legal and professional actions that could be taken against them, is very troubling.

Treating students and faculty as accused prisoners to be judged (or perhaps prejudged and needing to prove their commitment to the cause to gain exhoneration), rather than as humans in important relationships, valuable adults and developing children, is a consequence I fear.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all wonderful ideas. But they are not such universally and unequivocally good ideas as to be such that you can seek and endorse them without reservation. It all depends on what you include, what you determine to be equal, and what you diversify with.

Ultimately, the job of a school is to provide education, not a feeling or an experience. And that means a certain amount of necessary discrimination. Some subjects will be deemed relevant while others will not. Some behaviors will be deemed conducive to the group endeavor while others will not. Some applicants will be deemed skilled while other will not.

Excellence in education requires the proper operation of feedback mechanisms that allow students and teachers to optimize their performance, recognizing that both have real efficacy in determining their resulting outcomes and bearing their share of responsibility for it. It is also the case that even socially, we all bear some responsibility for our own situation and cannot expect the district to be able to determine, except by tyrannical control, that we have a certain experience. Often the school experience conveys rather than generates the negative social and educational experience that some students have. Some of this may be inevitable, some of it may be unintentional, and some of it may even be the school system’s duty to convey (such as the commensurate limitations that naturally result from bad behavioral or academic performance).

Of course, it must always be the goal of the district to serve all its students (and their parents, and in a way its employees too) to the best of its ability. But that goal is complicated by two problems. First, what truly “serves” the interests of the students? It might not be so simple as what they would prefer. And second, serving and pleasing everyone equally at the same time may not be possible, as I earlier expressed. Serving the interests of one group may conflict with serving the interests of another. And creating special classes whose demands are able to override the general rights and concerns of the population, as well as the specific rights and obligations of the district as a provider of education, is not a formula for producing excellence either among the students nor among the faculty.

If the district is able to keep all these values in mind, then I am sure that the results of the DEI audit will be positive and fruitful. Unfortunately, my experience has rather been that such inquiries are the beginning of the erosion of the institutional values of the enterprise in the interest of personal and political appeasement of certain individuals. Hopefully I am wrong, and that is not how things will go with District 20.

Hopefully the audit will not become a wedge to open the door so some parties can override the purposes and conditions and principles of education in the interests of political realignment and indoctrination. That would be a loss for all the students, educators, and parents, not least of all those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable. The degredation of the core mission of educational institutions and the inhibition of their ability to carry out that mission truly serves no one. It is my hope that this audit will not cause the district to lose sight of its core mission and the true value it provides, as has happened in so many other institutions (with all the best intentions). It is also my hope that the district will be able to listen to the anecdotes of concerned parties and seek productive solutions for their concerns without compromising the fair and appropriate treatment of the students and faculty.

I wish you all the best in your efforts to negotiate this difficult time and difficult situation. I am sure that there is no solution that won’t result in making someone unhappy. Because the respective rights and interests of various interested parties are inherently in tension with one another and because the foundational goals and values of the district force it to make certain discriminatory choices in order to serve and protect those goals, there will always be winners and losers. Someone will always be unhappy. And no one will ever get everything they want or get everything all their way in a shared public space. It is always a negotiation. And hopefully the push toward diversity, equity, and inclusion as an overriding set of values will not allow that negotiation (as well as the values of the institutions and its participants) to be subverted and overridden. I know that you are in a position subject to great criticism and pressure, and I hope you are able to negotiate it successfully, for the good of everyone. You have my best wishes and hopes.

Yours respectfully,

A letter in thanks for an article on Sir Roger Scruton by his literary executor

Thank you so much for your article on Sir Roger today. I enjoyed reading it. It’s strange how someone dies and then everyone tries to lay claim to their legacy. I confess I didn’t discover Roger until more recently, despite having spent my life studying philosophy and British literature. I confess I most ignored most people after the year 1900, believing the halcyon days of great writing to have passed and focusing on days long gone. I was greatly saddened when I realized I had only just discovered Sir Roger and he died within a year of me learning of him.

It’s strange, but even at his most atheistic (or agnostic), I found Sir Roger to be deeply religious. Even when he couldn’t take his own faith for granted (which is what many do), he was seeking God, looking for him. It’s hard to admit, but we all lack access to that which would uncontrovertibly confirm or deny the essence of our essential faith, whether in God or in random meaningless chance.
In such a world, sometimes the best way to find what we seek is to assert its counterfactual and chase the consequences to see where they lead. And I think Sir Roger sometimes seemed to be doing that. Even if our faith isn’t literally true, maybe it’s existentially true, maybe it’s philosophical or aesthetically true, maybe it’s true as a matter of practice or necessity, maybe it’s symbolically true, maybe it’s psychologically true.
And maybe, if it’s true in all those ways, it actually is literally true, too, or as true as reason can reveal without being able to take that final step of faith for us that says, yes, I will seek and learn and love as if this is what the world is and what I am and what we are for. I will put my trust in this vision.
And I think Sir Roger was always doing that. Always seeking that vision, always advocating for it. Even when his faith was weak, the vision called to him. And even if he could never take his faith for granted, maybe that’s not a bad thing. Being part of the people of God isn’t about owning him and assuming him. It’s about seeking him and following him. And I think no one can deny, in all his ups and downs, that that was Sir Roger’s desire.
Thank you again for you article. Stay well, and have a good new year.
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Misandry and marketing

I’m getting really, really tired of previews for shows starring women that all center around the conceit of “that’s right, I’m X and I’m a woman!” and all the men are mysogynistic jerks and she’s the clever, modern person schooling them in how awesome she is compared to all those dumb men. And sometimes she beats them up or beats them in their own areas of pride and competence. As if the character couldn’t be sold without the defiant, in your face, oppositional attitude. She can’t just be a good X, she’s a girl who’s a good X, in your face, men!

The stereotypical narrative of idiotic, prejudiced, incompetent, and evil men keeping down the plucky, smart, virtuous, superior girl is wearing just a bit thin. Chess player, detective, and submarine captain are just three examples I’ve seen from the last three weeks. Apart from the repetitive nature of the narratives and the same easy short cut to make you sympathize with the protagonist, who could probably stand up perfectly fine on her own without surrounding her with cardboard villains, I’m not very happy with the reductive and prejudiced idea of men it’s communicating to my girls.

Ms Marple and Tuppence and Harriet Vane and Nancy Drew and others enjoyed plenty of success, as detectives and as popular fictional characters, and didn’t also need to sell themselves as great characters and detectives by adding “Oh, and also, f#$% you, men!” That’s not how you earn someone’s respect or make them like you.

But that’s how so, so many projects are being sold to us. The basic idea today is, revive a beloved property or classic narrative trope, but with a woman, and also, f#$% you, men! I can enjoy the old type of heroines, in fact I absolutely adore Ms Marple and Harriet Vane and always have, and Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers are personal heroes of mine and always have been. Not because they’re women, because they’re incredible authors who write great characters. And it’s worth pointing out that their male detectives, Poiriot and Lord Peter, are not actually men in any real, biological sense, but are simply great fictional characters, written by women.

And neither those authors nor myself ever saw sex as any barrier to enjoying either their male or female characters, nor did they present it as such. As if I, as a man, couldn’t accept or enjoy female detectives, or as if I couldn’t enjoy male characters written by women. They put all their effort into incredible writing and characters that easily displayed their own value, instead of needing to gain it as a product of some narrative of sexual opposition and enmity.

Those tactics might work on some women, who get the tasty but shallow flavor of resentment to sweeten the appeal of what are sometimes lazily written characters. But frankly, I give most mature women a bit more credit than that. And with men, it’s just not an effective tactic. Who enjoys a mediocre character with a side of f#$@ you? That’s half your potential audience you’re alienating.

You can’t get people to genuinely love you by guilting them into it. Star Wars and Captain Marvel and Birds of Prey and Ghostbusters seem to take this approach, along with many other properties recently. Using an appeal to your support in the battle of the sexes to try to obligate women into liking a property as some sort of statement or salvo in the war against men. And men are supposed to like it, because if they don’t they’re sexist pigs. So take your deserved slaps and enjoy the remakes and sequels of your own favorite properties and enjoy it. Because these movies are important. They’re not just art or stories, they’re missions in an ideological war. And if you’re not for them then you’re the enemy, you basement-dwelling, pathetic, mysoginist man-child.

And in fact some men do respond in kind. They intuitively recognize that they’re not being offered a story, they’re being offered a criticism of their identity, often in a very overt and personal way. It’s not like they just put this spin on stories that were already focused on and aimed at women, they do it very deliberately to traditionally male-oriented shows and movies. They make an effort to infiltrate and convert men’s media.

And so the males respond out of their identity. They respond with resentment and a “f#$& you too, stay out of my stuff”. Which isn’t very helpful, but is at least understandable. And their criticisms often sting more because the shows and movies fail to capture the same audience as the original, in part because the audience didn’t feel the need to rush to the box office be insulted and criticized, and also because they often aren’t as good. Art that’s foremost a political statement tends to come off a bit shallow and shrill, in part because it relies on the message instead of good stories and characters to demand your support.

There really isn’t any shortage of great female characters that men have loved, and no shortage of male characters written by women that men have loved. But there is a big shortage of all kinds of characters who say “f#$& you, men, and if you don’t like it you’re a pig” that men have loved. It’s just not a great way to get someone to like or respect you. When you have to demand appreciation and respect purely on the basis of guilt, then you’ve already failed to produce it by natural means and are resorting to coercion. That’s something that’s true for both sexes.

The moment you start demanding a distribution of something, it becomes clear that you’re not capable of producing it. And even if you do get a dispensation, it won’t last. Real love, interest, and respect are things you create, you earn, you produce. They’re the fruit of human creativity and productive relationships. You can’t just demand them. You can be given a facsimile, a token, but it won’t last, because it won’t naturally reproduce itself. It has to be continually extracted and demanded. And it won’t satisfy or flower in the long run.

And that’s why so many of these movies and projects will be sadly forgotten. And that’s a shame, because often there’s real talent and value that goes into them, and it’s a largely the writing that falls flat. I’m perfectly happy enjoying the excellent creative products of women. Most men always have been. When they’re genuine, when they earn it, not demand it. Virtually everyone appreciates something truly great that adds value to their lives, regardless of where it came from.

There have been strong and excellent female writers and female characters since the dawn of the creative mediums. But resentment and jealousy don’t create good art. And you can’t get the results and acclaim good art commands simply by demanding that you should have it.

The pain of past experiences

It has been written that much good can be undone by one sinner. One might also reflect that much wisdom is undone by a drop of foolishness. Often with people they have very bad experiences with a corrupt or even simply misguided or limited imperfect version of something or someone. A bad parent, a bad church, a bad teacher, a bad government, a bad friend. And it’s very hard for us to see past what is revealed when it has hurt us or someone we care about or something we care about.

Unfortunately, it is part of the tapestry of human experience that all our human heroes and edifices are bound to reveal their flaws and limitations and contradictions, if given enough time and scrutiny. So you have to start from a grain of cynicism, knowing that no one is good but God; and all earthly governments, from a family to an empire, will be imperfect.

We are never able to live up to even our own standards, and so we are all some stripe of hypocrites. But to that grain of cynicism you must also add a healthy dose of optimism. The affirmation of life that accepts the flaws and limitations and blind spots and betrayals as inherent, yet finds the good to be real and discoverable and sensible, that finds pleasure in our desire to be more than what we are and reaches toward what could be.

Having been harmed by someone or something, it is very hard to see the value in those things or persons, or to take their positions and arguments and strategies seriously as positions to be considered, rather than enemies to be defeated. A bad father may sour us on fatherhood altogether, a bad leader on leadership itself, a bad meal may give us a lifelong aversion to that food, a bad church may make faith unpalatable. Or they may drive us into the arms of another person or philosophy that promises to oppose our former oppressor. Sometimes that provides a better home for that need. Sometimes the marketing tactics that take advantage of our hurt lead only to an opposite vice and enslavement. So often those who flee their father’s house to get away from him fall into the traps of men just as bad, using their freedom to merely change one misery for another.

It’s easier to understand danger and bad experiences than it is to extract the evil from the underlying value (whatever it might be, there’s always something) and see it for what it was and wasn’t and could and couldn’t be, to see the good in it. And the deeper the hurt, the harder to see the value. But usually the things that hurt most are also those with a lot of power and value (however misused), like a family, an intimate relationship, or a close community.

I’ve seen many people lose a lot of avenues for good in their lives because they had its source poisoned for them by a particularly bad example. And I’ve seen just as many fall into different (but still problematic) alternatives because they supported their rejection of the things that had harmed them. And you often find yourself needing support because of the pain of the loss that comes from pulling away from something that had power in your life. You need somewhere to belong and find strength, to stand and perhaps to resist and pull away, to grow. And sometimes joining the opposition party seems the best way to do that.

And who can blame people for this? Especially in the near term, when you need space and strength to recover and grow, to establish some identity of sufficient distinction to allow you to make a critical assessment of your former situation.

Unfortunately, most people take a long time to go beyond mere criticism, if they go beyond it at all, to a balanced and independent view that isn’t threatened in their identity by the old power and pain from their old lives so they can view it dispassionately. Some pains run so deep and take so long to heal. And sometimes unhealthy and immature means of coping may help promote survival and protection and reassurance but not advance people toward a more balanced and mature state of mind. People can stay angry right until the end of their lives and never resolve their relationships with the objects of their grievance.

Even in my own extended family I’ve seen this, people so hurt that they couldn’t ever stop chasing that pain and fighting those battles, even when the people in question were long gone, even when it stole their happiness and ruined their lives. Never underestimate people’s willingness to sacrifice health and happiness for pain and resentment and blame.

Dieting and moralizing

Diets have always been as much about a philosophy and a kind of cult culture (in the general sense, not the religious sense) as they have been about actual food.

Go all the way back to the days of the ancient Greeks and you find all sorts of crazy diets and theories about how they don’t just feed you, they really make you better (in some existential sense) and embody some optimized vision of humanity. Take a look at any diet fad today and you’ll find the same attitude, the same associations, the same language. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.

But why is this so common? I think the answer lies in the connections between the regulatory, protective, and provisional systems of the body and those same systems as they manifest in the mind. I’m not saying religious attitudes can be reduced merely to delusions of the body’s instincts, but rather that the complex systems of the conscious mind rest upon the simpler systems of the instinctive or unconscious mind and share much of the same architecture. And the simpler are caught up into the meaning of the complex, as the foundations of a tower are caught up into its spire. Things that exist and affect us at one level can easily get confused and mixed in at another. Small and simple things have a very deep and complex meaning for us.

It’s not hard for people to identify with the things that they take into their bodies and to line them up with an ideology. These ideologies connect to some deep psychological instincts inside us. These diets don’t just serve a physical function of nutrition or weight loss, but serve as a way of aligning our dietary experiences with our ideological narratives.

And that’s how many of these diets are marketed. Not merely as a way of getting food or nutrition or a way of cooking, but as a way to optimize our being itself, as THE WAY to get food and THE WAY to eat. This diet isn’t just good for you nutritional, it’s good, full stop. It will fulfill your need existential needs and align with the organization of your life. It will make you attractive and morally admirable, it will connect you to your community and the larger world harmoniously. It will give your life direction and focus and meaning.

So there are a lot of feelings involved. It’s not just cooking, not just eating or food science or nutrition. It’s about meaning and identity and a moral/holistic vision of humanity. People have often treated food in this way, across many many cultures. The details vary, but eating is a very important experience for us. It’s more than just survival for us. It is a part of our human experience on so many levels. Family meals, holidays, social gatherings, dates, banquets, festivals, religious observances, daily rituals, how many of these center around or include food and drink as a primary element of their structure? Food isn’t just food, it’s a kind of social and cultural currency.

So that’s why people get so worked up about diets, present and historical. It’s not just food to them. It’s who they are. And they’ve centered an important part of their identity and moral vision on how they eat. They’ve ritualized it and invested in it. So they’re likely to get very upset if your criticize it.

All of this is useful to know, but it does raise one further question. Should what you eat play that important of a role in your life? Is it a good idol to set up and look to for your identity, health, value, moral excellence, etc, or is that asking a bit too much of a god that isn’t quite up to carrying that much existential weight? Well, that’s something to chew on.

A letter to a friend

Dear J, as someone who has struggled through history and philosophy and religion for years, as well as shouldering a significant burden of depression that seems to arise almost inevitably as result of raising one’s awareness to the reality of such things, there is always one place I have found comfort, and I commend it to you as you pursue your further studies.

The book of Ecclesiastes is the most unvarnished, complex, poetic, honest, comforting, and terrifying book I’ve ever read. Most people won’t read it or can’t read it properly because they won’t let it strip away the layers of protection we build around ourselves to insulate ourselves from this kind of honest look at what the world and human life really are, in all their chaos and order and heroism and tragedy and harmony and dissonance.

The Teacher isn’t trying to write a dissertation. He’s using the power and poetry of words to explore his experience of life and just tell us honestly what he’s seen. And like the world itself, it’s messy and astounding and terrible and sweet and disastrous. He free associates from one bit of wisdom to another that balances of contradicts it, rises to glorious hopeful visions and shares his own despair and cynicism. It’s timeless, as utterly true today as it was the day it was written.

Even if you struggle to believe in God and the Bible, you can’t help but believe in Ecclesiastes. Commentators never seem able to just let this book be what it is, they want to use context to box it up and tame it, as if you could tame God and the world and make them fit in your neat little treatise. For the person who has found themselves in the wilderness of thought, this book meets you there.

I think this book and Song of Songs are perhaps the two greatest pieces of philosophical poetry ever conceived, and far from being out of place in the Old Testament form a unified core of wisdom and poetry that brings the humanity at the heart of the whole Hebrew Bible together. Man trying to understand himself, understand God, understand the world, trying to live with the realities of them all. And I think it actually helps to read both; I think they balance out one another in passion and reflection.

If you aren’t grateful and terrified and hopeful and full of despair when you reach the end of Ecclesiastes, you probably haven’t really given yourself to it. The fact that this book sits at the center of the Bible has always given me great hope. Because it states the terror and despair and confusion of the world better than I ever could, its power to speak truth is unparalleled, but it lives at the heart of the scriptures. It isn’t something outside, something that challenges of contradicts or is cast out. This is openly presented as pinnacle of wisdom that will heal the heart. It is the shadow whose confrontation will teach wisdom and bring peace.

If you can face Ecclesiastes, you can face the world, and you won’t be outside God’s wisdom, you will be in the heart of it. If you have time, I would love to see you examine Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. I think you would find them to be endless food for thought and wine for the heart’s comfort. The truths in them are not all kind and pleasant, but they heal the heart and fortify it. They are a garden of delights and the terror of a storm in the mountains.

The day comes for us all when the pitcher shatters at the well and the stone breaks at the milling, when the toil of life ends and we can no longer do that which it was our lot to do. These books never shy away from reminding us of that. But they also remind us to rest, and that to enjoy our days is gift from God.

Powered by Journey Diary.

Good cop parenting

Parenting is often a simple matter of playing good cop bad cop. It’s pretty hard to play it with yourself. There’s a reason why it’s a stereotype. It’s a useful strategy. And really, both cops are good cops. It just helps to have two complimentary approaches.

In reality the goals of both cops are the same. They’re partners. Knowing how to play off one another helps them navigate different people and different situations and figure out what works and find the balance that gets things where they need to go. It creates a dynamic strategy that adapts and is alive instead of being merely formulaic.

Of course you can go too far with either, becoming ineffective. And it’s easy to convince yourself that you don’t have any need for the other cop. But you’re always stronger and more effective when you’re working together, in collaboration, not contradiction or antagonism.

Three short commentaries: on election struggles, politics and marriage, and human fallibility

It’s unfortunate how much political haymaking is going on right now as the election results are being certified. As someone who has no respect for or investment in either side, the irony and hypocrisy of both is quite shocking. People who are anti-Trump are shocked and appalled, of course, but having witnessed their own previous actions and words these last four years (especially this year) the irony and hypocrisy is so thick I’m surprised they can keep a straight face.

As someone without a real horse in the race, to me it seems that the only real difference isn’t in the actual events (how Democrats vs Republicans conduct themselves), just in how each sees things and interprets them. Of course, I’m the first to admit that Trump is an idiot and lets his mouth run away with him, has no respect for the truth, and doesn’t think at all about the general consequences of his words and actions beyond how they benefit him (and make him feel good and feed his personal narrative). So of course he’s going to give idiotic speeches and whip people up and not think about whether that’s actually a wise or helpful thing to do, because he doesn’t have any concept of those categories, except insofar as they apply to himself.

People, of course, are crazy, and in a group get even crazier. All people. Not just Democrats or Republicans, not just alt right or antifa. All people get a bit nuts in a group. Add in a speech and a lot of emotion and people feel that they have to act. Maybe that means barging into a room and refusing to leave until they get what they want or are arrested. Maybe that means waving flags or shouting a lot. Maybe it means smashing windows or spray painting slogans. Maybe it even means assaulting law enforcement. Maybe it means setting dumpsters or trash cans on fire or burning effigies.

I would in no way condone any of these behaviors. But the fact is, tons of people engage in them, and both sides are shocked when the other side does it and are completely blind and full of excuses and self righteous when their own side does it. We literally just went through six months of having the majority of all state capitals and the federal capital overrun by protest and riots, many of which were violent and destructive. Colorado’s capital building was boarded up, fenced in, vandalized, surrounded, and assaulted on multiple occasions for weeks.

But to read the news about it, it was all mostly peaceful, perfectly normal, perfectly understandable, and above board. It was just political passion and people fighting for their concerns in keeping with the great tradition of American resistance. In other cities, people were dragged from cars, businesses were looted, roads were regularly blocked, buildings were set on fire with people inside them, and no Democrat or major media outlet had anything but positive things to say and were in fact proud to associate themselves with the protests.

Even Portland’s regular riots and violence were constantly described as mostly peaceful protests and cast in a positive light, even while the peaceful protestors tried to set fire to the (sympathetic) mayor’s apartment building. That story, which was barely covered, like so many stories, was always incredibly careful to tiptoe around the rioters and never to blame them for anything they did, always seeking to emphasize the positive, portray them sympathetically, explain and excuse their reasons for being where they were, and downplay any violence.

One story that came out just after the riot at the Capital building today said “Four People Died in Attacks on Capital”, giving the impression (with the headline and pictures) that the rioters were invaders who had killed four people in their rampage. Actually reading the story, it turns out that it was one of the protestors who had been shot by law enforcement, and the three others died in “unrelated medical emergencies”. So one wonders why the other three were included at all, except to inflate the headline and possibly to distract from what might have been the story, had this been a BLM protest: “Officers fatally shoot female protestor”.

And now people are writing think pieces on how on earth were supposed to explain the violence at the capital to our children, as if we hadn’t just been through months of protests and violence over all sorts of different causes, from covid to race to policing. One police officer did die several days later as a result of physical trauma caused during the fighting, and as with all such incidents of attacks on law enforcement (who face many dangers), people should be prosecuted for those actions. In all cases. It’s just strange to hear those stories leaped upon so eagerly by people who want to point out that “These maniacs attacked and injured law enforcement officers!” when they were just a few weeks ago arguing that those same officers were brutal, neo-facist maniacs who deserved to be attacked because they’re basically a bunch of violent thugs who are all bastards and should be abolished. The willingness to flip the rhetoric when it serves the narrative is frustrating.

Democrats complain about the terror and impropriety and undemocratic madness of the protests against Biden’s win. When Trump got elected there were protests and riots all over America. People burned Trump in effigy, projected “fuck Trump” and “not my president” on buildings, blocked roads, set fires, invaded and occupied the offices of elected officials (including congressional leaders), attacked law enforcement with clubs and rocks, vandalized and looted private and public properties, and yes, also did a lot of just marching and protesting and shouting and sign waving and flag waving (and a certain amount of flag burning). All over the country, for weeks. One man even set himself on fire.

And even when it comes to election results, obviously liberals were just as upset about Trump winning as conservatives are about Biden winning. Trump’s supporters in congress are protesting the results in around eight different states, I believe. When Trump won, house Democrats protested the results in eleven. The only real difference between the sides is whether you think the actions and reactions in question were justified. If you think they were, then you downplay and legitimize and sympathize. You understand. Maybe you even see it as heroic. Maybe you even join in. Because you think the cause is just. So you excuse, ignore, or endorse the behavior. But if you see the other side doing it, you don’t understand. You don’t sympathize. Their actions are magnified, rather than minimized, in your eyes. They’re shocking, an affront, an unprecedented assault on decency and order and integrity that reveals the corruption of the whole cause. Same actions, totally different reactions.

Just because Democrats did it doesn’t make it ok when Republicans do it. Just because Republicans do it doesn’t make it ok when Democrats do it. And people with good sense can see that. But most people don’t have good sense. The truth is, crazy people on both sides do it, and people who sympathize on both sides make excuses and ignore things when they’re in sympathy with the cause, and both sides blow up and are outraged and can’t understand and condemn and exaggerate when they aren’t in sympathy with the cause. A completely sober glance at the facts of history clearly shows the hypocrisy of both, and most especially in the way things are portrayed and discussed in the media. Because it’s all about that juicy narrative.

When a group of protestors enter the US capital after getting whipped up by a speech, the same media that kept calling violent riots “mostly peaceful protests” deserving of sympathy and immoral to restrain no matter how many weeks they went on or what lengths people went to or how many state and local government buildings were assaulted and trashed, immediately they call it “a coup”.

The point isn’t the rightness or wrongness of either reaction. The point is the inconsistency of labeling and interpretation, and how quick one group is to pounce in one situation and how slow they are to have anything to say at all in the other. And then they get to have a happy round condemning the people on the other side for doing exactly that, for failing to speak out. I don’t mind either side correctly and soberly pointing out bad behavior that is wrong and stupid and destructive. What I do mind is how they get so excited about it and start making political hay out of it and using it to strengthen their own personal (and often just as destructive and irrational and prejudiced) narratives.

Having said that, Trump does seem to have realized how dumb he was being and has tried to rewind some of the obvious consequences of his words, too late, that any sensible person would have anticipated and avoided. All the major Republican leaders virtually immediately condemned the actions of the protestors and called on them to stop and for law enforcement to retake control of the situation. And that’s far more than we ever got from any Democratic leaders over the protests earlier this year.

Personally, I think Trump deserves impeachment, removal from office, and probably even prison, and is easily the worst president we’ve ever had by a wide margin. Objectively, I think he’s earned all that a hundred times over. But in the interests of national healing and rehabilitation, I think the best thing we can really do for the nation is to simply ignore him. Sideline him, ignore him, don’t react or respond to anything he says or does, and keep moving ahead with what needs to be be done like adults and moving him out.

Trump is an attention hog, it’s what he craves, what he lives for, it’s what gives him his power. So the most appropriate punishment for him, the correct sentence, would simply be to become irrelevant and ignored and forgotten. He’s on his way out; let him go out with a whimper. Let him see how little he matters now and how few listening ears he has and how few friends he has left now that it’s all over. The more time we spend focusing on him and what he’s doing and what he has to say, the more he gets what he wants. The best thing is to just be the adult in the room and stop listening to his absurd tantrums.

Now, I have never been able to successfully explain this process of learning to see things the same from either side to anyone. I have never been able to explain my perspective to a Republican without making them upset or a Democrat without making them upset. There are so many things that look the same, despite seeming totally different to the parties involved, if you just have the imagination to see things from the other side. There is so much of what just seems like normal, neutral reasoning and interpretation that is so heavily colored by our underlying assumptions and perspectives that drive our sympathies, that affect what stands out and what fades back, what seems understandable and what seems like insanity, what seems obvious what seems like excuses.

That doesn’t mean that reality is just some soup of relativism. But it does mean that it’s very very hard to actually recognize the way in which our relative position on any matter colors how we interpret it and react to it and how we characterize it as part of our own personal narrative. We can see it when other people do it, but we can’t see it when we do it.

But whenever I try to be explain it and show it to anyone, they just see me as someone from the other side, as someone who doesn’t understand or appreciate their essential values and concerns and thoughts and feelings, someone who is alien and in opposition to them.

And that’s really the problem. This is how people are. This is how they’re made. It’s just one of the limitations of human psychology. We have different types of people, different personality types, different specializations, different talents, different interests, different priorities, different values. Why? Because it’s just not possible to fit everything the human race needs into one person. If it was possible, we would all be like that.

We can learn to mollify our excesses a bit. We can learn to integrate correctives into our nature as we discover its idiosyncrasies and its excesses and shortcomings and blind spots. We can learn to appreciate and understand and value others who have a different composition from ourselves. We can even integrate them into our lives as spouses, friends, and advisors. If they’re not too far separated from us.

Marriage is, on its most basic level, an attempt to correct the fundamental problem of the nature of mankind. We are incomplete. We are limited. We cannot be all. We cannot have it all or do it all or know it all or care about it all or cover it all, alone. That’s why marriage is more than mere reproduction. It’s not just a fix to make more humans, it’s the basic building block of the necessary social animal.

Humanity cannot be completely described with a single, solitary being. It takes, at minimum, two, male and female, to describe it. And all the other vast complexity of human society and interaction, from children and families to governments and institutions, builds up from that single dyadic point. That’s the absolute minimum that the concept of humanity can be reduced to. These two halves of the species.

And marriage is hard! Relations between the sexes are hard! Sometimes those other people just seem completely insane and inexplicable and idiotic and incomprehensible and misguided. We drive each other crazy, we’re afraid of one another, we resent one another. And yet we need one another. And if we reject that need, we reject humanity itself, because to be human is to recognize and admit and participate in that need, that nature that we cannot singly possess but must instead participate in like a dance.

We cannot be fully human without facing this terrible, frustrating, and seemingly hopeless task. To try to understand and value and love one another, or at least tolerate one another. And all that scales up into the differences between all humans. This is just an easy way to access and understand it, a stable archetypal touchstone of common experience and shared history. Society is a kind of family, and politics is a lot like a marriage. An arranged, necessary marriage. And in the case of contemporary politics, a very dysfunctional one.

This may sound odd, but I’m not really bothered that much by people’s bad behavior, I rather expect it. I know that that’s what people are like. What bothers me is inconsistency. Inconsistency in how people view their own actions and the actions of those they’re in sympathy with, people on their side, and how they view the actions of others. The inconsistency and hypocrisy frustrates me, because people don’t seem to be able to see it. The illusion that people have that they’re somehow better or smarter or more reasonable and principled, when it’s obvious to any outside observer that both groups are behaving and talking in the same manner.

It’s like there’s a magic trick both sides are doing, and it’s completely fooling only themselves and people on their side of the table. And the people on the other side can see through it and are pointing out the trick. And the people on the other side are also doing the same trick, but they’re completely fooled by their own trick, and the other people can see right through it. And as someone standing to the side of the table, both sides look insane, largely because they’re both doing the same thing and accusing each other of the same things and excusing the same things on their own part.

And it seems like it works on virtually everyone. I have not yet met anyone in person who sees it. Even my best attempts to help someone else see don’t work. I just get accused of being contrary and being a denialist, or belonging to the other side. Because I can see the validity of the arguments of the other side (which have at least as much validity as those same arguments, which have been accepted by the other side for their own stuff, so I wonder why they can’t also accept the same arguments when made by the opposition).

But people just don’t seem to be able to think like that. Even smart people and we’ll meaning people. People need a side. They need to belong. They require a perspective. They can’t shed that aspect of individuality and the particularity and relativity of human nature, it’s inescapable perspectivism. And people are who they are. Objectivity requires leaving behind any specific identity or or perspective, it requires disinhabiting your particularity. It requires a great emptying, and then a careful letting in of everything in an undifferentiated balance. It makes nonsense of the world. It makes you gaslight yourself. And that’s really really hard, maybe impossible for most people.

Anyway, what really bothers me about all this is the ironic and hypocritical shock at such a thing happening, and the harsh language used to describe it. As if it were something new. As if it weren’t the sort of thing that is really quite ordinary for humans and that gets excused by the same people who are complaining about it on a regular basis. That rubs me the wrong way.

In an objective sense, yes, I agree what happened was incredibly sad and idiotic and the result of complete corruption. I just wasn’t under any illusions that that wasn’t where we already were. And being cynical myself and already disappointed by people, it’s pretty rich to hear some of the very people who have so disappointed me talking like they’re shocked by such horrible behavior, when they’ve been ignoring it and excusing it and encouraging it themselves. In fact they’ve been ignoring and encouraging far worse for far longer.

I can’t stand the self-righteous posturing, as if these people, who are themselves the perpetrators of the problem, will somehow be the ones to cure it and make it better. As if they’re somehow better. The hypocrisy is simply infuriating.

That’s why I was always disgusted with Trump, someone who exploited real problems that he actually only exacerbated, who never had a chance of being better or making things better himself and likely never intended to. He makes trouble and stirs up controversies wherever he goes on purpose, it’s on of his tactics. So the idea of him making things better was laughable, so long as he was around he was going to keep creating trouble that other people had to deal with. The ridiculousness of the posturing and pointing out the sins of others, as if he wasn’t himself just as bad, was disgusting.

And then the Democrats play the same game and the same tune, as if they themselves weren’t exploiting the same tactics and causing just as much damage and weren’t just as much a danger to society. Each of them has some real power too, because each is to some degree right (likely entirely right) about the dangers they see coming from the words and actions of the other party. And both have a real contribution to make and things they’re right about and assets that our country desperately needs to protect it and make it prosper.

That’s why both sides have power, because insofar as they go, they’re right about what they have to offer and they’re right about the danger of the other side. But what both sides have wrong, what both are missing, is that they don’t understand what the other side has to offer, and they don’t understand the danger that they themselves pose. And that’s the source of the sickness. And because each side pushes so hard with the source of their power, laying so hard into those assets, they corrupt even these because they’re missing that other half of the equation, and so subvert what power they had and make even their great truths and assets into the most deceitful and pernicious of lies and poisons. Because they’re not just something false, but something true gone wrong.

I’ve felt this exact same frustration with both sides of the political system in turn over the last several years. And while I can enjoy sympathy if I go to the opposite side, I can never seem to get anyone to cross back and forth with me and appreciate both fully. There’s been no shortage of bad behavior from both sides. And no shortage of a complete blindness on the part of both sides to their own sins and a blinding glare of their examination of the other side’s sin. But they’re really the same, deep down. Different, but both equally human. Both doing the same things in different ways.

And I can’t find any comfort by fleeing to a side, escaping into the comforting selective blindness of perspective. To just accept a narrative and live by it and interpret things according to it. I can’t help but see the problems, the common words and behavior, whether I agree or disagree. Humans have to have a place, a perspective, a narrative of meaning. And since it’s often easier to recognize bad people more than bad ideas, and what behavior bothers us or attracts us is largely down to who we are as a person rather than any specific rational scheme of ideas and principles, these are the levers that move people thither and thus and drive their behavior.

Maybe there’s a hope under all this. A kind of unity. If we can only come to see it. Hopefully in a more positive aspect than how I see it. Right now we’re at the he far end of a dysfunctional relationship. The closest I’ve come to a solution is really just an emergency measure. People need to get off social media. Facebook and Twitter need to go. Comments on news stories need to be ignored or disabled. We need less of everything. Entertainment news, editorial news, should be shut out of our lives.

These things are eating us alive. And we think we want them, we think they’re good, we think we can handle them and manage them and keep our heads, and we can’t. They’re too much for us to handle. It’s just not possible, with the way the human mind works and is supposed to work. It’s ripping the psyche of the whole country apart.

We only invented all this ten years ars ago and look how much it has already done to us. It has rapidly accelerated the decline of our national relationship. It has fractured cities, parties, families, friends, faiths, genders, everything. And where it hasn’t fractured it has distilled and concentrated and pressurized and exaggerated and inflamed. It has pressed us down into fiery little eggs and rolled us against each other in a constant jumble of tension, until none of us can stand or live with each other.

And what we all need is just some space and some quiet and to mind our own business a bit. We need social media to end. We need less media absolutely. We need calm. We need a less concentrated perspective. We need to alter the focus of our eyes and ears and return them to the proper scale of our own lives. We aren’t ready to be God, hearing the voices and seeing the sins of the whole world. We’re just people, barely able to face and navigate the world immediately around us in a good and healthy way.

We need to stop listening to the people profiting from all this. The hustlers making their names and living off our suffering and outrage and the pain of an inflamed identitarianism. Our whole society is sick with it, from left to right. I don’t know if we can be cured. But first, at least, we need to stop drinking this poison and stop making ourselves sicker. And that means not listening to either Trump or the people claiming the invasion of the capital was a pro-Trump coup.

Trump is a fool, whose words capture the hearts of fools, whose foolish actions are then taken advantage of by fools to push their own narrative and platform, so they also can talk and act like and incite and excuse fools. All of them don’t really care about any of it, deep down, only that the person who gets the chance to be the dominant fool is them. Not that even they are aware of it.

Most people can’t see beyond their own filters, and see only their own advantage plainly written, their own story advancing and confirmed, taking clearer shape in the world, their own wounds clearly pricked, their own cares clearly provoked. And they see anything and anyone else as just an incomprehensible, utterly corrupt slag that must be purified and burnt out of society. As if there really wasn’t something deep down under all that perversion and twisted exaggeration and isolation that we didn’t really desperately need. As if the aggression and competitiveness of some was merely something worthless to be purged from society. As if the sensitivity and of some was merely a weakness to be eliminated from mankind.

It’s right to be cautious about excesses, the madness that comes from being isolated and unbalanced, from being alone, from being removed from the dance, having lost faith in its value and power. We need the harshness of the other, the softness of this one. We need the caution of one and the courage of another. We need the willingness of those and the reluctance of others.

Both factions are capable of descending into great madness and evil. And both are needed in concert for good. It’s wrong to reject the dance altogether, the value of our partners and who they and we can be when we are in balance. It’s inhuman to say that we don’t need one another. That we can be all, that we do not need, do not depend on one another. We’re sick without one another. It is, as scripture puts it, even in paradise, “not good”.

The dance is a trap. It is a prison. It confines us, restrains us, forces us into dependence and servitude. And it is our only hope for life and freedom, the only escape from slavery to our own nature and limits. Only in service and devotion to others, only in love and unity with them, only in tension and struggle with them, can we grow and become more than what we are. Only that way can reach toward being complete.

My own only claim to virture or wisdom is no great one. Only the claim of Socrates. I’m only that little bit wiser or different because I have some idea that I myself am part of problem. I’m not good or better myself. Only God is good, because only God is complete. I’m not. I’m just not under the illusion, or I’m a little less under the illusion, that I am. I know I’m a fool. And in our age, that passes for great wisdom. But, much like in the time of Socrates, no one seems eager to learn this wisdom.

I can in some sense sympathize with those Trump supporters, much as I despise Trump. If they truly believe what he was saying, if they care about the country and they’re hearing these things from the president himself and believe him, then a terrible injustice has been committed. They’re being brave and heroic, charging into a situation for which they are ill prepared and have no hope of success, against the arrayed powers of a massively powerful government (“the man”). They’re standing up to and drawing attention to a terrible wrong. From their perspective.

I’ve listened to plenty of people over the last six months justify similar illegal activity from a completely different perspective, seeing themselves as heroic for standing up to a different man, often to Trump himself. And the explanation both sides give is “well, but our people are actually right”. Which is what everyone thinks and says and really just takes for granted. And the truth is that usually to some degree both sides are right. And both are often also wrong.

Actions that are condemned by one side will often look heroic to the other side. How you see and describe them doesn’t derive from the nature of the acts themselves, but derives from the meaning and the narrative that you use to frame them. That’s what war is. That’s why both sides build monuments to their heroes. What defines heroism is a function of the context of those actions in that society, not merely the actions themselves all alone.

War is the most obvious and open struggle between conflicting contexts, conflicting narratives. When the only option left is to just decide by force which will become embodied in the world and become the shape of the future. These wars of narrative are always going on, struggling in a battle of selection to become the present and shape the future. Often they’re merely psychological. But in an exclusive world that contains definition and choice and specific character, only death can produce change and growth. Why? Because you can’t take any path without also giving something up, even if that thing is only possibility.

Possibility is pregnant with all possible choices. But in order to have any of them you have to choose one. And that means not choosing something else, letting that possible future perish. And harsh as that sounds, it’s a better bargain than making no choice at all. A train that chooses no destination goes nowhere. Maybe, someday, other future choices will reveal new possibilities, the return of similar past possibilities. But in the only real moment of experience, the present, you cannot go forward into the future without letting all possible futures but one die and fall behind, never to be.

Time and life itself are the function of the constant elimination of what could be from what is. War is the final escalation in the conflict between competing visions of what could be, an ultimate test of strength and will, the stubborn will to live, to be, to grow to become the future. Is it any wonder that the Norse, great and terrible fighters, gave man himself this meaning in his name, “the stubborn will to live”. And we see from a glance at the genetic lineage of men particularly how often that stubborn will has caused so many to fall behind and be forgotten while others became who we are today, became us.

What some people don’t seem to understand is that what makes something heroic or villainous isn’t a function of some objective feature of the physical world. It’s a function of what people believe. It’s a function of how they see the world and how they interpret it and what that meaning presses upon them as nesessary and courageous and praiseworthy action. It’s not something fixed or formulaic or just obvious. There’s a whole story behind it.

Human action is primarily about meaning, and our essential narrative are what provides the structure that causes that meaning to coalesce and become intelligible. That’s how human minds work. (This realization, along with the recognition that the material world cannot obviously be proved to contain “meaning” was what drove many thinkers into relativism. The hopelessness of sorting out any reality that wasn’t merely private in the face of such personal realities of expwrience, and the realization that the hoped for new common reality of bare physical laws and particles could not easily be construed in such a way as to include meaning and other such non-physical concepts.)

Messy afterthoughts: The flower wars of the Maya seemed heroic to them, to die in a war fought merely for the same of war. The raids of the Vikings seemed heroic to them. Do we know better now, or do we merely think differently? For all that we look down on them from our great height, what might they despise about us? If our current manner of life fails and falls, what might that prove? We enjoy great wealth, built on a foundation we largely inherited. But Rome stood for a thousand years, and Egypt far longer, on very different foundational narratives, against far more terrible odds, and we’ve hardly begun compared to their time scale. They weathered storms we could hardly dream of today.

Why do I love so much the assaults of cynicism and existentialism? Because facing them tears away your illusions and lays bare the real bones of reality and the human soul. It blasts away all the trite illusions that get in the way. It forces you to find better foundations. It’s a fire that burns away anything that isn’t adamantine.

I’m really not a cynic, though I may flirt with it and struggle with it. But I struggle with it like a beloved enemy. The battle with it makes me purer and stronger, if it does not destroy me. It burns away my folly and dross. It steals the comforts that would make a slave of me. It reveals the secrets at the heart of reality, beyond being. In mere glimpses, as around a corner. In that moment when self fails and falls away, you see, if you are not blinded and eradicated in the void of unbeing and unminding and unself and unsanity. And then you fall back into yourself. Recoalesce, like drops of mercury on a pan. But in that moment of exploded consciousness, for just a moment you see past yourself and get a glimpse of God. And are bewildered. And understand.

Coveting one another’s virtues and vices

Somehow our culture is obsessed with making virtues out of our vices. And we’re so eager to embrace them that we make our actual virtues and strengths into shameful weaknesses and vices. Women, on average, are more agreeable than men, but now publicly prize disagreeability and shame agreeability, as if women being proud of being defiantly in your face and is any better than men. I’ve never appreciated that aspect of men’s average personalities, and I don’t think women will wear it any better. Nor do I think the world is served by criticizing and shaming women for being more agreeable.

But we all seem to think that if we do it, if it’s us, not those people, then it will be ok, in fact it will be good. And we can do it and we won’t need anyone else to balance or correct or criticize us. It will just be a pure virtue when we do it.

Women might wear disagreeability differently than men, but that doesn’t mean better. Men might wear agreeability differently than women, but not necessarily better. Neither is strictly a virtue or a vice, or they wouldn’t be normally distributed.

Being disagreeable, as a woman, has been a problem throughout history, and not always well received, partly just because women have high expectations for other women. They expect and demand more solidarity and consideration. It matters to them more, it means more in their society, and they reward and punish it appropriately.

Men care a lot less about other men and what they think, and are much more like to say “screw you, I’m gonna do what I want”. But that disagreeability isn’t a virtue. Not for men, and not for women. It’s just an average feature. Men, and therefore their social structure, tend to be more disagreeable.

That also doesn’t mean that it’s a vice. It’s a feature to be understood, integrated, tamed, regulated, and dealt with. It could be a virtue, and it could be a vice. You can assume it’s good or bad for men or women to be how they are, that’s just how they are. The moral element is a separate, contingent, question. And you can’t assume it would be good or bad for either sex to change. That’s just swapping clothes, not improving them. The moral question is a separate issue.

Being “strong”, or outspoken, or in your face and bold, is not in itself either a good or bad thing. It all depends on how its being used, what it’s being used for, context, degree, balance, appropriateness, etc. This way of acting could be used for good, and it could be bad. And it’s wrong to assume that just because X group (my group) is being this way that that’s good and right and helpful. Or that because group Y is being that way that it’s bad.

Women, in general, have higher negative emotion. That’s why they make up the bulk of the anxiety disorders, while men stack up on disorders of aggression. Both sexes have their burdens to carry. Women have a more sensitive threat detection system, while men have a more sensitive threat response system. And both carry risks and challenges.

Women’s sensitivity to the negative is higher, and their tolerance for things not being satisfactory is lower. Then you add that average trait to average greater agreeability of women and you have some good and some bad results. Being agreeable means that women tend to seek group solutions to problems. They utilize community and the resources it provides to manage their concerns. And that’s pretty great. It also means that the concerns and feelings of any single person are somewhat regulated by the group, which acts collectively to evaluate and address those concerns. It also means they can be amplified by the group, one person’s exceptional concerns getting distributed among everyone, raising the collective threat assessment or moral imperatives for everyone when that isn’t quite appropriate.

To some degree we need to just learn the appreciate and understand the sexes for what they are, including their distinct character and differences. We won’t fix ourselves or fix the other sex by coveting their virtues or vices (as we see them). We simply need to recognize who we are, appreciate the value in it, and understand how we are meant to complement and temper and refine one another. After that, we can set abiut the much more difficult task of learning to manage and perfect whoever we are, how best to carry whatever burden we have been given in our place upon the spectrum of personality and society. We can learn to integrate, hopefully, some of the strengths of others, to balance somewhat within ourselves our natural tendencies, while understanding that all positions carry an inherent risk as well as an inherent positive potential.

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The coming election and likely Trump loss

Trump keeps talking about election fraud. The cost of fraud and the likelihood it will be exposed are very high. And the potential gain of fraud is actually very small in a national-scale election. Error has a far larger actual effect on national voting than any amount of historical actual fraud. Trump just stokes this narrative so he has a wedge to challenge a process that is actually very hard to manipulate in this manner.

It can be manipulated in many other ways, but outright fraud is one of the least effective ways. Personally, I see this impending Republican loss as a win. Trump was too poor an instrument to win this cultural battle. He is a part of the problem, the conservative mirror to the liberal extreme. Using him to fix things is like using flamethrowers to stop a hurricane.

So we lose this election strategically so we can set up a better option for next time. Someone wiser and more balanced. And Biden is probably the best case scenario for a democratic win. His sealing the nomination made the extremes of his party very angry, and that should be reassuring. He’s not what the hard left really wanted.

Now the real question is, will the left or the right learn any lessons from all this? The real lesson is that the extremes in both parties are the real threat, and people in the middle need to come together to push back and resist the extremes on both sides. Ideally the extremes in your own party, not the extremes in the other party. You get more results from cleaning your own house than bulldozing your neighbor’s, which you might not know well enough or have enough understanding of to effectively manage and judge and critique and don’t have cache and authority over.

Trump and AOC are mirrors to one another. And we need to push both of them back to the fringe and demand and give attention to people who preach caution, understanding, politeness, thoughtfulness, collaboration, unity, decorum, restraint, discussion, and patience no matter what party they come from.

On Shelby Steele

Reading Shelby’s book last year really changed how I understand not just America, but all kinds of things about all kinds of societies. I think he’s onto something about people in general and how moral-religious rituals in cultures center around guilt and absolution and the creation of a priestly class who gain moral (and perhaps political) authority as a result.

There’s a deep need in us to confront our feelings of guilt and duty and prove that we have correctly identified what sacrifices the gods demand and what proper sacrifices must be made. And here are these people who know what the correct sins are and know the correct way to absolve and appease. So we should all listen to those people, confess our sins before the priesthood, and be purified (or as near as possible) through the confession of sin and by giving our money to and listening to the priests.

The signs of this kind of thinking are everywhere. People literally refer to systemic racism as the “original sin” of our culture, even our own president. And the faithful demand tithes and confessions to address it. And there is definitely a priestly class and there are definitely followers and devotees of the faith, missionaries and zealots and indulgences paid by the wealthy to secure their place in heaven. There are special religious terms and ideas, a sacred language (as well as a sense of what is profane and cannot be uttered).

And it’s all powered by this fundamental (perhaps not incorrect) intuition that all humans have that there is some internal failing or incompleteness on our part, that there are some necessary truths to face and sacrifices to make to set ourselves on the right path and the right side of that judge, that ideal that condemns us by our failure to reach it. And we have priests and teachers who want to rise up and tell us what it is and how we can fix it.

This is such a common occurance throughout history that I think it touches on something we all grasp intuitively but explicate inconsistently and incompletely in every age. This is just the latest religion, the latest faith that seeks to address that concern. The question is, how well founded is it? Is it an accurate description of the world and of history and of ourselves? And does it solve the problem effectively? Does it create a consistent and coherent way forward that yields some real positive results? Does it properly understand and diagnose the problem and the solution? And that’s where I think sensible people can see that the answer is actually no, on both counts.

Surviving gender dissolution

The problem is that gender is one of the most, if not the most, fundamental representational category for human understanding. It’s one of the most basic things that a species is and must be aware of to function. So it’s one of the most basic bases of human thought, how we understand and conceptualize the world and ourselves. It’s one of the most deeply rooted archetypal categories for representing the world in our minds. And from a scientific standpoint its more fundamental to our inherent biological and mental structure than virtually anything.

Biological sex, and the need to detect and act based on it, goes back to single celled organisms. It predates complex life itself. It’s that fundamental, and understanding it (in some sense) and acting on it is histocially necessary for everything that has happened since that point. So confusing it, tearing it down, eradicating those fundamental categories, is deeply upsetting and anti-human, because it undermines one of the deepest and most necessary ways in which humans (and in fact almost all complex life) understand the world and themselves and determine how to act and find their place in the continuity of biological life and our species history.

That’s upsetting. It’s not a minor change to the territory of the mind. It is a deconstruction of the most fundamental basis of our biological and psychological and conceptual structure. That’s a big loss. You can’t suffer it and not feel pain. It’s a rejection of the fundamental structure of life and multiple layers of human identity. You can’t take apart something that has taken hundreds of millions of years to establish and refine and has cost an untold number of lives across all species and levels of complexity and is the basis of everything that’s been built since just after the development of internal cellular specificity and say “No, that’s not a thing, it’s whatever we want it to be; figure it out for yourself,” and think you can just figure it all out in a stable and coherent and successful way all on your own in a couple years.

There have been hundreds of millions of years and untold billions of lives lived and lost put into getting us to where we are. You aren’t going to be able to just tear all that down and replace it in a few years on your own (or even as a society) just because you think there’s a chance that you might have come with something better. That’s like blowing up the Earth on the off chance that living in space might turn out to be better, and people will just need to evolve and adapt to conditions there individually in the time they have once the bombs go off.
Sure, people have maybe been too reductive and rigid about gender, and we do need to be balanced and adaptive and wise as conditions change, but that rigidity and emphasis happens just because gender and sex really are that important to fundamental human identity and function and action and survival. It’s the sort of thing that if you lose your understanding of it, and if you lose the ability to act coherently and effectively based on it, you’ve lost something enormous. Something you can’t afford to lose. And so people put up protections around it, because it’s not the sort of thing you can lose or dissolve and survive.

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A comment on an argument about postmodernism

Don’t we all want equality? It all depends on what you mean by “equality” or equal treatment or even equal rights. Does equal mean “the same”? Fundamentally, are men the same as women? Are all cultures fundamentally the same? Is a transgender man the same as a biological man? If by equality you mean that all categories are the same, as in interchangeable with no difference in nature, value, or outcome, and all “truths” have equal validity and status and should be valued equally and all results of following them should result in equal outcomes, that’s a pretty big statement with a lot of underlying philosophical assumptions (and a lot that are subject to empirical verification).

We want to be nice to everyone and everything. We don’t want to say no to anything or anyone or make any judgements. Well, the only way to do that is to dissolve all truth and all value and level the whole thing out. The only way to prevent there from being some hard answers and some real differences, the only way to make everything the same, is to cancel the whole project, the whole race, before it can start.

The only way you can avoid some answers being wrong is by making all answers equivalently right. Then everyone will feel good and do well and everything will be better, right? The best way for children to learn is to teach them that all answers, categories, and actions are equivalent, right? That will help them the most, right? That’s being caring and fair and helpful and kind, right?
Bullshit. It’s cruel to tell people lies like that. It will harm them. As individuals and as whole societies. Murdering the truth isn’t a kindness to anyone, even if the truth hurts. Because we aren’t gods. We don’t get to design private worlds for ourselves where we define the nature of everything and control all the outcomes and nothing else and no one else but our own will and preferences exist.

Negative emotion exists for a reason. It exists to tell us when something is going wrong, when there is a misalignment between the world, our nature, our actions, and our identity. And it’s not obvious at first blush which it is. So we have to take the time to figure out if maybe there’s something in us that needs to be corrected and adjusted. And frankly, most of the time this is the case, because most of the time ourselves is the only thing we can actually control and change. Sometimes it’s the world that needs to be or can be adjusted to make us happy, but usually it’s us that uses our emotional feedback to learn how to grow and adapt and learn. We’re such tiny little finite things, we could hardly have all the correct limits of reality be laid out within one of us, and there are billions of us running up against one another. It’s far more likely that us little, temporary things need to learn from the big world and the big transcendent realities. The idea that reality should be expected to conform to the divergent preferences of some little hundred and fifty pound things of limited scope and intelligence, who live a mere moment of time in a tiny space is laughable. We’ve gotten an inflated idea of our own greatness. We think we’re gods, we have no humility or perspective. And what gives you, as a human, any right to assert your truth or its value or goodness over mine, whatever it is? My authority is just as equal as yours. So whatever I say has just as much value and validity, even if it opposes your ideas.

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Immigration

From an unsent letter

The thing that is interesting about immigration and group conflict and prejudice isn’t that it was so especially unique or terrible in America, it’s that it’s a universal problem everywhere, for all humans, and continues to be at all levels of socieity and, in all places, among all people, including those who to outsiders appear closely connected or indistinguishable.

There is an open, universal question being addressed. To what degree are we morally obligated to let in any person who wants to come into our territory and exploit it? That question doesn’t have a clear answer. The historical answer across most cultures would be, not much. And countries have a right to protect their borders and people have a right to try to protect their interests, because that’s their living.

With the Chinese thats a particularly interesting problem because they have moved into so many countries themselves around the globe, seeking opportunity, but the official position of the Chinese government on immigration is that non-Chinese people have no right to come into China on any kind of equal footing. Foreigners can ever only exist there in a provisional space, and the government will control every business venture you engage in and never grant you equal status as a citizen. And they’ve been having a lot of success and it’s given them a lot of advantages and bargaining power.

Their answer to the open question I mentioned is that they should be given rights to enter in anywhere, but that no one has those rights but them in China. The Chinese see their duty as protecting the rights and opportu ties of the Chinese. And really, that’s been the historical norm. They’re just perhaps the largest, most successful openly protectionist and totalitarian nation in the modern world. And you can’t just take for granted that the Chinese are wrong in their position., especially if they use their strength and solidarity to exploit the weakness of the European liberal political and economic systems to outperform them and eventually dominate them and supplant them. If their strategy succeeds and liberal western states and their influence crumble, that will be a historical argument in their favor.

America was really a bizzare and highly unusual experiment. The idea of a territory where people from anywhere could just come in and find anything even remotely similar to open and equal opportunity, especially when you’re bringing together all these different groups that can hardly stand their next door neighbors, like the Cornish and Irish, is a crazy and bizzare anamoly of untested experimentation far outside the norm of human experience and political strategy.

The fact that Asians were able to come to America and become the wealthiest and most educated subgroup, along with the Jews, is crazy, whatever difficulties they faced (and they did face many). It’s even crazier that it was possible for both groups to have that result in the same country. The fact that the wealthiest people group of African descent on the planet live in a country to which they were originally brought as slaves is also crazy. The fact that Irish, English, French, German, and so many other nationalities that had been fighting for centuries gave up so much of their identities and just lived together and mixed together when they had spent a thousand years hardly mixing with people from the next county over is crazy.

The crazy thing about America is that it was unique in its comparative lack of interest in the broad, obvious categories of division and identity, such a nationality and ethnicity, and much more interested, comparatively, in what you as an individual could contribute and accomplish. And the West was perhaps the most open frontier for that opportunity that had ever existed in history.

Of course opprtunity creates competition and generates its own unique problems. Being more open than anywhere ever meant you suddenly had all these groups rubbing elbows that had never had to face anything like it before. Never, before America, had anyone tried to build such a society out of such a crazy quilt of mismatched and unfamiliar groups, who had little means to know about or understand one another. And they all wanted a piece of the same unique opportunity and had left the confines of their old homes, that didn’t provide it, to pursue it. The fact that it went as well as it did and hung together at all is an argument in favor of the Ameican experiment.

Covid has been interesting because in many ways it’s a challenge to the system of open travel and unrestricted borders. It’s not clear that, when you let someone in, that you aren’t letting in something potentially dangerous to your own wellbeing. Europe is struggling with that same problem, for different reasons. European countries still maintain strong cultural identities forged out of an immense shared history and culture and genetic similarity. And now they’re trying to absorb very large numbers of radically different groups in a very short time frame (at one point around 3% of their total population in a year) and finding that it isn’t so easy and has a lot of difficult consequences.

You can’t just take for granted that it will all go fine and won’t matter and there won’t be any serious problems of conpatibility in the social ecosystem. People and cultures aren’t just generic. There are meaningful, real differences between cultures that people have legitimate concerns about how they can be integrated and coexist in a shared endeavor.

Cooperation, especially as individual and cultural differences maximize, becomes hard. And the argument “but we’ll all get rich and be prosperous and get opportunities” was a compelling carrot that America used to convince people to go along with it. But especially as (and if) American and Western prosperity fades and as (and if) authoritarian regimes like China succeed, it calls those compromises and that deal into question.

The real genius of Western liberal states is an idea that proceeds from Judeo-Christian religious teaching, that the appropriate level of analysis for a human is the individual, not the identity category. That God cares about the individual contents of the human heart, not where you came from. But that’s not the default or obvious answer, especially for a species that is so hypersocial and has such differing subcultures and strategies; that’s a disruptive answer.

And it’s not obvious that it’s going to be the default position going forward. Extremes of both left and right push away from it and toward a recentering of status based on identity classes. They might pick different classes to favor, but it’s the principle, not the example, that defines the activity. One group might say that it’s unfair and prejudiced to pick out and focus on the bad behaviors of a group, using it to characterize them as a class and assign class guilt. One group might pick blacks and say that you shouldn’t, that it’s morally wrong, point out statistics about criminality or drug or alcohol use or child abandonment, and argue that really most individuals are just people trying to live their lives and protect their interests.

What groups you feel you can’t or can’t do this kind of thing with depends entirely on your sympathies. Because you could do it with anyone. You could argue that most Irish or Chinese or English or Italian people, or white people in general, were just the same. And they shouldn’t be characterized according to this or that and assigned class guilt. Or maybe you think that you have a moral obligation to praise and focus on the positives of a group and ignore the negative aspects.

The higher truth is that there’s more than enough guilt to go around and convict everyone, every group, if we were being fair. And there’s an argument to pardon and ignore the faults of every group. No one really deserves a pass on judgement merely because they were either victors or victims, successful or unsuccessful. And some people are prejudiced toward the winners and some people are prejudiced toward the losers. It’s all fundamentally prejudice, because the arguments work both for and against everyone. If your narrative of sympathy tends toward either, you’ll only see the group you’re not in sympathy with as heroes by class identity and the other group as villains by class identity.

And the argument, “Yes, but we’re actually right about those people,” is exactly what everyone says. And, frankly, everyone is right. There is enough in every culture, in every person, to convict them. And if you’re sympathetic and see whatever group you favor as most proximate to your sympathies, there’s no limit to what you can excuse and ignore and justify.

That’s why class identity as the seat of focus for moral judgements is such an empty game. It assigns both virtues and vice too blindly. It plays a prejudiced game and tries to solve it with another prejudiced game. And conflicts between groups can only be resolved through group conflict and competition, through taking down the other group and pushing your group up. It’s an extremely simple and low-resolution solution to what is actually a complex and high-resolution problem.

Characterizing life and its conflicts according to shallow identities and measures doesn’t help, but rather exacerbates the problem. The world is so big and complex, and our perception and understanding is so limited, even of people quite close to us like people in our family and co-workers and neighbors. It’s not clear that it’s actually possible for most people to have anything but low-resolution pictures of and judgements about the majority of everyone they encounter. And it’s not clear that solving that problem by just assuming that everyone and everything is really the same, with the same generic beliefs and interests, is accurate or helpful.

There’s a real problem to be solved here, because if people really are blank slates and all differences are constructed and artificial, and all people and cultures have equivalent value, then there’s really nothing to be gained from cultural diversity. It’s doesn’t actually exist, it’s illusory, and there is no value other than what you already possess to be gained from anyone. They have nothing, really, to learn from you or you from them. “So why bother welcoming them?” is just as legitimate a question as “why not welcome them?” Reason doesn’t compel you to do so, and there’s nothing to be gained, so why expend the extra effort?

On the other hand, if there is some sort of higher, independent value toward which all people and all cultures aim and each capture more or less, but all inadequately and incompletely, then there might be real value in getting another perspective. But that premise would undermine the equal value premise that undergirds multiculturalism.

In my opinion, the mistake is in thinking that cultural relativism actually promotes rather than undermines multiculturalism. Because if cultural relativism is true then there’s really no external value or reason not to be completely and exclusively vested in your own individual culture. There’s nothing out there other than or better than whatever you already have. It’s only when objectivism and ideas of independent value and truth that transcend and exceed cultural norms rear their ugly, judgemental heads that we are actually forced to consider legitimate criticism of our own assumptions and value in someone else’s.

America, having lost faith in itself and in its ideas, is gradually evolving backward toward pre-liberal stances of tribalism and identitarianism, where the main things about everyone, the most interesting and significant things about them, the most important conflicts they face, are those of class identity, class guilt, class advancement, and class value assignment; tribal identity, rather than the individual.

It might seem like life is becoming more about the individuals, but it really isn’t, and it can’t under a belief system like cultural relativism and critical race theory. It’s just changing which individuals. It’s changing the rules for who gets assigned what, not how. It’s not freedom from prejudice, it’s just a new formula for assigning it. Because there’s isn’t any alternative absent a transcendent standard that judges both.

And since prejudice breeds prejudice and antagonism breeds resistance, you get both sides of the conflict pushing deeper and deeper into defending their tribal territory and “their people” and promoting their heroes and decrying their villains. But since there is no shared, objective neutral ground between them, there can only be blame on one side and self-righteousness on the other. There isn’t a place for the two sides to meet or integrate where they can recognize the shared faults and virtues of both. You just keep beating drum of the stories of class virtue and class villainy.

Ultimately, the question of how open borders (in any sense) should be is an open and ever-changing question, something that recent events have greatly emphasized. Entire civilizations have died because they didn’t recognize the threat they were welcoming into their midst. And others have stagnated and starved because they didn’t avail themselves of the opportunities and gains to be had.

Everyone wants opportunity, and everyone wants security. And it’s not always clear how to balance those needs, or to balance the risks and opportunities that other people present, especially when very different groups suddenly come together in a shared space of potential competition and cooperation. Americans can hardly stand the idea of the other half of America sharing the country with them. What makes them think the rest of the world will be any different? And if the stakes really are high (as people often argue they are, especially in elections and in the news) and you can’t just take for granted that we’ll all be fine and happy and equally successful and secure no matter what, then we all the more cause for real concern. People have good reasons to be very concerned about what they might miss if they don’t or what they might lose if they do or do not.

Those endemic assumptions we all carry, the things that we take for granted that other, different, people wouldn’t, or don’t, or haven’t, are dangerous blind spots. We assume we have answers to questions that aren’t really settled. Even America as an experiment is still very young and may prove untenable and unstable and may fail and crumble back into something else. Liberalism may prove to just be a brief, unstable flirtation that is replaced by something more like the Chinese system. In fact it seems more likely every day.

Communism as a form of totalitarianism was deeply rooted in class identity and judgement according to class. It failed, but its doing so wasn’t an obvious or expected outcome for many. And maybe it was flawed just because it picked the wrong class identities to focus on, an idea of class identity too unstable and vague to really achieve the kind of group solidarity and group opposition necessary to make the revolution take hold. That doesn’t mean it can’t take a new, better, form based on more stable class identities and tribes.

The stories and myths and tales of heroes and monsters of today, the tales of what is interesting and important and significant about people’s lives and identity and value are being written centered solidly around class identities and the oppositions and conflicts between them. That’s the primary level of analysis for humans now. That’s why so many stories seem so political these days. Because we’re returning, possibly most strongly in those areas that propose to be progressing away from it, toward a tribalistic culture of class and identity as the fundamental way to understand and evaluate people and their relationships. From an intellectual standpoint, looking at the underlying philosophies, almost inevitably so. Where else was cultural relativism supposed to go?

But to the average observer it will no doubt appear mystifiying that ideologies such as anti-racism, which sound unquestionably great, seem in practice to be leading to something like a voluntary return to segregation, or why attempts to eliminate sexism seem to be divide the sexes even more, or why attempts to create economic equality often result in even worse inequality.

These outcomes would seem very confusing to anyone who hadn’t studied history sufficiently to actually appreciate what produced many of the previous problems we now look back on, and misunderstand how much we share in those same qualities and strategies ourselves. We genuinely think we’re better or different, but all we do is share different assumptions and prejudices. And it’s not clear, even by our own metrics, that ours are right or better or more accurate or more stable.

For all our wealth, a lot of nations past would be unimpressed by our culture, and it looks like current and future generations and countries are currently losing their appreciation for it and respect for it and are ready to tear it down and try something new. We had a really good postwar period, and we’ve been coasting off it for a long time. But the rise is slowing and even reversing in some places. It’s not clear in what direction things will go. Globalism and liberalism may have reached their limit and begun their natural decay. You can’t take for granted that that isn’t the case. America, as it has been, is a strange experiment, the exception, not the rule. And nothing last forever if it is not nourished and transmitted carefully to the next generation. Perhaps we are simply reaching the long, slow decline of this story.

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The mixed benefits of losing organized religion

Some people seem to have misapprehended the message of Christianity. It isn’t that some people are good and some are bad (that’s our unsophisticated emotional instinct), it’s that some behaviors are good and some behaviors are bad, and all people are capable of participating in either one.

There’s a world of difference there. But people tend to reduce religion down to the instinctual moral instincts that religion is often attempting, through its elucidation, to inform and correct. It’s hard for us to grasp and maintain a focus on transcendent ideas and categories. We picture things most easily in human terms, quite literally. We humanize everything, we anthropomorphize everything, we personify everything. And so although it’s very admirable and useful to try to take a set of people or a set of behaviors and extrapolate to the underlying common element that is the actual problem, bad (incorrect, harmful, antihuman, maladaptive) behavior or bad belief, it’s the most natural thing in the world to reverse the process and simplify the behavioral and ideological struggle to “bad people”.

In seeking to reject this simplification, we sometimes today mischaracterize and reject the very structures established to help guide us and educate us and help us avoid those mistakes, and that do so openly in a way that can be viewed and codified and has been through a process of historical testing and explication. And we fail to realize that by sweeping them away we dont stop the process of simplification. We merely bury it and become less aware of it. So we go on being the worst kind of reductive religious zealots. Those who are completely unaware that that’s what they are, or even what the stable content of that faith consists in.

By abandoning “organized” religion, because it tends to be reductive, we do not succeed in ceasing to be reductive. That’s a universal human tendency, and organized religion was put in place partly to deal with this very problem. All we really end up with is disorganized reductive religion. And it’s not clear that that’s an improvement. Although not being aware of the religious structure and its failures might provide some measure of comfort, if not real world benefit.

Can you fix inequality?

The classic question that seems to be being debated in society today at all levels is essentially this: “Why shouldn’t this person or endeavkr be distributed the same goods or status as this other person or endeavor?” Why are things not the same? Why are they not fair, meaning equal, meaning possessed of the same value?

If your primary concern is fair distribution, something that I’ve observed women are particularly concerned with (and that has become a greater and greater political concern as women have gained political power; no doubt an anthropologist or evolutionary biologist would trace this concern back to some primordial feminine role of distributing the assembled goods of hunting and gathering at the communal hearth), then such questions are fairly easy to resolve. It’s fairly clear when status isn’t being distributed equally. It’s not hard to see that there’s a problem. Status, or value, of people/things/structures/identities/behaviors is not being equitably assigned.

So how do you correct that? That’s the practical question. By force, by education, by training, by intervention? All of these have been and are being considered and implemented. But do those attempts actually work and do they effectively produce the expected results and justify their cost? Can you redistribute status effectively? And what are the side effects? Can you level out status, bring up the status of some, without in some way bringing down the status of others to the same level?

This has been a challenging question in economics, and it holds just as much weight in the economics of social and moral status as it does in the world of money. And you cannot avoid such questions, if you truly care about the outcomes. It is insufficient merely to overserve that inequality exists. That fact is blindly obvious to everyone and explains the majority of human behavior. We constantly evaluate the unique properties of a situation, as well as the unique properties of ourselves and the unique results we wish to produce, and we tailor our actions accordingly.

If either humans or the enviroment or the results of action were equal by nature, then we wouldn’t bother with any of that cognitive or physical effort. Human intelligence would be fundamentally unnecessary, and even instinct would need little more than the most basic of algorithms to keep the system going.

So as humans, if we observe that status is not distributed equally, and we wish it to be more equal, then we must answer difficult questions beyond the mere fact of inequality. We must consider how to successfully adjust those outcomes. Especially, we must solve the perennial conundrum of how to achieve equality without being merely reductive. After all, the easiest way to achieve any kind of even surface is simply to scape it down to a level, to pick a floor and reduce all aberrations to its level.

Economically, nothing has been such an effective leveler as catastrophic destruction and death. If you want a surefire way to make sure everyone is at the same level, there’s nothing like removing the results of all achievement and storing up by hitting everyone with a catastrophic plague or war or environmental disaster. But I’m not sure most people would actually prefer that as a strategy, effective as it is.

Forced redistribution is another possibility. Take whatever unequal status anyone has above some level and give it to someone else whose status is suboptimal. Continually knock down those riding high and continually reallocate their excess to those riding low. And, I assume, hope that doing so does not fundamentally harm their means of producing status but rather corrects such problems. That by giving someone excess status they will naturally become more capable of producing such status, and that by taking status from someone they will become more naturally capable of maintaining the status they have been reduced to. Whether this hoped for outcome will actually occur is a very relevant practical and historical question.

There are, of course, many types of status, many types of value. Social status, economic status, professional, legal, relational, sexual, political, biological (health), physical (capability), and psychological status. And it troubles us how unequal people seem to be in these areas, how much variance there is. It troubles us partly that inequities exist, and partly that we are seemingly aware of them and make judgements and distinctions based on them and make adjustments to our behavior based on them. This upsets us. Are not all men and women created equal?

I suppose it depends on what you mean by “equal.” If you think that by equal we mean “the same,” and that differences and distinctions are illusory, then that’s a pretty big theoretical assumption in any field and leaves a lot to be explained about human behavior and history (and even biology). There would have to be some mighty big conspiracies going on manipulating the beliefs and outcomes of every dimension of life in every place humans have ever existed to make that kind of result possible, if the true underlying reality was completely the contrary. And it’s not clear, even then, if the conspiracies exist, why they should exist or why they should be successful in subverting the results if there exists no real fundamental differences to produce them or support their efforts. How do you scheme inequality out of means that are fundamentally incapable of such results?

If there exist no true distinctions between categories and definitions, if all exclusion based in definitional differencea is illusory, then why should putting up illusory divisions between categories produce differing results? Especially, why should these false divisions succeed in creating non-equivalence not just here, but in so many other places at so many times simultaneously, and so consistently, if the divisions are fundamentally illusory? How is it so easy to bend and distort the fundamental nature of the universe? How much extreme effort must be required to acheive and maintain such a crazy result, and what makes us think that inequality is achievable at all if nothing in the actual structure of the universe or humanity supports it?

One might ask of various fields, is there anything in economics or in biology or in physics (or psychology or politics, if you want to get into the softer sciences) to suggest that all differences in categories are purely illusory or purely socially constructed (whatever that means; made actual despite not being actual)? Is there anything in these fields to seriously support the contention that all outcomes of different inputs (different people, different systems, different structures, different actions, different materials, different behaviors, different assumptions) should turn out the same, equitably? Or should we expect differences to naturally emerge, regardless of manipulation?

One question that remains fundamentally unaddressed in all of this is thia rather an important one: What produces status? Are there already-existing, non-arbitrary means by which status is assigned and evaluated by humans? And to what degree can they be co-opted or overwritten or revised or ignored by those concerned with unequal distribution? If you stop taking the existence of status, or value, for granted, as something merely to be equitably distributed, and ask yourself, “What it is that produces it, what makes it possible?” you’ve got a whole new dimension of problems to address. The question isn’t merely, “Why doesn’t X have as much value as Y?” but “Why do X or Y have any value at all?”

This question is, I think, a far more interesting one. It’s of practical value to question how to divide a meal among a family. It’s a problem that needs solving. But it’s of far more fundamental importance to question how they got that meal in the first place, and even more practical to answer that question. If your essential problem is that people don’t have enough food, then the first question is useful for managing the solution, but far less useful for actually solving it. And attempts to solve the problem merely through management and distribution while ignoring production may actually serve to make the problem worse.

For example, if the adults in a family are undernourished and sick and unable to do the work necessary to find and provide more food, more equitable distribution won’t cure the poverty that is overtaking them. It is not especially useful to distribute goods equitably if they are not distributed according to where they are needed or merited to support further production of those goods. In a company, if I decided that I needed to spend the same amount on maintaining my facility as I do on producing my products, and allocated budgets for the departments accordingly, that would be equality. I wouldn’t be assigning different values to their contributions or accomplishments or allocating different amount of resources as a response. Everyone would have equal value.

Is that what we need? Would that work? What would likely happen to the company upon which all members depend for their pay as a result of such justice? Let’s take that question a bit further and look within a category. What if I decided that everyone in a given department deserved to be given equal pay, regardless of their roles and how much or how little responsibility or time the job required and regardless of how much education the position required. Would that fundementally work toward the natural health and function of the department and the people in it and increase and sustain the production upon which their salaries depend?

Let’s take it just one step further. What if I decided to pay people in a department equitably, the same, regardless of experience or performance? Would that naturally work toward supporting the health and function and productivity of the department and the people in it? Because if equity theory is right about difference between inputs, between categories, being illusory, then the answer should be yes.

Aligning the social system with the underlying egalitarian reality should produce the desired result, or at least not affect it negatively. If differences in categories and inputs is illusory, then disregarding them and structuring the system equally should result in equal outcomes; it should improve those outcomes, because no effort is being wasted or lost on supporting an artificial system of distinctions. It should be more efficient and more productive. If equity theory is correct, then this must be the inevitable and logical outcome, and it should be easier and more efficient to produce than its artificially-imposed opposite. So the question is, is this how the universe works?

Nope, it’s absolute horse$#!t. This is not being nice, it is not fair or kind or helpful. It is a denial and subversion the very basis of human productivity and survival, the entire point of intelligence and action. All people, all societies, all beliefs, all behaviors, all places, all systems, all actions, and all structures are not the same. They may all have value. But they are not all the same. They differ. Especially ones with real purpose. The more purpose they have, the more they are differentiated and specific, the more they can differ. Dissolution of difference in utility, in outcomes, can only be achieved by dissolving the purpose itself. Making your goal more vague and nebulous in order to extend the value of all contributions to it does not actually help you advance your goal. It merely dissolves the means by which you measure progress toward it.

If humans hadn’t figured out long, long ago there there are differences between things, between being here or there, between doing this or that, between behaving this way or that way, they would never have survived. If there were no differences, we wouldn’t exist, much less have achieved all we’ve achieved. Why have we outcompeted so many other species if there are no differences between us? How do you account for all the differences in your own life, as a result of your beliefs, capabilities, actions, and choices, much less all the differences in outcomes across history? Do you want to believe in a deterministic universe where nothing makes any difference and we’re all the same and no matter what you do it all ends up the same, where your choices and the individuality of your character make no difference? Is it reasonable to believe that we live in such a universe?

How do you account for differences in outcomes of people isolated and separated from one another by great gulfs of time and space (as was the case for a large amount of humanity across time)? How was the conspiracy maintained then? How were the outcomes constantly and consistently manipulated to fit the conspiratorial goals absent the presence of the conspiratorial hegemony? Isn’t it somewhat more reasonable to assume that the fundamental nature of the universe is inequality and difference and distinction, not equality and sameness and indistinctness? If this fundamental inequality is in fact the underlying nature of the universe, are we served or harmed by living in denial of it? Are we served or harmed by living in acceptance of it?

If human life, and its goods and its outcomes and even its existence, depend upon awareness of differences and the ability to recognize and categorize them, to be “aware of them and make judgements and distinctions based on them and make adjustments to our behavior based on them”, then what is our postmodern philosophy of equality actually trying to achieve? Is it not fundamentally in opposition to reality? Is it not fundamentally anti-human and dysfunctional?

As lovely as it all sounds, as tolerant and kind and optimistic as it may seem to try to extend access to all status and all value and all goods to all comers, how is such a philosophy that has fundamentally no understanding of how goods are produced but simply wants to reassign them, how is that supposed to actually produce paradise?

I think a better idea question would be, could you choose a more thoughtlessly compassionate and naive and counterproductive and childish outlook? There is a sweetness to children, who assume that everything just shows up and is available and costs nothing because their parents simply give it to them. They don’t have to pay the price to purchase those goods, or develop the capacity to produce them. They don’t understand where they come from; they just ask for them and get them.

And children often wonder, why shouldn’t I have that? Why can’t I have that? What stops me, other than me asking and you refusing? You could give it. So stop being a tyrannical and cruel parent. Stop abusing your children, stop excluding them, stop withholding from them. Be generous and your children will love you. Your family will grow. You will increase happiness, increase flourishing, increase provision. Because the goods, the value, the status, is simply there for the asking. It wasn’t produced by any special process or understanding. It wasn’t the result of some distinct and complex purpose and knowledge and behavior tailored to produce it.

None of this means that distribution doesn’t matter, or that we shouldn’t be concerned about it. Because injustice can take place at the level of distribution, as well as at the level of production. And it is the worst mistake for either side in the debate to assume that the only thing that exists is justice or injustice at their level. Injustice of distribution does occur and does matter, and there is painfulness even in the inequality of the distribution capacity for production, and neither are as easy to fix as they might seem (and trying to manipulate one often ends up messing up the other).

One could advance the theory that, well, it doesn’t matter that the nature of life and even the universe itself is unequal. It doesn’t matter. matter. It’s still wrong. Who are you going to take that argument up with? God, the universe, humanity itself? To some degree at least, we are constrained in our outcomes by the nature of things that we cannot and did not determine. And that’s hard for people to swallow. And if we are determined to correct for an injustice of that nature, is it easier or better or more effective to try to correct the universe for our feelings or our feelings for the universe? Should we prepare the road for ourselves or ourselves for the road?

The answer given today almost always seems to be that we can’t demand change from humans, perhaps because we believe them to be fixed and deterministic and fundamentally identical at heart and differences in outcomes to be the result of artificial manipulation, and so the answer to fixing it is more artificial manipulation, or manipulation that reverses the perceived distortion. So if we can’t ask anything of people, if we can’t allow them to be right or wrong or better or worse, then what lengths might we need to go to to fix the world? And how likely are we to succeed?

In fact, there are many cases in which manipulation of the world is called for. We do it all the time. Because accidents do happen. We make mistakes, too. And we try to insulate ourselves from those sorts of random effects and arbitrary injustices. But our current problem is more deeply rooted in our habit of assigning all differences in outcomes to the category of “arbitrary and unnecessary.” Perhaps we’ve achieved such a freedom from the limitations and consequences of reality through our technology that we’ve truly come believe we are gods, that we can take for granted that we can have and should have whatever we want, that the world can be changed to fit us, rather than us needing to bow to the harsh demands of the world.

By this point we should have some idea of what a pathological conception of equality and justice is. What should a proper conception of equality and justice be, then? It cannot be sameness. It cannot be founded in a rejection of all categories, differences, consequences, discernment, and judgements. Can an excessive focus on those differences and ignorance of all the problems related to distribution also result in a pathological ideology? Can a people become too obsessed with the idea of everyone getting (or having already got) their just desserts?

Of course they can, obviously. What is karma, in its bleakest conception, except a blanket philosophy that asserts that everyone gets what they deserve, and so everyone deserves what they got? This might actually be a more functional philosophy, if somewhat merciless and inflexible, than pure egalitarianism, because it at least is a decent reflection of the somewhat merciless world we live in and preserves the concepts that connect knowledge and action to outcomes (that keep complex animals alive). But that doesn’t make it right, or complete, or healthy, any more than pathological equalitarianism is right or complete or healthy. People are constantly falling off the extremes of their viewpoints, when sense and health lies in a careful balance.

So what is a sensible amount of equality? Or what is a productive and healthy way to use this instinct we have to distribute status more equally? Or should our concern not be primarily to distribute status and value equally, but to see its production equally distributed? Structural equality of opportunity, if not of result?

There is certainly a good argument to seek equality of opportunity. That seems a reasonable compromise between unrealistic egalitarianism and unrestrained opportunism. Throw in a dash of kindness and charity that focuses on enabling production, not dependence, and you might have a decent beginning.

Everyone should be able to agree on that as a basic principle, even if there will no doubt be constant arguments about what equal opportunity and kindness means. In what sense do you have “equal opportunity” if you do not have equal chances at success itself (for various naturally unequal reasons)? That’s something we have to solve in the process, in discussion and negotiation and dialectic and relationship. The challenges of life aren’t something you can solve with a dead, mineral answer. It requires something living, growing, struggling, a living process. At some point people have to accept that the world is uneven by nature, and some part of that is necessary, and some part of it is good. And some part of it can be altered, and some part of it isn’t good. And both together make us who we are and who we could be.