Sacredness

What does it mean that something is sacred? That it has some special importance and significance to someone, that it has a special power or meaning. It is easy to see, then, why sacredness persists as a quality even today. It may inhabit different idols, but sacredness is part of the furniture of human meaning, and so is part of the language and experience of our lives.

Whether the thing that is sacred to us knows or in some objective sense possesses the sacredness that we attribute to it isn’t clear. It is more like a spirit that inhabits it, that perhaps we do or don’t recognize. Often you can get someone to see or understand or feel the sacredness of something. It isn’t that hard. You just have to immerse them in the story, in the structure of meaning. And then usually they will understand. At least a little. Whether certain things are more appropriate vessels for a spirit or better avatars of sacredness seems to be a possibility. I think there is a real sense in which we can discuss how well something represents a certain spirit and how worthy of its sacred status it is.

The truth is, we live primarily in a world of meaning, not objects. We see meaning first, consider meaning first, interpret meaning first. Only later do we reflect upon the object itself in any detail, if at all. And the world of meaning is the world of sacredness. So to our eyes the world is full of spirits. And the most mundane objects are symbolic of and indicative of them. For modern humans no less than ancient.

Comfort or courage?

You don’t tell someone that “It’s normal to be afraid” in the hope that they will continue to be afraid. When we comfort a child and explain to them that what they’re going through is normal, what we mean is that being afaird is a normal part of the progression from not realizing there is something to be afraid of, to being afraid, to learning to overcome that fear or confront that fear or integrate that fear. Fear itself isn’t the desired end state. Comfort might be, if the fear is unreasonable. Courage might be, if the fear is reasonable. And you might need both to get to where you need to be, to a position of being able to live life in spite of your fear.

So whether your tactic is confrontation or sympathy, the real goal is the same. That is the thing we must not lose sight of, whatever end we come at things from. There may be a real question which technique will work best in this or that situation with this or that person, or whether perhaps a mix of both might be needed. But the goal of comfort in the face of being afraid isn’t enable us to continue to be afraid, it is so we can realize our own security and power to move beyond it, or even against it.

So, a typical dad who is fixed on pushing their child might need to consider if maybe the child really isn’t ready and so maybe they shouldn’t push so hard, or maybe they should provide more help and comfort. And a typical mom might need to consider if maybe the child handle what they’re facing and should be pushed, or help them less. Whatever your tendency is, you need to at least have the possibility in mind that you might be going too far or possibly not far enough.

But whichever extreme you err toward, the goal is to go places. We just need to be smart about how we do it so we get where we’re hoping to go.

Optimistic modernism

In response to the optimistic modernism of Greg Lukianov and James Lindsay

I listened to a great discussion between a couple of my favorite thinkers. But I can’t help but wonder if there are some things that are being assumed or ignored. The current historical and philosophical moment is the direct child of science and modernity and the enlightenment, and the fact that it is, means there are things that must be accounted for. The fact that the primary source and breeding ground postmodernism has itself been the academy, the academics, the enlightened, is a fact specially worth considering. The smartest people in the room built these theories and packaged them and sold them to the culture at large. Which begs the question, why did it come out of academia, and why does it hold so much appeal and fill such a necessary void for the common man? And what created that void to begin with?

I think one other problem here is the failure to recognize that liberal science itself is not fundamentally, at least for humans, self supporting. Rather, it rests upon a deeper and even more fundamental basis of rational and moral structures that allow humans to make use of the techniques of liberal science. Much of this content was known unconsciously and used both unconsciously and consciously throughout history (any basic study of history reveals that humans have always been just as smart and just as human as us today, often more clever because they had less help to reach their conclusions).

The elucidation of the laws of logic, the formulation of narrative and poetic structure to communicate stories, and the precepts of basic morality, family structure, self-governance, and social governance, were far more radical and foundational steps than anything that has since followed. Those are the basic foundations of a working human mind and life. And in the end, that’s the bedrock of everything else. And pretty much all the major religions had those big things worked out fairly well thousands of years ago.

For all that science since the enlightenment has accomplished (much of which had deep roots in ages of work that came before), it has in many ways not acknowledged or respected or bothered about those most foundational of foundations, seeing itself principally in the role of tipper of the sacred cows and never really pondering what role they might play or value they might have or what coherent and comprehensible and practical and meaningful rational, moral, and social bases it was putting in their place.

The failure of many enlightenment and modernist states, states based on reason and ideology and science rather than archaic religions or creeds, to produce utopia was often read by the common man as an indictment of their value. And even when they didn’t produce genocide or gulags or bloody revolutions, they still produced an excess of ennui and meaninglessness. It’s hard to know what to say about that. You can’t just tell people that they should be happy.

The enlightenment and modernism led straight into existentialism and postmodernism. That wasn’t an accident or an undealtwith holdout of unsophisticated primitivism, these are the direct children and direct result of modernism and the enlightenment. These are their unacknowledged sons and daughters, turning the weapons of their inheritance upon their forefathers.

And I would argue this is just a case of the son doing to his father what his father had done to his. Modernism did the same thing to previous rational structures as what is now being done to it. Having inherited the foundational structures of rationality and moral order from previous belief systems and generations, they turned those tools against their forefathers and declared them oppressors and idiots only seeking their own blind gain, in need of being purged and dispelled and corrected. They paid no respect to what they had inherited, what it had cost, what value it had, or how much of what they had was built upon it. And now the same thing is being done to modernists by their intellectual children. It’s poetic justice, in a way, and part of the tragic cycle of humanity.

There is an unacknowledged debt to the foundational structures of moral and rational stability to which liberal science owes its success. But if you talk to them, they built the whole thing ex nihilo out of darkness and blind ignorance. And then postmodernism do the same thing and the modernists cry foul.

One of the problems we have discovered the further we get in history is that you cannot design a system so perfect that it does not suffer from the problems of relying upon human participation in it. It does no good to have the rational systems of science if you do not have the more foundational systems of truth honesty order, proper and regulated desires, honest motivations, etc upon which to build them. More specifically, it does no good to have the scientific (or political systems) for people to use if you don’t already have the right sort of people to use them.

How you collect data, how you interpret data, what you do with that data, how you apply what you think you’ve learned from it, and all sorts of other terribly important matters are heavily dependent upon that basic human foundation of fundamental belief and practice. And although science is a wonderful technique and a wonderful answer to the questions “What? and”How?” it is not is good at answering questions like “Why?” or “Should?” without appealing some other deeper system of premises and values, which actually have an enormous foundational effect on the “what” and “how” that you produce.

The fact that the majority of postmodern nonsense has been generated in and disseminated through the university system itself should be sufficient proof of this fact, without needing to go further back into previous decades to find all the ways that the techniques of science have been used to promote and enact deeply dangerous an anti-human policies positions beliefs and inventions.

Having swept away the moral and rational orders on which modern liberal society and democracy and freedom and science were built, modernists somehow find themselves shocked to discover those systems now crumbling and a new type of religion arising to fill the vacuum left behind. Because these rational and moral systems are actually more foundational and more fundamental then thier later products of liberal science and society, it is not reasonable to expect them to continue to exist without them. It isn’t reasonable to expect that they can or will continue as they are without requiring something to emerge upon which they can be built.

The needs that these deep systems address are foundational to the human psyche and life, and therefore they are more in need of being filled and more felt as a vacuum in the void and therefore cannot be satisfied merely by the pleasant products liberal societies and science produce. So something must emerge; it is an aspect of humanity that cannot be removed.

You can call it religion, or the religious instinct, if you wish, but whatever it is it is foundational to the operation of the human mind and heart and spirit and a factor upon which all downstream constructions depend. And the simple fact is that those old systems are now crumbling and a new type of religion is arising to fill the vacuum and void left behind. Modernity helped tear the old cathedrals of value down. But the simple fact is that modernity and liberal science have not successfully generated a coherent and meaningful replacement system for filling that need. That’s what caused the turn to existentialism that gave us the rise of postmodernism. Postmodernism is what arose to save us from the existentialism modernism collapsed into.

I think this is also why we suddenly find such strange bedfellows in the fight against postmodernism, such as religious and conservative intellectuals and atheistic and liberal intellectuals. You even get odd hybrids like Douglas Murray that are a bit of both. They had been sold to us as natural opponents, but in their own way both were dependent on a devotion to some concept of truth and order and stability and honesty and proper intention and appropriate behavior and just plain old objective reality.

Call it God if you wish. But it provided a bedrock of thought upon which the edifices of modernity could be built, despite modernity often arguing that it was building them in spite of it. And there was some truth to that claim, but perhaps now we can see that it was not the religion, or God exactly, that was doing the resisting so much as the inevitable way that humans, even in the absence of such a conception of God, behave (as is very well illustrated today). In much the same way some scientists would ask you not to judge the efforts and theories of science itself by what actual people have done with them, I think the same holds true for philosophies and religions. Even just the idea of God did a lot for Western civilization and the Western intellectual mind, whether we acknowledged it or not. The idea was very good, even if what people did with it wasn’t always so great.

To some degree we would wish our theories not to be judged by their products, although at a certain point, especially when they have a practical element, they must be. We don’t want to accept that the ugliness of actual people and what they do with ideas is actually contained in our beautiful ideas themselves. We don’t want to admit that the ugly results of socialist theory might actually be a consequence of the theories themselves, rather than their failure in application. But theories must at least answer somewhat for their real world results, particularly if it can be clearly shown how one leads to the other.

It was the genius of Alexander solzhenitsyn that he laid the blame for the evils of the soviet state, not at the feet of Stalin, but of Lenin, who first conceived them. It wasn’t just the abuse of or distraction from the ideals of communism that produced the gulag, it was the ideals themselves. And I think there is some argument to be made, both from an existential, philosophical, and historical standpoint, that postmodernism is not merely the abuse or contradiction of modernity, but its product.

To be sure, humans do make a mess out of religion as such, just as they do out of ideology as such, and science as such. People can and do make a mess out of everything. The systems can’t exactly prevent that entirely. The question is, does a specific religion or ideology actively promote such ends? Or does it promote ends that we constantly fail to live up to?

That, in particular, is one of the strengths of the Judeo-Christian outlook that supports the process of continual seeking and refinement and challenging that liberal societies and liberal science are built upon, this idea of a standard of the ideal that we seek and desire but are always failing to live up to and falling from and having to realign ourselves to. God is continually calling the Jews to a just state, and they are continually bungling it or forgetting about it or subverting it for their own purposes. And they are continually having to humble themselves, admit the consequences, face the truth, and try again to do better. And God forgives them and accepts them and blesses them for it. That kind of attitude, that kind of people, is a rational and moral foundation upon which actual humans can build a process of seeking and enacting the good and the true.

When Socrates came along to blow the sophists away, they were a bunch of very modern (or postmodern) fellows. Thoroughly skeptical and mercenary, happy to argue any viewpoint for a bit of advantage. Not really believing in much of anything, they had seen through all arguments and truths. Bias and advantage were all there was. So why not learn to sieze the advantage? That is not the sort of foundation you could build the modern university on. No, it was only by establishing the call of his god, the daimon that demands wisdom, the honest pursuit of a real, stable, order and truth greater than our persona and its interests, that you lay the foundation upon which Plato and Aristotle could build the academy. The prophets came before the schools. Because we didn’t just need a certain kind of system, we needed a certain kind of people. People who shared a vision.

As Lukianov says, the postmodern ideology is completely in contradiction with the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy. Anyone who has spent time in a decent church would recognize a lot in the principles of CBT. They’re nascent (or perhaps deeply encoded) in the principles of religious self-examination. You can pull them out of the system they’re embedded in, and for some people that might help to clarify them and establish their value independent of your estimation of the system and everything going on in it. But

It is much easier to imagine in today’s world that everything is socially constructed because we today in our society can construct so much. We can build whole worlds around ourselves and live within them. Worlds of our own invention and construction and creativity. We can be what we want to be. We can be gods. To some degree.

The internet may be the forum that takes this ability to create our own world according to our own inclinations the furthest, but it is not the first. To a certain degree that’s what all products of human effort, all societies and structures are. We made what we wished. But we have always been somewhat limited by the primary level of reality, by the world as it is. The world of technology has taken us further and further from that world into the world of our own invention, and the digital realm has taken us the farther than anything else. And if you can invest entirely into that realm and make it your true home, it is the least limited space.

And yet it is still limited. And we are terribly offended when we return to the real world and find it to be not as the digital one we had created, with our avatar of ourselves as we have wished to make it, in a tidy bubble of agreement, in a place of personal security from which we can wield power and thrown barbs without consequence. It is terribly unjust and ugly that the world is not as the world we had made for ourselves. And so we want to bring the order and control and freedom (for ourselves) of our digital world back to the real world. We want to reshape it and make it confirm to our invented rules and structures. We want life to be as we imagine and wish it to be.

This is both our greatest power, as humans, and our greatest danger. Our ability to conceive and create with our minds. To alter the world. To create new possibilities. It has allowed us to create things that nothing else on earth could hope to equal, to exist in ways and in places that would have been undreamed of until we dreamt them. We are like little gods, able to imagine and to make it come into being, able to create a place to inhabit that is as we wished to make it. The problems arise when one of two things happen. Either we fail to respect and comprehend our power and divinity, or we fail to respect and comprehend our limitation.

We have to ask ourselves, what are the major basic questions that a system of knowledge and action must answer? What are its essential functions? They’re simple but difficult things. How to find a mate and maintain a relationship. How to make friends. How to treat your parents and children. How to get up and work each day. How to remain grateful while striving to better your situation. How to survive tragedy and suffering. How to face mortality with dignity and courage.

Even the most primitive ideologies have means built into them to help people do the truly basic tasks, like facing death with dignity. Even the most basic can answer questions about who we are and our place in the universe, what work we should set our hands to, what to love and what to fear. Modern systems largely dismiss every answer provided to all of these questions and say “work it out for yourself”. And most people find that profoundly unhelpful.

It’s a bit liberating, too, perhaps. At first. And you’ve got lots of nice things to keep you busy like jet skis and smartphones and streaming services and quick service restaurants and Snapchat. But on some level, all those distractions and powerful means for controlling your circumstances aren’t very useful or helpful if you don’t know what you’re using them for or what they’re helping you toward. “Me, being happy,” is a nice answer, but historically has proved a little vacuous. Certainly it’s better than being unhappy, suffering, bored, in danger, or in difficulty.

But the more we make the world like a video game, where we can be and do whatever we want in the world we’ve built, with no interference of real world consequences, the more we immerse ourselves in those comforting structures and create algorhythms to automatically feed us what we want, the more necessary it becomes to our psychic survival as we lose our ability to cope with any world that isn’t as centered around pleasing us as that one, the more trite and shallow it all seems.

Have you ever tried playing a video game where you’ve suspended the rules with some cheat codes? It’s fun for a while, being able to do anything. But eventually, when you realize you can’t be hurt, you can’t lose, you always get what you want, there’s not really much reason left to play. There are no limitations, no uncertainties, no challenge, no meaning. There’s nothing to be done. It’s all a foregone conclusion, a mindless repetition. There is a bit of mindless fun in it, but not the sort of fun that requires a human mind.

Looser clothes or tighter living?

My wife pointed out that maybe she should wear less flexible and stretchy clothing so she can feel where she is going and feel those limits. Maybe stretchy clothes aren’t the solution if you don’t want to keep getting more unhealthy. Maybe she should wear more unforgiving clothes.

She also speculated about how big you could get in a one size fits all garment like lularoe leggings. Probably pretty big, was her thought. Something made to fit and flatter and make anyone feel comfy has very few limits.

Maybe the solution isn’t to get stretcher clothes, she speculated. Maybe it’s to get healthier and get in control of our bodies.

Political parties that can’t lose…or win

People have forgotten how to strategically lose. There is so much pressure to always succeed, especially for politicians because you need to be seen to be doing something and to be a winner. Our whole society is too afraid to fail because we think that if we do it contradicts our entire value and existence, and we are too fragile to face the reality of having made a mistake.

The problem is, someone like Donald Trump can never truly be a winner because he will never admit failure. And someone who is never willing to fail is incapable of learning or growing. They will just move from failure to failure doing different things, repeating past mistakes, without ever actually learning or progressing or adapting. They’ll probably do some good things too, but always in an unrefined and haphazard way, booming and busting. Because an inability to admit imperfection means that you don’t have a good way to evaluate or perfect your better moves. You need failure to improve success.

And so we have a situation now where political parties back candidates they know are definitely a questionable choice and stick with them through their bad choices and bad behavior and never learn anything, rather than learning how to strategically lose, to learn from their mistakes, and then try again and do better the next time.

That childish unwillingness to admit or learn from our mistakes prevents any possibility of ever actually doing better or actually achieving the ends that we desire in the way that would be best. This also happens at the legislative level, where people are willing to push through laws and ideas despite their issues, and let’s figure out the problems afterward because we need to be seen as having accomplished something.

There is some truth in this approach, in that we do need to accept that nothing can ever be completely perfect or avoid all mistakes, and there will always be problems that will need to be dealt with as they come up. And if you’re going to wait for the perfect solution or the perfect person to do anything, you’re never going to have anything to go forward with now, when you need it.

The problems start piling up when you take that wisdom too far, to such an extremity, that you become completely unwilling to fail and unwilling to accept and admit mistakes and failures, just rushing ahead blindly in the desire to be seen as doing something. The problems arise when you become so determined to win and so determined to be seen being a doer and a winner (a very common political goal) that you may actually put forward something that actively stands in the way of a better solution or retards the goals that you are trying to reach.

And this happens far more often than we would like to admit. Sometimes the best laid and best intended efforts fail in their results, but we do not remove them or repair them or challenge them because what really matters to us is to have been seen to have done something, and it would be too big a challenge to the effort and the expense of what we did if we admit that it did not work. Why would anyone give us power and millions upon millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort if we admitted that what we did with it just didn’t really work? And once the system is in place it will have its own institutional incentives that keeps the whole ball rolling along, regardless of where it’s going.

This is something that Thomas Sowell has complained about a lot with regard to intellectuals and politicians who gain their success from the advancement of their ideas and do not have to pay the price for their failure in practice, but instead leverage their failure into an even stronger argument for themselves and their importance and their position. There are many programs we have in place, as well as many people that we have in place, that have not succeeded in achieving the results they were expected to achieve, especially not within the time or means in which they promised to achieve them.

And yet the demand for their advancement never lessens, and they become even more and more necessary as the results they promised actually become less and less evident. The less they achieve their stated goals, despite getting what they asked for from us, the more they need to ask of us. More support, more money, more effort, more defeating of their enemies. At what point do you say, hey, you’re never going to get everything all your way, and you got what you said you needed, and nothing has changed. But they say that it’s even more important to elect them again, because the situation is even more dire now, the need more urgent. The problems they promise to address will never be solved or retired, because if they did then the fixers own importance and necessity would be lessened. You end up with professional revolutionaries campaigning on a never ending war that never seems to quite tilt in either direction toward any resolution.

The danger of agreeable people

In an extreme situation, one with high and terrible stakes, it’s highly probable that the most likely people to have caused it will be quite disagreeable, and the people most likely to resist and halt that situation will also be disagreeable. The agreeable people occupy a middle space. They are less obviously dangerous, because they don’t stick out and rock the boat as much. They don’t shock you by standing out against the tide. They stick closer to the general good and general will of the group.

But. But if society ever shifts or is led in a way that is genuinely dangerous, then the agreeable people become part of the problem, in fact an almost intractable and irresistible core to the problem, because most of them will shift and follow the trend in the interest of group solidarity. They form a solid mass, far more irresistible than a lone dissenting voice, that can roll over whole nations.

My wife once shared with me the story of an amusing phone call. A coworker, who was very sweet and agreeable, was on a phone call with a very disagreeable person who was reflecting that if a certain type of person ever came into his neighborhood, he would be tempted to shoot them. “Yes, totally,” was the girl’s response, instinctively. Her boss, who was listening in on the call, and who is a more disagreeable person (and wasn’t personally put on the spot in such an odd social situation), later pointed out to her that she had just casually agreed to shoot someone. And while that might be good customer service, it was problematic behavior.

Now, my wife reflected that this is a problem with agreeable people. They want to go along with you. They want to believe you. They want to sympathize with you. They want to move in sympathy with your motion. But if you align them with someone taking a bad tack, they might not even really think about what they’re going along with. Because they don’t really want to resist you or challenge you. They want to be in sympathy. They want to move together. However, my wife pointed out, it was only a phone call, and the girl was really nice and wouldn’t really agree with shooting someone in real life. And that is where I actually disagree.

The data actually shows that the majority of people, in a social situation that favors it, would be Nazis (or at the least Soviet informers). Most people in a society go along with things. There’s an enormous cost to bucking the trend of a whole society. The costs are so deeply embedded, the current is so ubiquitous across all domains of life, that for most people the inevitable, necessary option is to just go along with it. You need to go along with it. It is, according to the rest of the group, to whom you look for solidarity and guidance in determining the general good, the right thing to do.

Very few people set themselves the task all on their own of determining what is right or wrong. We outsource a lot of those tasks, delegate them to the feedback of the group, to test ideas and actions and positions for us so we can know what is and isn’t appropriate so we can maintain our position on the right side of society and history.

Very few Germans actively resisted the Nazi party. In Soviet Russia, half the population was informing on the other half, many of them because they were actively trying to be good citizens. Those are extreme examples, but the trend holds everywhere. Most people, especially in a situation where the whole structure of the social game is set up to reward them if they follow along and to marginalize them if they don’t, will try to remain within the group. And so they will at least assent to their part of the group’s action, even if they don’t actively participate in its most extreme activities.

Average housewives may not have run the gulag system, but plenty of average housewives provided information and testimony that sent people to the gulag. Even in Nazi Germany, the way they actually handled the Jews was very calculated. Each person just had charge of a certain part of the process. Hired outsiders from other countries were brought in to assist for some tasks. Ways were found to make it easier for people to participate. Plenty of good drink, strategic breaks, even the chance to back out of certain assignments.

Some people did the assignments with more determination, more willingness. Many more did it as part of their solidarity with their fellows, sharing their part of the common burden. And these were the people at the foremost extremes of evil action, the people whose job it was to round up, strip, kill, or deport the Jewish people to the camps. Most other Germans had to assent to and participate in far less. And it’s worth remembering that the Nazis were voted in; they didn’t seize power. And they were voted in partly as part of a pro-social effort to help the country, to right past injustices, and to protect it from the genuine dangers posed by external and internal threats.

Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are good examples because they’re so recent and so extreme. In some ways Russia is actually more relevant, because it was such a vast ideological revolution and ended up encompassing so many countries and involved the people’s participation in the system from top to bottom. It was literally meant to be the state of the common people. As was Mao’s China. And the result in both cases was horror beyond belief, systemic dishonesty, corruption, betrayal, and oppression. This wasn’t just a small core of evil leaders like Hitler and his generals trying to conquer the world. This was the people’s revolution, liberation and prosperity and equality; utopia.

So it’s worth remembering the lessons of history. You should never underestimate what the average, agreeable person is actually capable of agreeing to. Given the right circumstances. Don’t underestimate these lovely people who seek and follow the common good. Even if they won’t engage in the most extreme actions themselves, there’s far less of a limit to what people will assent to and participate in, in their own way and capacity, than you might think. Those nice, upstanding citizens are often only as good as the system they’re bound to. And their power and solidarity can be wielded to terrible ends as well and being ones.

One of the lessons to be taken from The Gulag Archipelago is the author’s reflection, looking back, at all the ways he actually enabled the state that came to oppress him to come into being without ever having realized it or taking responsibility for it. Soviet Russia didn’t come from nowhere, it built itself brick by brick, in large part through the efforts, actions, and assent of the common people (the elite power holders, the aristocrats and even landed gentry, after all, were mostly either killed or arrested).

So we must have a clearer and more accurate picture of humanity, and especially of the danger of agreeable people, which we understand less and credit far less than we believe in the danger of disagreeable people (which is more obvious, especially to those who find resistance to the group upsetting). We need to become conscious of an awake to the subtle and potential dangers of being agreeable. We might have no clear idea what future state (literally or figuratively) we might be creating with our agreeableness.

The dangers of disagreeable people are, these days, very widely and easily understood, just as it’s easy for us to see how, for example, men or the political right can go wrong. But we are less acquainted with the pathology and dangers of women and the political left (which are no less real nor extreme, only different). Because they do exist and are no less real.

These peoole aren’t an entirely different type of humanity that is somehow miraculously better and right and without flaw or danger or pathology. It’s just a different pathology. One that’s less obviously confronting you with its dangers, but dangerous nonetheless. It may be less like a wasp confronting you with a nasty sting than it is like a hive of bees surrounding you and slowly vibrating you and cooking you to death (and yes, that is a thing bees do).

It’s worth remembering that the Nazi party was the Social Democratic Party of Germany. That’s sounds nice, doesn’t it? Very left wing and progressive. And Stalin’s party was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It was formed as way to unite activists in the struggle for political freedom and equality.

The point isn’t to argue that our current political left is like either the Nazis or Communists in sheep’s clothing. The point is that you can’t take for granted that they aren’t. You can’t take for granted that anyone isn’t. Even your own party. That’s the problem. Trusting a person or party or ideology just by default, being agreeable, going along, assuming there’s absolutely no potential for danger, no pathological version of or element to what you believe in, is itself catastrophically dangerous.

The danger is there, no matter whether you are left or right, whether you are agreeable or disagreeable. Your inability to perceive the potential for danger in certain groups, including your own, is part of the danger itself.

The idea that that sweet girl in customer service could not, under the right circumstances, assent to and be complicit in a horrific state of affairs is completely wrong. And more recent psychological experiments have also confirmed that to be the case. Most people will go along with almost anything, and even act in their own capacity to support it, given the right environment that rewards it.

You don’t have to be Stalin to support the Gulag system, you can just be that good neighbor who reports when someone is cheating and unjustly hiding something and stealing from the system and the good of everyone. You can just be that good citizen who reports that thing that person said in private or online that goes against what the party has decided is the good of all.

So there is a real need to recognize and understand the dangers posed by agreeability. You may be doing someothing you actively think is good, largely because the way you structure your evaluation of what is good is highly conditioned and determined by how your position affects and is viewed by others around you. You don’t want to cause distress; you want to seek the common good, as it is being broadly expressed and sought. And the fact that people might be wrong, and that you might need to stand up to them and disagree with them and resist them and not give people what they want and even hurt them by saying and doing things they don’t like and don’t agree with, and that will cause you to be seen as mean and disagreeable, as an antiosocial element, won’t be an easy thought to entertain.

Disagreeable people, on the other hand, worry less about such things. And that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. It makes them more dangerous in a certain way. They are more able to step back and look at things from either a purely ideological or purely selfish point of view. Because they care less about what others think or want and feel less of a need to be in sympathy, they might just focus on what they think and want and not give a damn what anyone else says. And that can be good, or it can be bad, depending on the quality of their mind and character.

Most people are safer with more awareness of and care for the thoughts and feelings of others. It helps to distribute the burden of judgement and responsibility, so you’re getting an average consensus, and not betting so much on the success or failure of one person’s judgement or feelings.

Disagreeable people pose a more obvious danger, not only on their own, but because they might be able to move large parts of the more agreeable culture along with them. Of course that also makes a good disagreeable person dangerous to injustice and dishonesty and evil.

Alexander Solzenitzen wasn’t too disagreeable a person, but he was disagreeable enough to privately complain about the party in a private letter and get arrested and sentenced to the gulag. And he was disagreeable enough to decide to work hard to resist and deny and denounce the party, and his own part in enabling it, once he had seen the truth. And he helped bring down the whole international soviet system with his unwillingness to assent.

And he tells terrible stories of pitiable people, sent to the gulag, who could never see it as anything but a terrible mistake, who could not and would not accept the corrupt results of the system, even when they themselves were the victims. They still argued that they had done right and had been good citizens and had gone along with and served the party, that they had been agreeable and were part of the positive project for the people and the common good, and all of it was a terrible misunderstanding. These loyalists could never accept or understand what had happened because they remained naive and couldn’t never bring themselves to disagree with or question or distrust themselves and the system they had participated in.

We need more caution about agreeable people. We can’t just blindly trust them, nor should they blindly trust themselves. Nice people are still people, and people are wonderful and they are also dangerous. Being agreeable may make you more likely to be attuned to the consensus and movement of the group, and that’s largely a good and necessary thing for society to operate. It’s the glue that holds it together. We just need to keep in mind that the group is far from infallible and may participate in and assent to all kinds of things without really questioning them that much, in the assumed interests of the common good.

We also need to rehabilitate the value of disagreeable people. Not just our own disagreeable people, the ones inside our ball of consent, but voices speaking out to question the consensus. They exist for a reason, even if they upset us sometimes. They need agreeable people to keep them in line, as agreeable people need disagreeable people to keep them in line. The two are meant to restrain and refine one another.

We can’t assume that there is no value in being disagreeable. One curious example from Nazi Germany was an elite commander who actively tried to stop the rounding up of the Jews. Not because we has so in sympathy with them. He was the commander of an occupied city and was trying to run it successfully, to prove to the people how German approaches were superior and could bring order and prosperity. And he pointed out, correctly, that the Jews were skilled and essential craftsman that the town needed, that they were indispensable, and getting rid of them would cripple the economy of the whole region. It’s a curious fact that when things got worse for Germany and there were less resources available, the leaders did not slow the extermination of the Jews, but poured even more into it. If they had set this goal of revenge against the Jews aside, it would have helped them win the war.

This particular commander wasn’t in it for that. He was in it for the political ideology, the genuine belief that they would make things better under their new system. He wasn’t in it for personal revenge or an ideological or emotional vendetta. But plenty of others above him were. And so you had a strange situation where a Nazi commander was literally running around his city overrun by the units in charge of deporting the Jews, confronting and even threatening to shoot those soldiers if they didn’t leave, and doing his best to secure what Jews he could in safe locations.

Afterward, this commander wrote and complained at length to his superiors and defended his position as being the proper one actually in the best interests of the Nazi party and Germany. The elimination of the Jews, he pointed out, was wasteful and foolish and self-defeating and barbaric and would wreck the efforts of the Nazi party. And he wasn’t wrong about any of that. But he himself, a Nazi commander, was one of only a very few who actively pointed this out and tried to do anything to stop what was happening. Not because he was against the Germans or for the Jews, or because he was so nice or so mean, but because he didn’t agree with what his party said was really in the Germans’ best interest and was willing to fight for it.

Most people, even those in charge of carrying out the Holocaust, just went along with what society demanded of them quite agreeably. It’s also worth pointing out that it was another loyal Nazi leader who boldly stood out and resisted the horrific actions of the Japanese in China during one of the worst slaughters of the civilian populace in Nanjing. Again, not because he was on the side of Chinese or disloyal to his party, but because he didn’t agree that such actions served the good of his own endeavor. Stories like these are confusing because they don’t easily fit our narratives and moral understandings that are calibrated so much by group identity and solidarity.

These Nazi commanders were still loyal Nazis, they saw themselves as part of that group. But they were willing to point out and even actively resist their own side when they disagreed that the group’s actions were really the right thing to do and believed they would bring harm. Most people learn the idea of what is right and wrong by social cues, by how the group responds to an action or posture. They assimilate that feedback and use it to navigate society and determine action and present themselves as good and acceptable and pro-social. They learn what they can do and what they can’t do, what will get a bad reaction that shames them or pushes them away or marginalizes them, what will earn them praise and prestige and approval and open up opportunities.

Most people instinctively learn this way and react this way constantly (and we all do to some degree, unless you’re a genuine sociopath). And the people and society around us are constantly sending feedback. They’re constantly sharing their expectations, their values, their concerns, their fears. And in quite benign ways. It’s a social narrative woven all through our media, our entertainment, our art, our advertising, our politics, and our day to day conversation.

Maintaining a large group in cohesion is very difficult. Ants are the only creatures that maintain comparably large and complex societies, and they do it by enforced genetic identity and despotic control. All the members of the colony are nearly identical, and the queens rule supreme. Of course this gives each type of ant colony a very limited ecological niche, since they’re so uniform and specialized. They have a reduced adaptive potential as a result of going all in on scalability (the ability to go big, achieved through consitency and centralization).

Humans form immense social structures with far more variability and flexibility and decentralization than ants. And one of the ways we deal with that challenge on a social level (from friendships up through whole states) is through an immensely complex system of interpersonal communication. We’re constantly sending signals and adapting and responding. There’s constant feedback and recalibration occurring, to make the group cohesion possible. It’s an immense social free market, constantly determining the value of social goods and giving feedback on the cost and reward of various behaviors. We’re hypersocial, and so we must be hyper-communicative and socially sensitive.

But you can’t run such a system purely on adaptation to the group. A system based solely on that is directionless and amorphous and unable to actively and quickly refine or adapt or innovate. Some portion of the people have to be at least slightly more willing to go somewhat against the consensus, to test it, to either see what might actually work better, or be willing to theorize about what might actually be better for the group, even if it’s not the average strategy the group is actively rewarding. I’m not advocating for rebelliousness or contrarianism or revolutionary defiance or anarchism. Those are the pathological, unbalanced versions of this type, as a completely dronelike and fearful and sychophantic and compliant attitude is the pathological version of the agreeable type. There is a good type of disagreeability, as there is a bad type of agreeability.

Collaboration alone is not sufficient for a just or successful society. Confrontation alone is also not sufficient or it just or successful society. Each of them might be necessary or useful or good or healthy in the short-term or in a certain circumstance. But you cannot take for granted that either will be successful or just or helpful universally. They both have their circumstances where they will impede rather than help you, and they both have pathological versions of themselves where they have become too universal and unquestioned and unbalanced to avoid becoming anti-human.

Rehabilitating racism

Anti-racism is a problem because it represents a rehabilitation of racialized thinking. Rather than seeking to reduce the degree to which we assign value and make judgments and sort people according two race, it moves those judgments to the forefront.

We’ve seen from history where that goes. The most likely result of such mental sorting and value assignment is a return to segregation and Jim Crow type approaches to the structuring of society. Favoring and penalizing certain people purely based on the color of their skin. Taxation and economic benefits based on the color of your skin, advancement in education and business on the basis of your skin, preferential hiring on the basis of skin color, choosing what to read and where to shop and who to oaiten to on the basis of skin color, all that stuff. Cheers and praise and moral value assigned a priori purely on the basis of skin, reduced platforms and reduced validity of opinions on the basis of skin.

All of this is miles away from the more liberal democratic approach that was favored previously in the latter half of the 20th century. The fact that this move seems justified to some people is hardly a novelty. Such things have always seemed perfectly justified to those who believed in them.

The real lesson to be learned from all this is that people are largely unable to recognize or evaluate viewpoints and ideologies outside of their context. So an idea that bothers them extremely when it comes in one context or from a certain group of people with whom they are not in sympathy register Ls not at all when it comes from a different place, in a different context, or from people with whom they have sympathy.

Most people are almost completely incapable of actually abstracting the positions from the people and the circumstances in which the ideas were advanced, which is what most people actually use as their primary basis for decision making and moral evaluation. Rather than beginning with exercising their most objective mental faculties to guide their reactions, most people primarily experience an instinctive and emotional response based on personality and essential sympathy with (or antipathy with) the object in question, then follow those reactions up with rational explication afterward.

What this means of course is that people are very capable of seeing the splinter in someone else’s eye but are completely incapable of seeing the log in their own, even when they’re composed of the same material. Context, sympathy, circumstances, impressions, proximity, and familiarity play an immense role in how we evaluate whatever ideas we encounter. It is very difficult to make the move from the expression of an idea in those contexts to the actual core idea or argument being presented, absent these properties.

And so left-wing authoritarians are quite upset about right-wing authoritarians despite subcribing to similar approaches, because it’s not the authoritarianism itself they really object to. It’s those people’s authoritarianism that’s bad. Their own they hardly even notice, because they accept the premises behind it and see it as justified. For all their arguments against it, they aren’t really against authoritarianism a priori. Their arguments against it by the other side are applied a posteriori, after they have already found that they are not in sympathy with that faction. And they are quite willing, having found sympathy within their own faction, to apply a posteriori argumentation to justify those same authoritarian approaches from within their own group.

This is why it is so easy to find a hypocriaies and conflicts and betrayal of principles in politicians, for example, or among almost anyone who is defending their position on politics. People regularly call out things in the other party that their own party is also clearly guilty of, and are completely blind and ignorant and defensive and full of excuses when their people do the same things and it makes one wonder. “I thought you were against that? That’s what you complained about from that other person, and yet you don’t complain about it when you do it.” It happens so often and so consistently, this inconsistency, that it’s almost comical.

It is all because the process of essential moral evaluation does not go: Abstract reasoning – – >Moral conviction, it goes: Moral intuition – – >Abstract reasoning and argumentation. So when anti-racism brings in what from another perspective in another context would clearly be recognized as the very essence of previous racism, they do not recognize it. And because it is in the service of a cause for which they are sympathetic or rather a group toward which they are sympathetic, their racialized thinking and morality is portrayed as justifiable and reasonable and righteous.

The actual arguments and suggestions of both the current purveyors of racialized thinking and the racialized thinkers of the early 20th century are essentially the same, they just come from a different context, a different intuitive sympathetic position that serves as the real fundamental basis for justification. So it’s not the racialization itself that makes the position wrong, it’s the fact of where it came from and who it serves that makes it wrong. If it serves the people and the cause I am for, if it’s our racialization, it’s good. And that’s how you rehabilitate racism.

How Trump helped lose the culture war

As much as I despise Trump for his selfishness and degeneracy, critical race theory, postmodernism, fourth wave feminism, and various other popular ideological movements (which have all cross pollinated into something large enough to be considered a religion) make him look like a silly little middle school bully next to the Maoist revolution. But I still voted against him. There isn’t any hope for conservatism as long as Trump is around. He’ll keep subverting it and distorting it and making it about him. And he isn’t about anything other than himself. So to save the future of conservatism, he has to go. Hopefully someone better will come along. It’s hard to imagine anyone worse.

It’s strange though, how few people are aware of something as large and powerful and deeply rooted as what critical theory has become. It’s probably one of the largest religions in America by now. It has made enormous inroads with Democrats. There are a few holdouts on the fringe. Some old school democrats, labor dems, classical liberals. On the right, a lot of the educated women were (justifiably) shocked and alienated by Trump. That opened a wedge for a different moral narrative to make inroads and start to move them away from their positions. Critical theory has done that very effectively, thanks to book clubs and social media. Women like to read, and they like causes, and they like to share things, and they like to share caring about things. So lately the reading list for a lot of college educated (formerly conservative) women has looked like the reading list for the critical theory classes at a liberal university.

Conservative men don’t seem to be aa amenable to critical theory or postmodernism, but I believe that they’ve still been affected and infected by a lot of the perspectives and tactics of the postmodernists. Having had various tactics used on them, they’re eager to return the favor and wield the same weapons. And Trump certainly hasn’t helped set the tone for a thoughtful and reasoned discussion of anything.

Maybe it would have happened slowly of its own accord, thanks to the gradual cultural diffusion that shapes social norms. But I think the advancement of postmodernism into the youth and into Christianity, particular among women, was hastened by two historical events. First, the introduction of the smartphone. That just changed everything, our whole network of experience. Second, the election of Trump.

For all that conservatives and even some liberals have praised Trump as a defense against the advance of postmodernism and critical theory, I maintain that my original prediction about his term has, in fact, come true. Trump is flashy and belligerent and confrontational, but that’s just not how you actually win the culture war. You win through persuasion, through getting people to understand and appreciate the best version of your position. And Trump consistently serves up the worst, most shallow and thoughtless version of everything, even the good stuff. His election represented a betrayal for many people, a betrayal of principle, an unforgivable compromise. And the way he has warped government and his party to his personal use has been disgusting.

So I blame Trump for the loss of a lot of the best conservatives. Educated, high-conscience women that we really needed, that formed a compassionate and approachable backbone that helped balance out some of the more disagreeable and thoughtless elements in the party. Also he drove out or drove into hiding and retirement many of the true ideological conservatives, the people more loyal to the ideas and values of the party than to the party, who knew what they believed in and wouldn’t compromise. Trump wanted to be the conservative party, so he didn’t want competition from anyone or anything that demanded that it was something other than loyalty to him. Those people, men and women, haven’t joined the democrats, generally, and are very unlikely to embrace critical theory even if they do. But they’ve been disenfranchised and lost their party platform. I fall into that group myself.

For me, though, the loss of those educated, conscientious women is what really hurts. And it’s not clear whether we’ll ever really get them back. Trump drove the most important parts of the party out of it, in my opinion. And right into the waiting arms of critical theory. And I will never forgive him for that. Ever.

On the upside, the craziness of critical theory has started pushing some liberal democrats out of an increasingly authoritarian democratic party. They’re looking askance at their own lines now and wondering if maybe it’s worth taking another look at some brand of conservatism. And if Trump weren’t so crazy and hard to swallow, it would probably be an easier move for them to make. And he often forces them to compromise themselves to cross over. I can forgive Trump for that, I suppose. But I still regret it. Frankly, we desperately need to lose Trump, to lose this battle, to win the fight against critical theory and postmodernism. We need adults, not children. He’s pushing away our best people. He’s putting forward the worst version of the party’s platform (when he bothers to put it forward at all). He’s distracting. He’s disruptive. He’s incompetent. He’s a bad manager. And you can’t win a culture war with a general whose only real goal is his own advancement and who has no real investment in anything else (or the skill to follow through even if he did). He’s a sideshow. It’s like hanging on to a bad boyfriend because you can’t stand the thought of being back at square one. You’ve invested so much in him, you need him to be what you wish he was. But the more time you spend chasing that dead end, the more time you waste that could be devoted to finding better people and fighting the real fight.

Not that I enjoy the concept of the “culture war”. I happen to believe that the only way to win is to redeem the parties into the best versions of themselves and get them to work together. The democratic party right now is sick with critical theory. It needs a doctor to remove the ideological pathogen. And the republican party is sick with the cancer of Trump, who has spread his useless tissues all throughout the structure, making it less and less able to function. I’m not sure how to inoculate for critical theory yet. That a long term struggle, one that’s been gestating a long time and will take a long time to resolve. But Trump is at least discrete. He rose to where he is quite recently and quite surprisingly. And he can be got rid of (hopefully) by just voting him out. No doubt the long-term effects of him will last for quite a while, but at least we can send the man back to his golf courses and golden toilets.

So that’s my position. We need to lose this battle to win the war. I don’t think Trump is actually a help, in fact I think he’s making the war less winnable in the long run. That’s the problem of an incompetent and self-serving leader. They don’t actually advance the causes you hope for, they just make a show of it and make you feel like you need them while fomenting division and drama that actually provokes and exacerbates the problem (making them seem even more necessary). He’s a hustler.

Trump is hopefully just an awful enigma and a lesson learned. A failed tactic. And failed it has. In the real battle to win hearts and minds and redeem the parties toward the best and most reasonable and functional and healthy and balanced and upright versions of themselves, Trump has done far more than anyone I can think of to worsen the situation for everyone. So let us hope to God we can learn our lesson and make better choices in the future. The real struggle of our time isn’t to protect or defend or support Trump. Selling that vision is half of what was wrong with him. The real long-term struggle of our time is with postmodernism’s challenge to the whole project of liberal democracy. And that will require wisdom and courage, and wiser and better leaders who won’t put their own needs and desires ahead of their country.

The beauty of rock bottom

The advantage of reaching the point of having nothing is that it really allows you to take stock of yourself and your life and see what you’re missing and what you gave up. It makes you appreciate what you lost and what it was really worth. It gives you wonderful perspective. And if you want to start rebuilding toward something, there’s nothing like being nowhere to open up your horizons.

I think the hardest part is actually letting yourself hit the bottom and stop trying to hang on to the unsupported branches of a life that’s had its roots kicked out from under it. It also gives you a great opportunity to renogotiate the terms of your happiness with yourself. You can renegotiate your idea of what it will take for you to be happy or content or invested in where you are. You can take stock of your relationships and what they might actually be worth, having reached a point of real degeneration where you can’t just take them for granted any more and might have to love without them. It gives you clarity about what is worth saving and what is worth treasuring.

The great advantage of dashed expectations is the chance to renegotiate more reasonable terms with yourself. What is enough value to be worth preserving? How much effort is it worth? What is enough of a result to be worth being content and continuing to invest? What can you lose as an enterprise that wasn’t worth the investment?

No one really ever wants to let ourselves fall to that level. Even just psychologically, because let’s all admit that what feels like complete collapse and hitting rock bottom is often not anywhere near the actual possible lowest bottom we could reach.

Realizing that, it gives us a chance to consider what we need to make strong so that it will endure and sustain us if we have another, even further, fall. If things went really wrong, catastrophically wrong in an unrecoverable way, what is there in our lives that will remain and endure to keep our souls alive? What anchors are we ignoring and undervaluing that we will need if the storms truly rise?

It’s funny, I wasn’t able to lose weight until I hit a kind of bottom, physically and emotionally. That’s what it took for me to start to build and turn things around. I got myself back into writing and reading after hitting a rock bottom intellectually and emotionally and socially. I swore off social media, isolated myself, and then started tentatively reaching out fingers to find my place again. I looked low enough to be able to start building again and investing again and finding value again.

The key thing, really, is to not try to escape the bottom, but to just let yourself settle there without trying to desperately claw your way out or hang on or cling to some life raft or be driven to some island of refuge. That’s the kind of circumstance under which you do not make good choices. People have affairs, get addicted, live dangerously, act stupidly, all to try to not be where they are and stay, or imagine they stayed, at some higher level. But there’s a kind of purity in letting yourself settle, letting your life shrink to the size of your sight and your reach, and then just starting from there. Don’t miss the chance to look around and take stock. Let it sit for a while. You may eventually find that things you thought you had given up on, you actually haven’t, and you have the energy to start working at the bottom again. But you need to give yourself that time to find out.

Maybe all you have is your parents. Maybe all you have is your kids and a relatively stable job and decent home. Maybe those are enough to negotiate a happiness from. There are plenty of people who learn to love with less. And if you can start from there, sometimes you can build on that. Hitting bottom lets you see what you actually have and what you don’t and start using that and appreciating that and building toward that.

The real problem is, a lot of people don’t use the bottom well. They don’t see it for the opportunity it is to recalibrate. How little can you be happy with? Where can you go from there? How can you begin to reverse your trajectory so you’re moving up instead of falling down? Because it’s really the feeling of falling that hurts. Once you’re actually at the bottom and accept it any movement upward, no matter how small, feels far more satisfying and meaningful than falling. Trajectory often matters more to people than position. And relative values mean more than absolute ones. This holds whether you’re at the top or at the bottom. It’s why people who have fallen far less than they could can still feel so miserable and people coming up slowly from much further down can still feel content and encouraged.

A cut tangent from the entry about Untamed

The movie musical Rent does something similar. It has a song where the male singer, Roger, is clearly in the wrong and needs to change. The music becomes discordant when he sings, the style he uses is very harsh, the framing portrays him as separated and confined and in shadow. The girl, Miami, is free, her music soars. She’s clearly in the right.

Objectively, here’s the situation. Roger and Mimi both have AIDS. Roger already lost his previous girlfriend to it. Mimi is a stripper and a junkie who nearly dies later in the musical. Their key song together, whatever it happens to be about in plot and character terms, is in plain terms a matter of a very sick drug addict barging into an apartment and trying to seduce a man she recently met who has clear fears and doubts about the wisdom of getting involved with someone living that life and how it might distract him from his creative work.

Now, maybe Roger had a lesson to learn, maybe he did have a wrong or incomplete perspective that he needed to grow out of; but those are some legitimate concerns, at least. He’s not being crazy and repressed. And it’s not obvious apart from the contextual framing that Mimi is really the one we should sympathize with. After living off of charity and struggling to survive for much of the runtime, Roger breaks up with Mimi and gets a job, and Mimi continues her drug addiction and almost dies. Eventually Roger learns his lesson, quits his job, and goes back to Mimi, who wakes up from her apparent death to hear his song.

The argument the musical makes for your heart is actually quite strong. And I love Roger and Mimi’s song and sing it quite passionately. Even apart from all the ways you can use music and context and characterization to direct the audience’s sympathies, there’s something there in their story that people fundamentally respond to. The characters all have AIDS and are coming to term with it. They’re all afraid of dying. Mimi teaches Roger how to let go of fear and live for the moment. She’s untamed. She trusts her soul.

Why does Rent resonate, apart from the pathos of the story and quality of the music? Because it is our story. We are all dying. We all have a terminal diagnosis. We are all struggling with this question: can we do something to justify our lives and give them meaning before we die? Is that meaning to be found in work or in relationships? Will life present us with new opportunities only to snatch them away? These are all universal fears and struggles. That’s why the story appeals. And we all have to figure out how to live in this moment.

The question, “Who actually lived in that situation better, Roger or Mimi? ” is much less clear than the musical makes it seem. To its credit, I think it does try to show that there’s some sort of balance needed. Mimi’s life was clearly out of control and it cost her her life, however glorious her philosophy of living in the moment according to her passions sounded when she sung about it. And Roger had been burned by life and was filled with fear and it was holding him back. He was living in denial and holding life at arm’s length. Nevertheless, he kept his life together far better than a lot of the other characters, partly because of his concerns about the consequences of the cost of living heedlessly.

Let’s be honest, if you have a terminal diagnosis and are struggling with meaning, if you’re fighting to grasp what little bit of life you can for the short moment you have it, it’s hard not to see the appeal of living in the moment, forgetting about restrictions and limitations and what anyone else thinks, and living your desires to the fullest. And it’s hard not to see why you wouldn’t be upset with anyone or anything you saw as standing in your way and holding back your hand while you wait for the gallows. That’s just cruel. It’s unjust. On the other hand, it’s also hard to deny the appeal of caution learned from the burned hand, the care and reluctance to take risks that comes from the realization that you only have a limited number of minutes to live. But what’s the point of squirreling away today and delaying gratification when the future is so uncertain and so short lived?

So why not let go of regret and live for the now? Realistically, why would you do anything else? That’s been a hard question for humanity to answer for thousands of years. We know what we are. Fragile little animals who know how the world treats such creatures. And that’s a colossal burden to bear. The immense consumption of alcohol by the human race has done a lot to get us through it and help us forget our troubles and live in the moment. It helps us disable the higher functions that keep us from fully inhabiting the present and our unrestrained impulses, something we wish we could do. Other drugs and little pleasures have helped, as well.

Life clearly is a kind of tightrope we walk, between abandon and paralysis. I don’t think we can clearly side with either Roger or with Mimi. The movie adaptation in particular seems to want us to side with Mimi. Our culture seems to want us to side with Mimi. She’s the prophet of the story. She holds the light, literally and figuratively. She’s dying, but she passes on her lesson to the fearful and more beourgois and cautious (relatively) Roger.

And that’s part of the problem with Rent, as well as with the postmodern narratives of successful intellectuals and authors. The hypocrisy. They preach a gospel of utter ruin to a dying, impoverished people, to soothe their own self-consciousness, while living off the benefits of their own carefully calculated and curated lifestyles. Mimi’s life philosophy was the direct cause of her problems, not merely a balm to soothe an inevitable existential quandary or some injustice forced on her by others. Or even if they were not in some way the direct cause of her situation (giving her the benefit of the doubt), they kept her trapped in it. They made it far harder to escape.

Life philosophies are just after the fact reflections on and rationalizations of your experience. They also have a causal effect. They might only be one factor among many, but what you believe produces as well as interprets your behavior and your relationship to your environment. People who believe it’s fine or even good to engage in a behavior are much more likely to engage in it. Obviously.

It might seem nice to toy with the idea of Mimi’s philosophy, to soothe the anxiety of being a Roger, but as carefree as Mimi was, her lack of concern and impulsiveness and passion was also her prison. That’s a dangerous toy to wield for a bit of self improvement or relaxation, a bit of self empowerment. Maybe you can only take as much of it as you need to balance yourself out. Maybe not. That’s less like righting the ship than it is like hurling half the cargo over the other side to balance it out. That like trying to burn off a chill.

There’s a very old saying that two wrong don’t make a right. And it was worth making it a saying because that is not actually the instinctive wisdom of humans. We think two wrongs does make a right, or rather that whatever is opposite a wrong must cure it. In reality, both poles are capable of being either wrong or right. And getting a bit of the wrong end of the other pole won’t make you more balanced or corrected or independent, it will just diversify your distortions. What people really need to learn to do is to find the value and the distortion in either pole, and learn how to correct for it whichever they inhabit, to learn how to live is wisdom and health whatever the situation demands.

Speculation about the content of Untamed

I haven’t read the book Untamed, and in order to criticize something you should definitely read it. I’m just not sure I want to spend my time on it. But a quick glance offered me enough insight that I think I could get at a lot of its major take-home points. A book like that is meant to draw you in and move you and inspire you with the author’s personal story, and the story sells the themes they extract. Is that self-help or biography? I’m not sure. It fits the Oprah format. That’s how her show worked. The goal of a book like that is to show you who you should be. It’s a hero book. My inspiring journey.

If I had to guess at the book’s central themes, I would wager that they include the following points. And just for the record I’m not arguing against these points here, only guessing what they are and clarifying them.

First; the rules and restrictions and expectations of others are part of the shackles that religion and an oppressive patriarchy put on you to enslave your true power. This is what I like to think of as the “Elsa ethos.” It’s what Elsa sings about in the Frozen movies, especially the second one. It sounds beautiful and brave, but it could also be a supervillain origin song. Throw off the chains holding you back. Embrace your freedom and power.

Second: worship of the self. The self as divine guide. The usual new age psychological spirituality, probably packaged more discreetly and in a more contemporary and progressive way. The supremacy of the inner voice and following your bliss, seeking and creating your identity as the great project of life. othing helps you establish your identity like a rejection of the restrictions placed upon it by society, the patriarchy, religion, etc. I call this the “Raskolnikov ethos,” the heroic divinity of the self.

In a morally relativistic world, the only thing that still has reality and moral meaning is the self. Establishing the heroic self-sufficiency of that identity often requires an act of deliberate casting away of the rules and restrictions the shadow world places upon you. For Raskolnikov that meant murdering someone, casting off the regulation of his aggression, and maybe that is what what a man would think of. Women are more likely to hone in on something less aggressive and violent, but no less symbolic for them. An act of social disruption.

Third, and I’ve already touched on this: the theme of inventing your own meaning. The meaning of who you are or should be or who women are or should be isn’t up to men or religion or society to decide. It’s up to women to decide what it is they want to be and to take what they want and be what they want to be. And the world will be better for it.

I’m not sure women would really be happy to grant this same kind of carte blanche to men. I have a feeling they would like to control and restrain men’s masculine inner wildness quite a bit and are legitimately afraid of the consequences if men did this. But they think women are better, women can do no wrong, and so it’s good if women do it. The important thing is to trust yourself, because women at least (if not all humans) are inherently trustworthy. I suppose you could sum this idea up as the “be yourself, trust yourself” ethos. I’m not entirely sure that it applies to men, though, particularly straight white men, so maybe it should be restricted to “trust women”.

Fourth: another narrative I’m guessing is included but am less certain of is the assertion that “I am worthy, I am good enough, I deserve it”. This is a fairly standard self-help mantra. This, along with several other ideas I already laid out, all fall under the umbrella of believing in yourself. It’s positive self-talk for those who feel ground down by the millstone of the competitive hierarchy. When things go badly and people don’t get what they want or expected, when their status falls or doesn’t seem to measure up, their instinct is to self-indict. This theme is a rejection of that instinct as a false artifact with no real justification behind it.

I call this the “This is me” ethos. I know I deserve your love. There’s nothing I’m not worthy of. No more defeatist or self-critical thinking. You are your only perfect judge. This theme is also tied up with the idea of “my best life”, which is the modern version of “the good life”, adapted for a more postmodern sensibility. It’s not the good life, it’s my best life. It’s not only mine to live and enjoy, it’s mine to judge and determine. It’s subjective; it answers only to my own conscience, not arbitrary and false measures imposed on it from the outside by society. It’s relative; it is my best, not the good, because it is for me to judge relative to myself and my own life and judgements and feelings. It’s relational, my best life for me; not definitional, the good life for humans.

Fifth: a final narrative that I’m just taking a wild swing that it might be included, simply because of its position in the pantheon alongside these others, is some kind of racial narrative about white privilege and the debt that must be paid to enact racial reconciliation. I really can’t imagine how it might connect or fit in. But it’s a key lynchpin of these philosophies, so that you hardly ever see them seperated for long, and so would I guess that it must come in somewhere, somehow.

There’s a predictability to postmodern pop philosophy. There are certain themes that just always seem to go together. This one in particular isn’t a comment on the state of the black community or black culture, it’s about the primacy of the need for white people to address their status and their history and their position and their feelings about themselves as a abstract entity. In some ways its not really a story about black people, so much as it is a story of white guilt. It is the “ethos of white guilt.” Educated, prosperous, beourgois white guilt specifically. I suppose LGBTQ could also be made the subject of this particular moral melodrama, it fills a similar role. But either black liberation or LGBTQ liberation is likely to make an appearance somewhere. Both provide an opportunity for criticism and a symbolic rejection of the preceding cultural mileau. A symbolic sacrifice to secure moral credibility and justification. You need something in there that isn’t just patting yourself on the back and abducting responsibility. Guilt is a persistent psychological phenomenon, and guilt has to go somewhere, so the author needs a new container for that part of her readers’ psyche. It won’t actually all go away. You need somewhere for all the guilt to go, and racial narratives are the most in-vogue solution to that problem.

So there, those are my primary predictions about the content of the book. I don’t know exactly how she might explain these themes, these are just five major themes I would expect to form some of the core conclusions of a book called Untamed. I’m sure she brings her points to life in a compelling manner. That isn’t really a positive or a negative for the content, only of the skill of the author. Anything, especially a personal narrative, can be made to sound compelling and engaging. History has taught us that. And the fact that there are other people who seem to like being themselves and find their own stories and lives and beliefs compelling.

So, liberation of personal power (the Elsa ethos), rejection of imposed external restrictions (the Raskolnikov ethos), finding meaning within yourself (self-determination of meaning, the Trust-Yourself, Trust-Women ethos), believing in your own worthiness and the justice of your desires (the This is Me ethos), and (speculatively, I still can’t see where it fits in, I just think it might) the White Guilt ethos. Add all these up, and you get girls gone wild, the good version. An untamed, strong, liberated, self-determining woman.

Now, as far as I can tell, none of this has anything to do with Christianity in the slightest, and is closer to a liberal version of Ayn Rand than anything else that comes to mind. But I have the vague feeling that I’ve heard of the author before and that she has something to do with women and Christianity. And probably she’s the sort of popular writer that many Christian women feel they want to and should be reading: both spiritually deep and culturally hip and progressive. A brief glance at the endorsements on the back made that clear enough. It falls neatly into the kind of new-age, self-help sort of religion that Oprah (and by extension a large section of all American women) adores.

Probably the book contains a decent amount of scripture recontextualized into a gospel of personal liberation, empowerment, and fulfillment. This would all fit well with the current wave of critical theory, Postmodernism, and fourth wave feminism that is being specifically marketed to white, educated women and increasingly to those morally and religiously inclined women who were especially alienated by the election of Donald Trump.

I’m sure the author takes you on a journey inside her soul and her experiences in a way that makes you feel the oppresssion and injustice of her previous state and embraces her emancipation as a triumph of freedom and goodness and positive power. And no doubt there are endless numbers of women out there (as there are men) enslaved to false masters that bleed you slowly dry. So it’s a narrative that will resonate. We all have feelings, and given the opportunity to see things through another person’s eyes, with their selective vision, a good writer and a willing reader can share those feelings quite powerfully.

Now, why do I assume that the things I mentioned are some of the points the book makes? Well, in part because these are very common narratives and arguments that form the bedrock of the postmodern viewpoint. It’s packaged up nicely for the intended audience to look like a typical female-oriented religious book, but all the markers are written right on the face of it. An experiment nced tracker of philosophies and ideologies can read the signs. I only glanced at the endorsements, maybe read one quarter of the text on the back cover, and read maybe a third to half of the dust jacket blurb.

I feel fairly confident in making these predictions because these aren’t ideas this author invented; they’ve been around for decades in and philosophical circles. This is just one woman’s personal story of how she came to believe in their gospel and be freed.

And it’s not like these sentiments are even new to philosophy. Postmodernists didn’t really invent their ideas, they just arranged them in a nice new structure. So they’re freely available in the human lexicon and well represented both currently in our culture and historically, if you know how to abstract from the examples to the underlying ideas.

Of course, there’s obviously a lot that’s attractive about liberation, empowerment, and fulfillment. Everyone wants that. Everyone is after that. Children seek it instinctually. It is part of the assertion of the self against the world that arises as soon as the self can be conceived. The questions, “Why shouldn’t I have and do exactly as I want? Why should I be restrained by the world around me?” are good questions, and not easy to answer. But they aren’t, as parents know, questions without an answer.

And to those who might criticize the project of the book as a whole, I would say that, yes, the author probably does need liberation, empowerment, and fulfillment. As do her readers. And for the record, it isn’t only women who feel this way. The feelings and instincts she identifies as being part of the female experience are in fact well-established parts of the human experience.

Without giving any detailed response to any of these specific narratives (and personal stories are very hard to argue with because their power lies in the authenticity and immediacy of the experience, not their status as a coherent interconnected thesis) I would simply say that I don’t actually think these are beliefs that can be effectively universalized into guiding principles upon which to base a life or a society, and that in the long run they do not represent the best way to actually gain the things they promise to secure.

All human attempts at a system for guiding our lives tend to be a bit unstable and prone to abuse. And that includes those attempts the author is likely rejecting in this book. But I think that the philosophies she is selling are also prone to instability and abuse; in fact they’re remarkably prone to it. And they are dishonest about human nature and the human experience, as well as the deep struggles of the human condition.

I’m very tempted to look up a summary of the book, particularly a list of chapter headings. I could probably figure out its trajectory much better. It looks like it’s structured around a personal story, as book club books often are. There’s no point arguing with someone’s personal experience. Experience is experience. Especially in a relativistic worldview, experience is king. It can’t be argued with. But boiling ideas down to their underlying theses does give you something to work with, as does abstracting from particular events to guiding principles. And since she’s written a book that seems to fall somewhere between self-help and memior, I would guess that she tells personal stories and uses them to explore and sell her abstracted principles. The lessons she learned from her experience.

So why, then, was I not able to remain in the room while the book was being read? I guess we all have some limits. I’m all for free exploration. And my wife basically asked me, don’t you trust me? And the real answer is, I don’t even trust myself! If I’ve learned anything from being me, it’s that immersing yourself in any set of ideas or any person’s story sufficiently will inevitably draw you into understanding them and even becoming a bit like them. Especially if they’re very persuasive and the medium has enough existential immediacy, if there’s a sympathy there to build on, or if the proferred viewpoint is sweet enough. And the longer you spend there, the easier it is to let it sweep you up.

It takes a lot to keep your head, even for me. And there are some ideas that are so tasty, so seductive, that you can’t really spend much time with them without risking yourself. There are some narratives I have to keep myself away from as a man, as a human, because I know how much they would appease and feed some part of me that I know I can’t fully trust.

One of the problems with responding to any of these narratives is that they’re such fundamentally agreeable positions, that to deny them is to be so inherently disagreeable as to lose all credibility. After all, if I disagree with these narratives, then I must be asserting their opposite. You don’t deserve it, you aren’t worthy, you can’t be trusted, you shouldn’t be empowered or fulfilled, the world isn’t bettered by your finding meaning, Race isn’t a problem. This is where the real brilliance of the polemic shines through. If you can state your position in such a way that any contradiction of it appears obviously wrong, then you’ve won the battle without really having to fight it.

It’s a bit like the brilliance of naming your movement or organization after something everybody wants and almost no one disagrees with. That way, no one can criticize you without instantly losing their credibility. They’re obligated by the nature of your stated ends to endorse the rightness of your cause. Americans for freedom. People for a better tomorrow. Coloradoans for prosperity. All those vague sorts of names that political action committees have. It makes them sound friendly, because they want the same things you do! And anyone who is against them is evil and is against freedom, prosperity, etc. Black Lives Matter is a perfect example. The name won the argument before it’s been had.

Of course at heart BLM, like all those other political action committees, goes beyond the abstract universal interests that, frankly, everybody wants and agrees with and actually gets into specific beliefs and arguments about what the state of things is, what the causes are, and how best to address them. And like many such entities, the funds they raise don’t go toward some vague “good stuff for black people” fund or “prosperity” fund or “freedom” fund, the money goes to political campaigns and candidates and lobbying, all of which are very specific.

And with BLM, as with all these other movements like Americans for Prosperity, that’s where there can be and is actual disagreement. There might be real relevant data to consider and bring up when it comes to what the state of affairs is, as well as its causes. And there might be considerable disagreement about what the best way is to make things better or to get closer to that desired ultimate shared interest. There might be considerable disagreement about who is actually most qualified and likely to secure “freedom” or “prosperity” or a better tomorrow. But political action committees like to use their labeling as a cudgel to force people to accept their facts and explanations and solutions a priori, or risk being labeled a malevolent actor who is against the whole project.

And that’s what I don’t like. The false narratives. That simply by expressing your desire to pursue something almost everyone wants, that you’re by definition in the right, and that anyone who disagrees with how you seek it is simply an evil person who doesn’t believe in those things. It creates a very compelling personal narrative, a heroic one. Of the oppressed and virtuous hero, held back by the evil cabal that has done nothing but suppress and oppress them. Oddly enough, this kind of narrative resonates especially well with well-off Americans.

People do want someone to blame that isn’t themselves. And given the choice between believing that there might be something fundamentally difficult and broken about yourself and maybe the whole world, or believing that there is some conspiracy that is to blame whose elimination would remove all the restrictions and negative feelings and frustration and aimlessness, whose elimination would mean freedom and prosperity and meaning, it’s easy to see which is more compelling. It’s a beautiful story. Heroic. Passionate. Wild and liberated. It’s a rejection of everything that has so disappointed and betrayed us. It’s superhuman. Divine.

But I still think that that is all a matter of positioning and anecdotes and good marketing. The truth is that almost everyone wants those things, even the people we think of as being especially terrible. In fact they might be the best at following some of the personal value narratives I outlined earlier. Stripped of the personal context that, frankly, allows everyone to see themselves as the hero of their story, when you extract the ideas behind them and universalize them and imagine what would actually result from a large, mixed slice of humanity putting them in practice, you start to see the problems.

If I were to suggest one possible test for this book and its ideas, it would be to go through the whole book, and any place it says the word “women”, substitute “men”. Just gender swap every lesson and moral imperative, so they become broadly inclusive of all humanity. Take away the inherent solidarity of sex prejudice and see if that’s how we think humans in general should think and behave.

And then, if you have the patience, do the same thing again, but this time substitute “children” for “women”. See if that’s really what you would wish upon your kids, to succeed in navigating the world. Then maybe try a different nationality, like, say Russians or North Koreans or Saudis (anyone you’re not especially in sympathy with) and see if that makes any difference in how it reads. The real test for the universality and truth of an idea is trying it out in different circumstances. It’s always easy to vote for a new law when it promises to benefit you personally, but it’s always worth considering how you would feel about it if someone else were making use of its benefits.

My final theory that I would be tempted to hazard a guess at, but can’t really prove unless I actually read the book and find that it does, in fact, contain this particular pack of contemporary philosophical and moral narratives, is that the book consists of the author identifying where her belief systems and structures went wrong (about marriage, womanhood, happiness, success, God, meaning, right and wrong) and failed her, and then ends in her rejection of them and liberation from them.

Now this kind of approach is tricky, because it has some real grounding. You can be 100% correct about something being imperfect, corrupt, poorly formulated, prone to abuse, frequently pathological, and even tyrannical, but still be wrong in rejecting it. Humans, after all, have all these flaws. But the solution isn’t to reject humanity, but rather to seek the good in them and for them. And there’s a real risk in the kind of naiveté that believes that it was just the system that was wrong, and if you had the right system, or no system, then everything would be perfect. Such a belief is very persuasive, because it both removes personal responsibility and establishes a clear external wrong to be put right, a negative structure to be torn down. And you can begin by tearing it down in your own life and heart and mind.

Rejecting something that’s gone wrong isn’t the same as curing it, though. And embracing something that’s the opposite of what you had believed (and then rejected) as therefore being perfect and trustworthy and incorruptible is a terribly dangerous road to walk down. Trump, for example, gained much of his current halo of perfection not by virtue of what he was, but by what he was opposed to. It’s an inherent tendency of humans to believe that whatever attacks or destroys or weakens something that has hurt us must therefore be good. And it’s hard to argue with getting exactly what you want and getting back at those who kept you from having it. That’s the kind of freedom you might want to pass on. At least to those well-off, educated, ethical, successful, agreeable, beourgois people like yourself who will use it mostly to feel better about themselves and alleviate some of their existential guilt (rather than for more obviously nefarious means).

I have no doubt that Untamed is well-written. I’m not sure that it needs to be especially well written, though; the ideas (I’m guessing) it promotes are so hot and so culturally on point and in demand. They speak so clearly to a deep hunger within us. It’s not, after all, as if there isn’t a universal frustration within us about the limitations that the world, religion, society, other people, and even ourselves put on us.

Men deal with that frustration as much as women, but more often express themselves or seek solidarity through aggression and rejection of connection. Women tend to have more negative feelings, but find solidarity in agreeableness, compliance, unity, and community. And maybe this author is simply saying that women need to move more toward men and be a little more aggressive and predatory and wild and disagreeable. Maybe she feels like she was played for a fool by her husband and by marriage as a whole, and got tired of being the patsy and the better, more patient one, and wanted to snatch some happiness for herself.

Maybe she feels that way so much that she’s lost sight of the value of the feminine character and some of the pitfalls of the masculine character. Maybe she thinks women will wear it better than men, that in them it will be perfected. And maybe when they have got it perfectly and get rid of the ones who make it imperfect, they won’t need anyone any more, and men least of all. They will be rid of men and rid of the terrible world that the patriarchal, religious, white, tyrannical men built. And the primordial utopia that was suppressed will dawn again, as society returns to its innate perfection.

And maybe she’s right. I confess, if I were to believe in these narratives, I certainly wouldn’t do good things with them. The harvest they would yield in my soul would not be nearly so benign or glorious. And I don’t say that because I find them unattractive propositions. In fact in the short-term I think they would be delightful. If I could take for granted that I could enjoy their psychic benefits without having them gradually affect my general behavior, that would be nice.

I’m not the worst person in the world, but I certainly wouldn’t trust myself, were I to be possessed by these beliefs. I’m pretty sure I need to be tamed. I’m pretty sure women don’t even really realize how important it is that humanity remain tamed. We let ourselves be tamed by our better selves, by our higher callings and reasoning. By the need to compromise to survive in the world and live in productive harmony and cooperation with other. We didn’t follow our hearts into peace and justice. We had to fight ourselves for it.

The natural state of humanity is not so benign as those who live in affluence and freedom from consequence imagine it to be. You’ve watched too many cozy documentaries and Disney cartoons if you think it is. The single largest, most successful chimpanzee tribe in the world became what it is by ruthless expansion of territory, war, murder, cannibalism, fratricide, infanticide, kidnapping, and genocide. Even the apes aren’t all sitting around playing patty cake in some primordial paradise. You could argue (wrongly but understandably) that it’s just the males causing problems there too. But that’s nature. Ants practice slavery and war, and they’re almost exclusively female (but admittedly quite different from us mammals). For the moment, in any case, nature seems determined to keep producing quite a lot of male humans (as well as male chimpanzees and bull elk and elephant seals, all of whom have some similar qualities). So how do you fix that problem without “fixing” nature itself?

And that is what I mean by the difference between rejecting something and curing it. Curing something means that you still see the inherent value in something and the way it is supposed to function, and you want to preserve and bring forward that value, not reject it or eliminate it. It is the difference between cancer and diabetes. Cancer is something you need to destroy and eliminate. It has no value as healthy tissue, it merely prevents healthy tissue from functioning. Diabetes is a case of a very important and valuable system not working the way it is meant to, causing disease and distress and even, potentially, death. Cancer is also different because it is separate from the healthy tissues, it’s not a natural or functional part of them; it’s removable. And if you remove it, you cure it and restore health. But you can’t remove diabetes. It’s not separable from the structure of the things whose dysfunction makes up its natural being. It must be restored to function. It cannot be removed.

So the question is, are the things that hurt and limited the author of Untamed cancer or diabetes? Are they removable or dysfunctional? Do they require revolution or resolution? It’s important to know, because misdiagnosis can be dangerous. If you try to stop or remove something that you actually need in its proper function, however sick it might be, you won’t make yourself healthier in the end.

Let’s be honest. Men suck. Religion sucks. Society sucks. The relationship between the sexes sucks. Gender roles suck. Marriage sucks. White people suck. The dominance hierarchy sucks. Rationalism sucks. Laws and restrictions suck. Capitalism sucks. Traditional culture sucks. It’s all one big mess from beginning to end. And it’s also that mess that got us where we are, got us everything we have and enjoy, including the freedom and prosperity to criticize and reject it. And if you bother looking closely you’ll notice that everything else sucks too, even more so in some cases, and usually just as much, but in different ways. Women suck too. And countries other than America aren’t exactly utopia. Neither has socialism been all that was promised. Or lawlessness. Or other religions or atheistic philosophies. Or relationships outside marriage. Or life without men or without women. So just maybe, before we tear it all down and set ourselves free, we should consider into what space we are freeing ourselves. Is the value and greatness of our individual selves really large enough to fill that void? That’s a question people have been asking since Neitzsche. If we eliminate God, are we really great enough and good enough to fill his shoes?

What exactly do women imagine the message of pornography is? I deserve it, I am worthy of it. I should get it exactly what I want. I can have whatever I want. There are no limits, no restrictions. This makes me happy. This gives me what I want. The restrictions placed upon me are unfair and cruel. I shouldn’t be restricted. I shouldn’t have to be ashamed. This is who I am. This is who I’m meant to be. This makes me complete as a person. Let the animal free. Let it run, let it chase, let it have what it hungers for. That is its function.

That is what pornography says to a man. That’s the argument it presents to justify itself. Are you going to tell me that I can’t have what I want but you can? Who made your desires so special? In a relativistic world where your internal judgments and feelings, not the restrictions of others or outside authorities, rule; why are my desires any less good or relevant than yours? Why do you and all these other people who make up oppositional or minority positions get to pursue what you want, but the strong and the majority are supposed to give it up? Doesn’t your empowerment apply to everyone equally? If I want something you don’t approve of, you don’t hold some special right to censor me. That would just be the tyranny of society again, just a different, more ratified (but really now quite common and hegemonic) society. Isn’t my rebellion against your current hegemony just as valid as your rebellion against the previous one?

I have a feeling that the author of Untamed doesn’t approve of pornography. But I don’t really see much difference between these narratives and the narratives that pornography (and a culture of sexual license) whispers to me. I don’t feel like being faithful. I tame myself because women demand it, and because my faith, which I believe has my best interests in mind, demands it. I feel like being unfaithful and having what I want instead absolutely every single damn day of my life.

So what, really is the substantive difference between me sitting and looking at pornography next to my wife, and someone sitting there reading something making rh exact same pitch. I could make the same arguments for why it’s ok for me to watch Game of Thrones or other explicit cable shows. I’m a big boy. I’m an adult. I can be trusted to watch this and enjoy this and immerse myself in this and take the fun stories out of it and not be affected by it, not have it settle into some part of my brain and affect my thoughts and behavior.

And maybe I could handle Game of Thrones. Everyone has their limits. Maybe this is within mine. Maybe I can be trusted to taste a world where the restrictions on my seeing beautiful naked women are lifted just a little and not have it affect my behavior and relationships. Maybe I could handle a lot, actually. Most people seem to think you can just enjoy porn outright and it doesn’t matter. In fact it’s something you really have to take for granted as being normal, even in the majority of Christian relationships.

So why should everyone else get to enjoy a freedom that I don’t? If the real truth is that social and religious restrictions are an unnatural cancerous imposition and we should be free to follow my heart and desires and fulfillment, whatever I believe that to be (not what someone else says they should be), why don’t I get that too? If you’re going to sit there granting yourself that kind of license, you can sure as hell guarantee that I’m going to be wondering why I shouldn’t do exactly the same.

The greatest risk to the postmodern society is the possibility that someone might actually take it seriously and start doing exactly what they thought best and work to seriously remove the cancers that stand in their way. They might actually take literally something that was meant as an exercise in self-therapy, an attempt to remove the ghosts and goblins of an oppressive past. The author of Untamed did something relatively socially acceptable, even praiseworthy in contemporary circles, even praiseworthy in many religious circles. She saw someone across the room, wanted to be with them, divorced her unfaithful husband, broke up her family and marriage to marry her new (female, but that incidental) partner, and lived happily ever after and wrote a book about it.

I’m not even saying that what she did was wrong. It certainly wasn’t wrong by general societal standards. It was maybe even heroic. She’s certainly selling it that way, both figuratively and literally. Her actions were certainly a far cry from acceptable by traditional or religious standards, but as an act of rejection of those standards and the false chains of (that specific) society and religion and as an act of self-empowerment and liberation and the ascention of her own divinity, it was pretty effective.

Still, I wonder how those actions and ideas would look to us coming from someone else, or if the situation, the context, was a little different. How would you feel if your husband or wife used them to justify leaving you? How would you feel if your spouse or your child, rather than you, became untamed? What about your neighbor, or your less than stellar coworker, or that girl you really disliked in high school? That personal story and the way it directs our sympathies has such a large effect on how we interpret what someone says and does and believes.

Elsa’s song “Show Yourself” in Frozen 2 is cute and empowering because it’s Elsa singing it. To reiterate in case you don’t recall, Elsa says that she’s different, that normal rules don’t apply to her, that she needs to embrace her power, and that she is the meaning of her own life. It’s a weirdly aggressive and sexual song, where she discovers that the meaning and quest of her life is herself and the flowering of her identity and power. The whole song is sung to herself, essentially. It’s a love ballad between herself and her empowered and unleashed self. And the moment that unlocks it all is when she realizes that she’s not seeking anything outside her or bigger than her, because there isn’t anything: she was always just looking for herself, and discovers that she’s the biggest, most magical and divine and powerful thing around.

The movies have gone out of their way to make Elsa seem sympathetic and show us she’s the good guy (or girl). She’s adorable, like a giant, slender baby. So the fact that she’s saying the same things that a Nacississtic supervillain would say in their moment of coming into their character just don’t register with us. We can’t recognize the idea outside its context. We just say, well, I know Elsa, she doesn’t mean it like that. She won’t take it that way or that far. And the two thoughts that arise in my mind are, “Yes, but someone else might;” and, “What in the actual content of the idea (not the person or situation it’s embedded in) prevents that?”

There is a covenant and understanding between us humans that we are not all going to do exactly as we please. That we’re going to tame ourselves for the sake of ourselves, and for the sake of each other, for the sake of our being together, and for the sake of what we have determined through wisdom and reason and experience to be good. And if you don’t think men are holding themselves back, if you don’t think women have tamed them, if you don’t think they’ve made some real progress in taming their inner impulses, but still struggle with them, if you think that they’ve done exactly as they want without a thought for others and haven’t resented paying that price, then you don’t know much about men.

Maybe in Untamed the author has some balancing ideals to head off the ideological consequences of the typical postmodern narratives. But I haven’t usually experienced that to be the case. Usually there’s more of an expectation that you’ll trust them and take for granted it will be fine because you trust and believe in the virtue and restraint of the person the message is coming from (even if the message itself contains no such safeguards). Usually people take a fairly extreme position of identifying the structures that failed them or resisted them as a cancer. Usually the natal temptation to embrace self-divinity is pretty hard to resist, once you’ve given up on the major forces that keep it at bay (society, religion, etc). Maybe Untamed doesn’t fall into those traps, but I would be surprised if it avoided them.

I have a very low tolerance for the condensed miasma of postmodern politico-moral-psychological-spirituality. I should be more patient with it, but I saw it coming fifteen years ago in college (a lot of its major elements started gaining broader cultural traction in the 90s but began intellectually long before that) and haven’t learned to like it more now that it’s the default worldview espoused everywhere. I find it to be deeply anti-intellectual. And it runs counter to the received wisdom of the majority of all major cultures across time (which were bought dearly through a process of historical experimentation and selection, a very high stakes and costly empirical process).

Well, I’ve said a lot here about a book I haven’t even read. And that’s probably pretty unfair. Since I didn’t feel like reading it, I suppose my reaction should be judged by how accurately I was able to predict the content and conclusions of the author, if not the specific means by which she arrived at them. Someone once said that you can identify someone who has been ideologically possessed by how accurately you can predict most of what they’re going to say based on just a tiny representative sample. I’ve seen a lot of postmodernism, and this book’s cover flashed the signs and seems to be aiming for that audience, and so I intuit its direction. To be honest, I hope I’m wrong. It’s such a popular book, apparently. And if it is what I think it is, it’s easy to see why.

The shifting strategy of socialism

If nationalism has some basis in racial solidarity, in the identity of the tribe (the French, Germans, Italians, for example), might it not make sense to infer that tribalism is itself part of the reason socialism can’t seem to cohere on a broader international basis? And if that’s an obstacle to the Marxist dream, then maybe in order to make the dream come true you need to work with it instead of against it.

If your goal is the overthrow of the ruling class, first you need to develop the idea of the ruling class. And if it helps your efforts to identify it with a specific racial identity that transcends national boundaries (for example, whiteness), then that’s a way to marry tribalism and socialism. You can probably even get people within that class to side against it ideologically. Next you work on developing the idea of a persecuted and oppressed class identity that transcends national lines. If you can line that up with a racial or other biological identity that transcends national boundaries (sexual identity subcultures could and have become a trans-national tribal identity, for example; and people of color, generally construed, are another one), then you’ve got a basis for an oppressed class that can unite across technical national boundaries because it retains the power of biological tribal proximity without being a formal nation.

That’s how you marry nationalism with socialism. You just figure out what the common underlying unity was in nationalism that was a problem, and figure out a way to work with it and maneuver it into the position you need it to occupy. Then draw the distinctions between the oppressed class (which is now also a racial or biological identity class) and the oppressor class (which is now also a racial or biological identity class), and tell the story of that oppression again and again. Keep redrawing those differences and emphasizing the story of those differences, inflame those racial/class/tribal differences. Explain how the victims have been unfairly oppressed and how the perpetrators are their enemies. Make the story of that oppression the story of everything. Reinterpret all history, all civil and private institutions, all interactions between people in those terms, as a conflict between those classes. That provides the justification for the wholesale dismantling and restructuring of those systems. And right there you’ve got the makings for a worldwide, trans-national revolution.

Postscript: This post might require some background in the history of socialist movements to really make sense. One of the fundamental problems of socialism and the Marxist theory is that the workers of the world failed to unite. It was very hard to get socialist regimes to cooperate across national boundaires. And it was very hard to get people to take the sort of class-based action that was needed when they were still hanging on to the filial attachment of nationhood. It was very hard to get people to identify properly with class and set aside their commonality of history and proximity and tribal ethnic identity. Socialist theoreticians underestimated the power and tenacity of tribal identity to unite people across class boundaries.

Familial attachments were, of course, another problem. If anyone has ever read the mission statements of a Marxist organization and wondered, “What does dismantling the nuclear family have to do with socialism?” then they either haven’t properly understood the desired social structure socialism aims toward, or they haven’t properly appreciated the power of the family.

The family unit has the ability to be terrifically tenacious and powerful, to persist across time and across differences within a group of people. It is its own little state, its own micro-society and micro-government. And that makes it a competitor to the socialistic, centralized class-defined state. It introduces loyalties that oppose and restrain the socialist project and weakens loyalties the socialist project needs to emphasize. So its power base, its franchise on loyalty, has to be eroded and reassigned to the collective.

A personal story of political intuition

Plenty of people have explored the problems with socialism far better than I could. Problems like the free rider problem. But I do want to add one example from my own past that shows that I, at least, am not a good enough person to have in a system where outcomes are not closely tied to inputs. And in general this story serves to reinforce some of the problems you run into the moment you start seperating causes and inputs from their justified results good or bad. I’m not the best person in the world, but I’m also not the worst. So of I can’t trust myself, how can I trust everyone else to be better than me? Maybe part of the secret of some of us who don’t believe in socialism is that we have fewer illusions about ourselves. Some, no doubt, believe in themselves but not in others or in humanity as a whole.

Anyway, I was young. I was in the social group run by my church where you play games and memorize things and earned batches and little stars or jewels to go on those badges. Each badge represented one whole book in which you had memorized every Passage. And each Jewel represented a section of that book. Generally speaking, most people completed around one book a year oh, and when you tagged completed that level of the group and moved on to the next level you presumably had finished all three books. One of my friends have been doing the program for the last two years, and when I arrived he was already part way done with the third book when the year began. As for myself, I was starting from the beginning. Luckily, I was unusually good at memorizing things, and I used that skill to advance quickly. In fact I decided that I would try to finish all three books in a single year. I managed to finish the first book and the second book and even got a long way through the third book before we reached the end of the year. I didn’t quite reach my goal, but I knew that I had done something no one had ever done.

So, when the end of the Year awards ceremony arrived and they were handing out the awards, I fully expected to receive one, since I had set a record for progressing through the material. In particular I was expecting to receive the award for “most accomplished.” because I had literally accomplished the most, not just among my peers, but of anyone ever in that grade level.

But when the awards were handed out, my best friend got that award, because he had finished the third book. He had gotten farther than anyone in our level. I was deeply disappointed. any theater with my reaction my instinctive thought was “Well, I’m never going to bother doing something like that again.” The moment I realized that I could make that effort and do all that work and not even get recognized for it, I decided that it wasn’t really worth doing. And I very quickly generalized it to a lesson abiut life in general. There’s no point in putting any exceptional effort into anything if you aren’t going to be able to be recognized for it or enjoy the rewards for it. Better to not bother striving and just do enough to get by.

Now, I know that that was the wrong lesson to learn. That’s not my point. Obviously that was a terrible lesson to take from that experience. But look how easy and obvious and instinctual it was for me to draw that response! I was a high performer in life. I had parents who had high expectations for me because they knew what I was capable of. And I immediately drew the conclusion in that situation. If that’s the conclusion a fairly principled, high performer takes from that kind of situation, what kind of lesson might less principled people take from similar situations? Why do your best if all results will be averaged? Why strive to be top of the class if it won’t mean anything or even be seen?

To some degree, the problem with all political theory is that we have to work with people as they actually are, not how we wish they were. And if even your best people aren’t good enough to thrive in a given system, if it fundamentally disincentivizes them from being their best, then just maybe there’s an unrecognized problem with the system. Maybe, given time, you could make people better and then the system would work. But that’s a pretty big if, whereas the obvious immediate evidence is that people as they are and are the system as it is produces some very undesirable outcomes. Maybe those outcomes are something we can accept, maybe that’s the price we all pay for equality. Being less than we could. Or maybe that loss harms everyone enough to require taking another look at the system.

An addendum to “meaning in life”

Life, of course, isn’t all about survival, any more than it is all about ambition or pleasure. But all of these are components of our lives. If there’s one peoole that we can learn something about finding meaning in the midst of uncertainly of survival from, it’s the Jews. It’s amazing that they are still here today. And even more amazing is the fact that their survival and their success as a culture has not depended on the world making things easy for them. They seem to have learned how to create success anywhere they go. And everywhere they’ve gone they’ve tended to find a world out to destroy them.

So how have the Jews survived, and not even survived but prospered? Is there some connection to the strategies of meaning we’ve been discussing? I think there is. They have had a durable vitality to the life of their culture, which can only come from having a durable meaning to their lives that does not depend on either their own perfection or the perfection of the world around them. They have had a constant habit of spinning straw into gold, and also a habit of losing that gold and then making it anew.

According to their own history, they have lived through a constant cycle where they depend on and trust their God and achieve stability and prosperity. Then, as soon as they have got used to prosperity, they forget their God and stop living in proper relationship to their covenant with him. Laziness and blindness and corruption sneak in, and they forget and neglect their foundations. The universe throws a storm at them, and they are unprepared to withstand it. They fall and are enslaved and scattered. And in time they come back to their foundation and rise again.

The surprising thing about the Jews isn’t that they rise and fall. Everyone does that. What is surprising about the Jews is that, no matter how many times or how far they fall, they always seem to come back to their foundations and rise again. Their foundations endure, even if their cities and temples and great constructions do not. And so they have outlasted empire after empire because, though they cannot always save their houses or their lives, the foundations of their nation are built upon a rock that endures.

The Jewish approach to life could be summed up by the verse, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Jesus, a Jew, spoke these words to Jews, and they were in keeping with what the prophets had been telling them for centuries. But what does it mean?

It means, attend to your foundations first, and everything else, all the great things you wish for, can be built atop them. And rebuilt, if necessary, again and again. Seek first the kingdom of God, the foundational, stable repository of value and the proper relation to life and being and meaning and value, and everything else can be added to that. And if it all falls, which for the Jews it often did, especially the higher their towers rose and the further they got from their foundations, you won’t be swept away. The lynchpin of your meaning and strength and value and hope won’t be swept away.

That is a life of a culture and of an individual that is tenacious. It is living. It grows and regrows out of something rooted. Meaning, more than anything else, is the central problem of humanity. Solve that problem, and all other problems can be endured. Build that foundation, and all other things you could want can be built atop it. And that is why I believe the Jews have endured and succeeded against all odds.

We could all stand to learn a little from their experiences.

Meaning in life

Meaning in life isn’t a function of how big and grand and special and unique a thing you’re doing, and what that makes of you. Meaning in life is a function of taking responsibility for and investing in the life you have, and what that makes of you.

We can’t all be Shakespeare or Kanye West or Bill Gates or Barack Obama or Einstein or Kobe Bryant or Martha Stewart. But we can all be great people.

We all want to be important. It’s a deep need we feel. We want to be an individual, we want to know that we matter, that we are seen and not forgotten. But seen by who? Important to who? How do you get that? If value is a product of being valued, then who is it that we’re chasing, expecting to capture that value?

Is it ourselves? I propose that there is never enough value and importance you can capture from yourself to satisfy yourself. You were already the most important person in the world to you. And whatever great heights you achieve, you’re still you and feel like you. So who then? What people do you need to be seen and recognized by to feel important? How many of them? How do you become important enough to someone to feel like you matter enough to yourself to be happy?

You can die as the most significant person in the world, known to millions, having changed history, and not have been important enough to anyone to actually have anyone who would shed a tear at your graveside or feel your loss personally. And often those who chase those heights have to sacrifice a lot along the way. If meaning and value are only for those who rise to the greatest visibility, then the majority of all humanity is screwed, lost in a pointless scramble to reach the top.

There are seven billion people in the world. Are you really going to bet your happiness in life and your existential worth on you somehow mattering enough for them to care about you and your story? Who are you to them? Most people have a hard enough time really caring about or even seeing anyone beyond themselves. You’ve got seven billion competitors who are just as human as you, and people being born and people dying every minute. Why should they see you? And even if they do, in such a sea of humanity, how long can you expect that to last? Long enough to build the meaning of your life on? Those five minutes of fame pass quickly.

The only real human society that matters, that sticks with you and provides durable meaning, is the actual network of people you touch, that are close to you. If the people who were close to you don’t know you and value you and care for you, and if they never felt your care for and investment in them, you’re a nobody. You’re faceless. You’ve missed out on the most basic level of human value that is available to everyone.

Extremes are worth considering, how the greatest celebrity can feel lonely and empty, and how the lowest menial worker can feel important and fulfilled. But most of us live somewhere in the middle. We’re not really trying to make the list of most influential people in the world. We just want to be more than what we are. So the really relevant question is, how do we do that? What’s the best way? And if we are feeling at a very low ebb, a very low value, how do we begin to climb, when what we desire might seem so far off?

The real foundation of value isn’t to matter to everyone. It’s to matter to someone. Get a job and do well at it. It doesn’t really matter that much what job. It’s a foundation. Just find a job where you can do well and matter to someone. Find a family, or invest in the one you have. That’s a pre-made resource for finding people to whom you can matter. Friends and neighbors are an option, if you have the opoortunity and inclination and space in your life. A church or other social group. You don’t have to matter to everyone, or be the most important person in a place. You just need to find a space where you matter to someone. And that’s a foundation for a life.

What you build on that foundation is up to you. But so many people make the mistake of thinking that the quickest way to value, to a home, is to just start stacking frames on top of each other to reach the highest point possible. Tall towers with shallow foundations fall easily. And a house built on a deep foundation may not rise as high, but it can endure the storms and the centuries and provide a place of meaning and value and significance for you and for others for ages to come.

Great lives provide places of meaning and comfort and protection and inspiration and watering for those around them and those inside them. But however small our lives may seem, we can create that place and find people to bring inside it. And however amazing and cathedral-like and extensive our lives may seem, we can fail to fill that space with anyone, and it can be hollow. Your house can be just as valued by the people within it as the greatest castle of a life, and feel warmer and more intimate if those people are close to you and known to you. And it can endure and keep providing a place of value and consequence for long after you’re gone, if the foundations are deep.

Value isn’t about the work you do. It’s about who you do the work for. Because value only comes from being valued by someone. The value of work done only for yourself is fleeting, because that kind of value is static and is subject to mood, dependent on your own feelings about yourself. But work done for someone or something you love and care about is work that matters and endures and forces you to recognize your value even when you won’t. Even the smallest work rendered to God, to your highest conception of truth and goodness, has infinitely precious value. The question to ask yourself is, what is a truly stable container for my value? Is it your work colleagues? Your high school friends? Society? God? The universe? Your family? Your parents or children? Your friends on social media? Who is it you’re working to impress and be valued by? And who is a stable source and container for that value? And how can you best invest to gain it in them?

A final note on anti-fragility. Life is hard. Life is unpredictable. In fact if there is one thing you can predict, it’s that you’re going to face difficulties, disappointments, and tragedy. At the very least, you and everyone you care about will suffer the tragedy of death. And however late it is in coming, it is always an unwelcome guest. The world will test whatever you try to build in it. Storms will come against the walls of the sheltered garden you build. It’s only a question of when and how big. No engineer builds a dam with the assumption that no floods will ever occur, the questions they ask when designing it are how big, and when. The floods will come.

Whatever you seek to build, it must be at least well founded enough at a fundamental level that a wind that knocks the roof off won’t bring down the whole structure. A life that is dependent on everything going perfectly and achieving everything you hope for is a life that’s fundamentally at the mercy of circumstance. It’s fragile, no matter how impressive it looks.

You may not have time in life to accomplish everything you planned and needed to achieve value. You might get injured or miss your opportunities. You might get sick or suffer a crippling loss. You might get distracted or be forgetful or lazy. You might have your just rewards stolen or ignored. You might do everything right and then lose it all through a random twist of fate (the current pandemic is certainly a good example of that). And the chances that you will do everything right and will do everything you could in life are pretty slim.

Your value in life can’t be dependent on either you doing everything perfectly or on the world doing everything perfectly for you. Both circumstances and yourself are going to disappoint you. How are you ever going to be important enough to make your life have meaning and your value have substance if the whole construction is dependent on things going the way you planned?

This has to be a fundamental concern in our approach to how we build our lives and their value and our importance and how we secure those existential goods that we need to keep going and find meaning in life. We may not be able to impress the world. We may not be able to change it. We may not be able to do a lot of things that we wish we could and feel that we need to to have a life worth being grateful for and happy with. We need a foundation that can endure some storms and some building problems. If we want to build something worth remembering, something likely to last, something to leave behind, to transfer value into the future and to the lives of others.

The question that we have to answer when we seek to build our value is, how will it survive, how will you survive, if the world and yourself turn out to be less than you had hoped? How much of what you have built will still be standing after the floodwaters rise against it? How much of you will still stand after a defeat? What percentage of your peace and happiness will still be there? How much can you truly hold on to during a flood? How much can be rebuilt in the time you have if everything but the foundations goes?

Why we need the noble savage

We must believe in the myth of the noble savage. It is this story, this mythology, that allows us to maintain the great fiction that guards and preserves the deep psychological needs of our hearts. There is something deep inside us that it protects, a different story, a nagging doubt, a yawning void, that it protects us from. It must fill that space, lest the feared darkness take its place. And we’re not sure we would survive, or what it would demand of us.

The need the myth of the noble savage fills is the need to believe that our situation, our pain and guilt and disappointment, is not the fault of either the fundamental structure of the universe or of ourselves, but is the fault of someone else, something that happened to us along the way to here. The world is good. We by our nature are good. And if something wasn’t screwing it up and making it go wrong somehow (and how is a very good question, if the myth of the noble savage is true).

We don’t want to believe that the natural state of the universe is pain and suffering and failure. And we especially don’t want to believe that we are part of that pain and suffering and imperfection, that we are participants, that we are part of the infection, part of the cause of the problem. We want to save ourselves and save the world from original sin and have someone or something else to blame.

We have to believe that if we could just take away whatever it is that someone else is doing, what would be left between us and the world would be beautiful and paradisical and we would be happy. If we could just remove the satanic influence of X (whoever or whatever we choose to blame), then the garden would return to paradise, and we could live in it whole and in peace.

Today, our serpents take many forms. Corporations, capitalism, racism, white privilege, the government, religion, prejudice, bigotry, cisheteronormativity, the patriarchy, and inequality are a few popular serpents you’re likely hear preached about from the pulpit if you flip on the news today. If you search through enough channels you might hear a different list. Socialists, elites, anarchists, and deviants might come up.

The myth of the noble savage is much more entrenched in the left than the right, however. The left gives more credence to the utopian vision, that paradise is the natural birthright of all before it stolen or denied by their list of villains. The right, rather, seems to argue that utopia, or as much of it as is possible, is already here. It’s an illusion that paradise is a default; failure and chaos are the real default, but if you try and compete sufficiently, success will be winnowed out of the chaff and emerge thanks to “the market”, which is essentially just competition to achieve positive outcomes. And so however much of paradise is actually possible, we are already achieving through the process of our competition, struggle, and striving.

If you study personality theory, it’s clear why the left would take more to utopian visions. They’re generally high in openness, full of creativity and the belief in possibilities and open horizons. And the right is generally more conscientious, more concerned about the limits the world places on us and what we have to do to survive within them.

I’m not making an endorsement of either mode of being. In a strict sense, conservatives are right about the world. It is a certain sort of thing, it does have real limits. And to succeed we need to learn to live within them. But we need the left to help us test what those limits actually are and to prevent us from getting locked too much into our habits and assumptions. We need hope, we need innovation, we need creativity. The situation is always changing. There may be more opportunities available than we thought. The limits of possibility need testing. We just need to be able to do so without risking what we’ve achieved, since we know that it wasn’t easy to achieve and is so easy to lose.

The terrifying possibility for the utopian, if it turns out that the noble savage myth isn’t true, is that they’re trapped. The world is confining, it is limited, it is tyrannical, it is dismal, it isn’t free and open. And that means that their whole mode of being is in question. Who they are is wrong, the way that they see the world is wrong. The world and their innate way of approaching it are mismatched. Either they or it shouldn’t be. They’re in conflict, and only one can survive.

We shouldn’t pretend that that isn’t a serious concern and an excellent basis for motivation. The utopians need to believe in the noble savage, and they also therefore have to believe in the existence of the spoiler, the enemy that ruins it all, for their whole vision of the world and of themselves to survive and have value. Their place in the world and their ability to live with themselves and with the world depends on these beliefs.

So there’s not much hope or understanding when people from the other side (those of the constrained vision, as Thomas Sowell would describe it) tell them to wake up and get real and act dismissively toward their most essential convictions and the project that defines their entire lives (removing that which prevents goodness from emerging).

And let’s be perfectly honest, the “realism” of the right can be just as unrealistic in its failure to consider possibility, its willingness to ignore the costs and injustices that occur as part of the process of life. They might be right that the best way to overcome problems is to seek production of good outcomes through effort and competition to succeed, paying the price and allowing what doesn’t work to fail, but that doesn’t mean that nothing can be done about the collateral damage, that nothing can be done to abate some of the difficulties, that it isn’t possible to make recovery and recuperation and new attempts possible for more people.

As a dad, it’s easy for me to think that I’m saving my kids by making them face what’s hard. I want them to be strong, to be able to face what the world throws at them and not be overcome. I want them to discover their own strength. And I don’t want them to be naive and not realize how hard the world can be. And sometimes that means facing the world as it is, not as what we wish it was, and doing what needs to be done, whether it’s what we wanted or not.

And I think that I am perfectly justified and correct in that belief. I believe that the best information available shows that that is indeed a necessary and excellent pathway to success in life. My own experience, traditional wisdom, and modern psychological research all confirm it. But! But, that belief, however realistic or correct, does not exhaust the category of what it is true or helpful to know and do. Reality and its possibilities and our possible ways of dealing with it are not exhausted by my perspective on it. It is correct. It is not complete.

I have seen my wife do some amazing things. She comes at things from the opposing strategy, as often but not always happens in marriages. And I have seen myself do some terrible things. I have seen my own “correct” realism turn tyrannical. I have seen it overwhelm my children and cause them to retreat and collapse. I have seen it be counterproductive. And I have seen my wife succeed where I failed and provide essential support from her end that made the success of my efforts possible. Life isn’t exactly a walled garden or a harsh wilderness. It’s a bit of both. And so we need to carry a bit of both with us to keep our wits about us, wherever we end up.

In many ways my wife and I aren’t really so different. I prefer to lead with confrontation, and then once my children are willing to listen and to submit to learning, then I’ll switch to softness and encouragement and remonstration, now that they’re on the right track and back in the right places, now that they’ve accepted the creative destruction of failure and are ready to start building toward something good. My wife prefers to first create a soft and inviting and safe environment and then try to work from that pleasing and conserving space toward venturing forth to where we need to go.

And the answer to which approach is actually best is: both. Sometimes you definitely need one. Sometimes you need a balance. Sometimes one just won’t work and you need to switch tactics. It’s often hard to tell which strategy is called for. So you either need two different people who can offer both and trade off and support one another, or you need to at least be aware on your own of the potential value of both and be willing to switch when necessary (which is hard to do, but possible). Life requires that you be a little schizophrenic. As an Ikea manual once said, when assembling this fixture, it is best to be two people.

To be perfectly honest, I think the noble savage myth (or at least its appeal) is an entension of our innate belief in the goodness of children. That the small and undeveloped or vulnerable must be innocent and good. It’s an understandable belief, and a useful and perhaps even necessary one. Our children, especially small children, demand so much of us and cost us so much. When they’re small, they scream at us and cry at us and scourge our ears with their demands, and they are often incredibly hard to understand or please.

What keeps you going through all that? What keeps a mother caring for an infant that has turned her practically, emotionally, and physically into their personal slave and offers almost nothing back in return? What gives us tolerance for such behavior? Innate positive Delusion. No, seriously. To some degree, the essential conviction in our hearts (despite the evidence) is that our child is fundamentally good (despite appearances) and will develop toward the expression of goodness, if we can only meet their needs and provide a secure environment that protects and provides for them. People often feel that way about their kids when they’ve grown far beyond infancy and the reasonability of such suspensions of judgment and positive prejudice. But that’s what keeps us invested, what gives us patience, what helps us survive the endless ups and downs of child-rearing

This is also why the noble savage myth is so persistent, despite plenty of evidence to contradict it. Our minds are already accustomed to maintaining this kind of delusion about things we see as incipient, despite everything our children put us through. It keeps us from tossing our kids out the window every day. That’s a very personal power. It’s tenacious.

That optimism is essential for getting through what your child will put you through. If you had real future knowledge of the worst moments of your child’s adult life (or lack of an adult life), it would be much harder to face and do what you need to do in the present. We need to believe in our children. And considering all that we put into them and how precious they are to us, we also need to believe that the world isn’t just some terrible, devouring place that we’re bringing them into. We need to believe that if we can just keep the wolves at bay that our child will be good and the world will be good to them. If we cannot believe in the world as a good place, then it is cruel to bring an innocent child into it. If we cannot believe in our child as a good person, then it is cruel to the world and to us to bring them into it.

The noble savage myth is simply the optimistic prejudice toward children writ large, across time or across social development. And even mothers of grown adults, even criminals, can have a hard time accepting the imperfections and dangers of their own children. They simply can’t believe it. Because believing it would contradict everything that they gave they their life to and sacrificed and suffered for, the assumption that made them able to make those necessary sacrifices. Someone must be doing an injustice, must be spoiling things, must be to blame. They cannot believe it of their baby.

It’s hard as a parent not to do this. My own father is particularly loathe to admit that his daughter, my sister, ever did wrong or was anything other than wonderful. Deep down, he knows better, and he never let it stop him from pushing back when he thought she needed it. But he clearly had a strong prejudice and a desire, at least, for a blind spot. It was clear what he wanted to believe. My wife’s parents think she’s an angel that fell from heaven, basically. I mean, sure, she’s wonderful, and probably in comparison to many people is pretty close to divine. But as someone who knows her well, which her parents must, I know that she’s far from an angel.

There is real utility in believing the best of people, and of the world, and there’s real utility in approaching them that way. You may help that positive possibility to grow into being. You may succeed in providing just the protections and opportunities that allow new beauty and goodness to flourish. On the other hand, you might be blindly naive and fail to appreciate the real internal and external dangers before you and fail to respond to or confront them. You might enable when you should have resisted and believed when you should have questioned. You might have set a sheep among the wolves or a wolf among sheep. Because, although it is beautiful and kind and correct and useful and captures a fundamental reality, your optimistic belief does not exhaust reality. It does not describe or cover all the possibilities of being or necessary action. It is good. But it is inadequate. There is a nonzero possibility that your child could be a dastard, and that your tolerance and positive prejudice could enable it, or even cause it.

Useful as it might be, and as much as we might tell it to ourselves about our own children, or by extension about all children, the whole human race, the myth of the noble savage is simply that, a myth. It’s a story. And it’s not the whole story. Sometimes it’s an outright false story. Maintaining it may actually harm the object we’re trying to protect, ourselves and our children, or whoever we are treating like children, like something less than real, mature, capable humans and complex and fallible moral agents.

Refusing to face and confront the real dangers the world will present and that our own children can present to the world and themselves does neither any favors. In fact it makes the danger more likely. And it can make them weak and unprepared, or confused and frustrated and bitter when they are disappointed. It can make life traumatic. There is nothing so traumatic as finding out that the whole world and even yourself is something far different and far worse than you had believed. That can kick the whole life out of you, if you’re truly unprepared for it, if you’ve never been inoculated by a little harsh “realism” to know how to integrate and overcome it.

Sometimes you need the knowledge that neither you nor the world is perfect, and you shouldn’t expect things to behave like they are. And if you have no other explanation, when things do go south, you’ll be endlessly searching for those spoilers, those enemies, that are somehow ruining the whole perfect system. You’ll see them, in contrast to yourself and your world, as unutterably evil and unjust, and be willing to do anything to remove them. And when removing them does not remove all the evil from the world, what then? Will you broaden your net? Will you seek new scapegoats to condemn? The French Revolution didn’t start with the overthrow and execution of the aristocracy and immediately end with civil utopia. It went on, and on. Until even the people who had started the revolution were themselves being led to the guillotine, as revolution after revolution followed, trying to ferret out who exactly was still getting in the way of paradise.

So what is to be done? It may a fact that the myth of the noble savage is, strictly speaking, untrue. But it is something we desperately want to be true. And when it comes to people, especially our children, we need it to be true. And among those who have the love and kindness and energy to wish to extend their protection beyond their own children to others, to help and protect them, which is a noble and wonderful sentiment that we desperately need to protect and make use of, they will have that energy and have that resiliency in part because of their naive, uncynical belief in that story, that instinct, that belief in the world and in others.

The problem is, such an approach is quite likely to have exactly the opposite effect we hope for. It can harm even the object of our love just as much as it can hurt them. And partly because it isn’t the full truth, it leaves out some terribly important realities that we need to be aware of to navigate the world and even ourselves. But it’s a useful belief. We need it. We need that approach, or we would never get through the infancy of our children or of our societies. We need a foot in what the world could be, and what we could be, not only in what it is and what we are. As humans, we need a foot in possibility, as well as versimility. And it’s often easy to mistake harshness and extremity for versimility and miss the full scope of reality. That something an eye for possibility helps guard us from.

I can agree, having thought through all this, that I understand the myth of the noble savage. I understand its genesis, its appeal. I understand why it needed, both by individuals psychologically and socially by humanity. It has value. It contains some truth. I don’t think this is a mistake that is cured by expunging falseness, but rather by adding truth. By correcting the incompleteness. By balancing our approach and understanding. By marrying the different halves of our interpretational approaches.

If I could suggest any possible cure to those who suffer from an excess in one perspective or another (inducing those who believe in the myth of the noble savage), it would be to get married and have children. That should teach you a lot. Or at least it should offer you the opportunity, if you can just take advantage of it. If you can actually learn the lessons available from a husband or wife and children, you will likely arrive at a more balanced and nuanced perspective.

If that seems like too unlikely or too difficult or costly a solution, reading a little history works pretty well too. You can get the benefit of other people’s experiences, even if you can’t get your own. And history provides plenty of examples, of you can just keep your mind open enough to learn the lessons that are available. You have to approach it with the attitude of attempting to add to your understanding, not merely confirming it, though. And that can be tricky. You need an assumption of value to be found. Which is also the same assumption you need for a good marriage.

Any good human society is much like a good marriage. It brings together different people who have enough in common to appreciate and understand one another, but enough different to add something to each other’s lives that we couldn’t provide sufficiently alone. We balance strengths and weaknesses and diversify our ability to respond to the many, varying needs and challenges that may arise.

As in any marriage, sometimes our partners will disappoint us. Sometimes they won’t be great. Sometimes they will hurt us dreadfully and drain the goodness and life from our lives. That is why we need love. That is why we need faith and belief and hope in our relationship. If we have only naive love and childish dreams, we will be terribly disappointed and heartbroken. We will be vulnerable and foolish and thoughtless and easy to exploit, and even prone to mismanagement and exploitation of ourselves. Faith and love is why we need realism, and realism is why we need faith and love.

Life isn’t a static system that you simply set in motion and iterate on, it’s a living dynamic. Conditions and possibility, limitations and opportunity. Understanding and imagination. Caution and adventure. Comfort and challenge. Yin and yang, anima and animus. It’s a dialogue between the world as it is and the world as it could be. We need the myth of the noble savage, and we need to grow beyond it. We need to understand where it comes from and where it is leading us. Because we can’t quite believe in it, and we can’t quite give it up. This idea needs a home, and it needs a better home than we currently have for it. And I hope we can find it.

P. S. As I hope I’ve made clear, I don’t like the term “realism”, and I believe it to be a bit of a misnomer. People often point to things that are dark and gritty as being “more real”, as if only harsh realities and not pleasant ones were real, which is terribly reductive. But I couldn’t think of a good term to use for this viewpoint, and I think that’s how it might represent itself. As bracing realism. Harsh reality. A competitive, confrontational approach. Less nice, less agreeable, but honest. Pragmatism over idealism. Taking the world as it is, not how we wish it was. Especially as a counterpoint to the attitude behind the noble savage myth, I couldn’t think of a good term for it.

Obviously, as an ideology, “nature red in tooth and claw” is the historic counterpoint to the noble savage myth, and is just as naive and limited in its own way. Both positions are, that’s part of my point. We know what it is and have terms to describe it when a mother (or father) is excessively positive about their child and wants to protect them and thinks they can do no wrong. We know about mama bears. But what do you call a dad who deliberately cajoles and pushes their hesitant kid off the diving board or tells them how to punch back the next time a bully tries to mess with them? In particular, what images and language do we have to talk about it that don’t immediately condemn it but recognize the potential value (as well as the potential problems and excesses)?

I’m not sure we have that vocabulary, we’re so focused on being idealistic and nice and agreeable and harmless and pleasant and kind. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be those things, only that they too have their pathology and they too are incomplete, and being pragmatic and disagreeable (while having its own pathology and incompleteness) is also important and needed and valuable and life-problems serving and affirming. Humans aren’t either sheep or wolves, though they can be, to their ruin; our power is in being something between both of them.

It’s very important that we have the language and imagery, the mental mythology, to help us see the value in “realism”, and to see the dangers in idealism. We wouldn’t have both of these innate instincts and viewpoints persisting across all time and cultures if they weren’t both fundamentally necessary and didn’t both have some truth to them. And we wouldn’t need both of them if either of them were complete and sufficient and didn’t need a counterbalance and watchdog to protect them from becoming pathological. We wouldn’t have men if women could do everything men can do. And we wouldn’t have women if men could do everything they can do. We wouldn’t keep finding right wingers and left wingers everywhere if we didn’t actually require two hands to rise to highest heights.

The Good Place?

I don’t think I’ve talked much about The Good Place before. I don’t really have the energy to, but somehow I’m going to do it for way too long. It doesn’t reflect well on me to be so hard on what is really a fine show with some decent laughs, but I’m going to anyway. It’s an OK comedy with an OK cast. But it annoys me so much. It could be just a quirky show with a very odd and amusing premise, but instead it spends waaaay too much time actually delving into the nuts and bolts of its conceit.

It’s like listening to an English major talk about philosophy (and that’s probably what it is). It knows just enough to seem clever. But a little bit of cleverness that acts like a lot of cleverness is a dangerous and tiresome thing. It should really just stick to the funny business and not get into its premise that much. It shouldn’t look that hard at the world it’s built. Because it needs it to hold up if it applies that much scrutiny and it doesn’t. There have been plenty of silly shows like this before, but those shows usually didn’t get all meta and preachy and spend lots of time examining the plausibility of a dog actually working for the police solving crimes.

Maybe it annoys me because it deals with religion and ethics and and moral philosophy, and I actually have a real background in all those things. And seeing it made into a dumb show that pretends its smart is actually far worse than if it was just a dumb show just having fun with all that serious business. The presumptive idiocy that it might think its actually saying something profound and thoughtful, as well as the idea that this might be some people’s only substantial basis for actually addressing these issues, is horrifying.

It’s amazing how much philosophy and ethics is blindly smuggled in these days under the guise of amusing entertainment. Comedies with a bit of drama and self awareness and commentary. They’re not just silly shows, they’re making you better too. They’re educating you with their shallow stereotypes and goofy plots and exaggerated performances and trite lessons. And even stupider Americans don’t even really they’re being “improved.”

It’s all terribly inorganic and hacky. The comedy makes that easy. By relying on parody and jokes you can make it seem like you were actually being intellectually clever, throw in some smart talk to make yourself seem wise. And rhs audience hardly realize that their conclusions about a significant moral issue were established by cartoonishly simple portrayals of a position and didactic commentary from some snarky authorial stand-in.

Not that I’m some brilliant philosopher or writer. But truly good moral lessons of real sognificance should emerge organically from the substance of the story. But these shows are constantly yakking their heads off at you about their messages. None of it would actually pass muster in any real discussion, so why pretend that it is one rather than just focusing on the fun possibilities of plots characters in the world?

Maybe if it weren’t for the weird and heady premise, the schticks of the various characters would run thin. As far as I can tell, all of them are pretty much doing the same things and acting the same way and making the same sorts of jokes and hitting the same character beats as they were all the way back at the beginning of the show. Once the central mystery was solved, they kept chasing their premise and their characters’ schtiks round and round, seemingly hoping they’ll end up somewhere that will either mean something or let the show continue, or both. But it seems like a very unsustainable premise, and the more unsustainable (the harder to keep going what it had) the farther it goes into its own inner workings.

On some level, it’s like The Office. We want to keep seeing this person be weird and this person be self absorbed and this person be clueless and this person be plucky. And we want to see weird, silly stuff in a very odd, esoteric world. But both the world and the character arcs want to push toward some sort of conclusion, not toward continuing the status quo. It’s like the characters are literally constantly searching for a plot device to keep the show going.

The Good Place is a high-concept show with a very tried and true comedic substance that actually provides the meat and potatoes of watchability. But high concepts are difficult to maintain, so they keep trying to ride it out and keep it going. But the show’s substance isn’t quite clever enough for that, however much anything seems kind of profound and clever if you have Ted Danson in glasses talk about it in a flippant yet earnest manner. Characters talk casually about how many corkscrews they’ve shoved into eyeballs while having polite discussions about philosophy and the fine points of keeping the show’s premise running. It funny. But if we actually take any of it seriously and think about it much, it’s a problem.

I guess the main thing about it that offends me is that it’s a dumb comedy. And I like dumb, absurd comedies. And this is a particularly absurd and unrealistic one populated by exaggerated caricatures. And that can be really funny. But the show wastes so much time and effort acting like it isn’t just a dumb comedy. And it keeps trying to figure out how to keep going and act like it and the characters are going somewhere, and so far as I can tell it hasn’t, and it shouldn’t. The show would end itself if it did.

Really, the problem is that the show should have already ended. It should have had fun with the premise and the characters and when the premise had run its course and the characters figured it out and got somewhere, ended. But it keeps going, like some absurd version of Supernatural (another show that has possibly outrun its premise but survives on the strength of the formula). How many times will we have to watch The Good Place upend its status quo so it can reset the world and repeat its basic arcs while the typical antics go on?

Maybe I’m being too harsh. I suppose that’s what all shows do these days. I just wish they would avoid bringing real intellectual issues into their silly farce. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey had fun with Heaven and Hell, but they never pretended they were actually trying to actually teach you anything and never made you listen to didactic lectures about the moral philosophy of the premise. And let’s be honest, what we really want is to watch Death lose at Battleship, not listen to him pontificate about shallow postmodern ethical quandaries.

Maybe I’m just a snob. Maybe I’m offended at the idea that because of this show someone might think they actually know something about these subjects. And maybe this really is the closest many people will actually come to learning about these subjects. And that depresses me terribly.

Birth of the goddess

Spicy meatball warning. Offensive, personal, not at all polite or correct.

Prepare for some shocking imagery. I believe it to be necessary to really adrress this subject honestly and unblinkingly. The unvarnished reality of it. I know that in some ways I’m violating my own points I made in my entry about Cuties. There are some subjects that you can’t address, can’t represent, without participating in them. Is it possible to discuss the worship of sex, to describe what it has become, what power it has, what its image is, without being almost shockingly provocative and even pornographic? I don’t know.

I don’t think everyone should read this. I think it takes a strong heart and a strong mind to actually look this thing in the face and not be devoured by it. And that’s kind of my point. How can we not be devoured? How can we have it before us and not be consumed? Are we helpless before our new god that we have made? Let us who wish to see join me. As we go on.

I am struggling to understand sex. Sex is so much. Sex is everything. Sex is everywhere. Sex sex sex. We have half the human race made one way and half made the other way, and all of us are the consequences of sex, and many of us are busy dealing with the results of sex, and some of us are using sex, and others of us are seeking sex. It’s all sex. All that for this weird little thing we do. And even among your own half of humanity, you don’t get away from it. It’s increasingly all about sex. There are no safe spaces from sex.

It’s strange how many religions involve or even revolve around sex. Sex is worshipped, sex is symbolic of the sacred, sex is ritualized, sex is the ritual. And today sex still seems to determine religion. One interesting fact I took from the book “Cheap Sex” but need more information on and time to think about is, that given a conflict between existing sexual desires/choices/beliefs and religion, a structure that encompasses an entire system of value and knowledge and practical behavioral guidelines, sex almost always wins.

Sex is the true religion. If it’s a fight between religion and sex, sex changes religion, not religion sex. At least today that’s how it is. Perhaps, in choosing or testing a faith, people choose whatever religion can contain or explain or justify their intuitions about sex. But what drives those intuitions these days? Might the factors that drive our intuitions about sex have been drastically changed by technology and our particular historical situation? Might those factors always have at least some influence? There is an underlying system, and there are also changing conditions. And our intuitions go off both. So how much have our conditions changed, compared to previous ages? And what is the result?

Sex is in our view far more than ever. And its consequences seem the most remote. And even its previously understood uses and function seem almost just as remote now (producing children, facilitating pair bonding). Instead, the pleasure, the promise of sex is at the fore. Especially the promise. Because sex promises an awful lot. More than reality can really fulfill, in many ways. As a man, at least, our desires for ourselves and what we will do to and for our partner often go far beyond the reality. Look at our pornography. Much of it doesn’t even pretend to be based in reality. And I’m not just talking about unreasonably beautiful people or absurd situations, those people really do exist (although it might be very unrealistic to expect them to ever be interested in being with you and me or for those situations to happen to the average person).

Have you seen what women are like? They’re amazing. There are women out there, thousands, maybe millions, who are beautiful beyond belief, and quite a surprising amount of them are willing to take advantage of that fact to earn a little advantage by exploiting it, including by showing it off. But that’s not what I have in mind, referring to porn that isn’t based in reality. Those girls are real, even if their availability isn’t. No, I mean, that according to data, one of the most popular genres for porn is hentai, which is a kind of erotic anime, much of which goes far beyond the boundaries of what is actually possible in real life, much less actual likely human relationships.

I know that as a man sex promises so much. What it says about me and what I could do, what it says I could do to someone, what it says they could do to me, it promises so much, it’s beyond imagining. I’ve seen my actual sexual performance, actual sex I’ve had, even when I’m doing my best. And it’s nothing like what sex promises. It says I could lift a woman up and bang her against a wall and have sex with her for hours and hours and cum rivers ten times in a night while she screams in ecstasy. It tells me that under her clothes she conceals the greatest secrets of the universe, the most glorious and desirable objects. That a wobbling excess of fat here or there is actually the most amazing thing the universe has even conjured and there are things I could do with it that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. In reality you can grab it a bit, kiss it a bit, have sex for a few minutes on average, and suddenly collapse, out of breath and spent after just a little loss of bodily fluids. A bit deflating, but true. Orgasm readers most men quite soft and dazed and helpless, and comes on quite easily.

Why, then, do you think men are willing to risk so much and throw away so much for the chance of just a glance or a touch, much less the sweet, soft reward of penetration? Because sex promises so much! Sometimes I can’t even understand it. You look at the actual thing with calm eyes and you’re like, well, that’s it. There’s really only so much I can do with it, however you dress it up. It’s really pretty normal, and pretty similar at heart between different bodies. It’s flesh. It’s skin. We’ve all got it. And yet it boils my brain.

Not just one thing, it’s the whole thing. What is it that’s so attractive about women? What is it that’s so desirable about pussy (to use the modern term, which has an interesting generality, an abstractness that actually fits the nebulous nature of the thing desired, and that it somehow represents more than what is actually obviously present in the specific bodies of women)?

When a man sees a woman, he is seeing that woman and desiring her. There may be layers to that desire. There may be a relational depth to their affection. There may be history, there may be memories. But there is also the desire. Sexiness. The way that the woman becomes an avatar of something the man desires that is far greater and bigger and more amazing and perfect and important than any actual human could reasonably be. They are sexual attraction. They are the givers of pussy. They bring the gift of the divine abstract that men worship and cannot help but worship and desire madly. It is like how the priestesses of Aphrodite through their individual sexual acts facilitate contact with the divine goddess herself. In a way, that symbolism is true. So many of us experience it and confirm it. That particularly form of worship (not uncommon worldwide) is just an unusually literal and curiously candid expression of that desire and experience. I’m not saying I’m in favor of it, only that it perfectly explicable and representative, given how men feel.

Sometimes, when the fever fades, you wonder, what is the appeal? What is the big deal? Why does so much attach to this? Why not to something else, or why not to nothing at all? Why this madness? And for some people it does attach to something else, sometimes very unusual objects, and sometimes to nothing at all.

What is this underlying power? What is this almost religious fervor that seems to be innate to sex? And is it inescapable? Must all things in life, even religion, bow before and serve as the handmaidens of the innate religion of sex? The worship of Aphrodite? The worship of the bodies of others? And perhaps of our own? How much of it is about that aspect, the worship of our own bodies, the need to be worshipped, to be made divine by that worship, the need to be made immortal by the giving of the seed and the pleasure of the body at conception (or at least the sensation of it, without the reality)?

Does sex require of us worship of ourselves or worship of another? Or perhaps both? Why does pussy seem to be the most amazing, desirable, wonderful, irresistible thing in the whole world? Seriously, it’s a kind of madness. The ancients weren’t wrong about that. Why does the whole shape and movement of a naked woman have the ability to capture me and control me and drive me beyond my senses? Why does it seem like nothing must stand between me and that which I desire, and anything is worth the effort and worth the risk to get it? Why does a woman who would be willing to give me access to pussy, to Aphrodite, to the beauty and enjoyment of naked womanhood, to the pleasure of her body and care, who will take in my gift of semen, why does she suddenly seem like the greatest and most generous and kind and amazing being ever to walk the face of the Earth? Why? For such a thing.

Take out your breasts and thrust forth your nipples, uncover the swollen curves of your ass, expose the silken line of your pussy, wrap your lips around my manhood and let your hair fall behind you as your eyes look up at me. And I will think you are the greatest person who has ever lived, and that no one in life has ever done as much for me as you do in this moment. You are the greatest thing that has ever been, and I would do anything and give anything for it.

The mere fact that that is an almost guaranteed reality, that that reaction is within the power of most women to produce any time they wish to, is absolutely insane. That elevation to near sainthood, or even divinity, is so close and easy for any woman to grasp. If she only desires it. That is an ungodly amount of power.

Of course, about six seconds after you come inside a girl, your senses come back a bit and you can see behind the curtain a little (as well as recognize your own position). And that can be a bit awkward. But right up until that moment, it seems like you’re chasing union with the divine embodiment of the universe itself.

In some ways it seems quite unfair. Even cruel. After all, sex promises a lot but can deliver only so much, and only for so long. And the world is constantly imposing itself. Reality. The chances of actually securing what sex constantly promises and demands are so very low for many of us. And the costs are often so high.

How could such power be contained? How could it be controlled, how overcome? Is there any hope? Once the power of sex has been set loose, is there any hope for us, especially men, to escape it or resist it? What percentage of us could actually stand up to an assault on our restraint? A determined attack. Will we not all be made slaves to its overwhelming power? Will we not sacrifice anything to keep what we have or gain what we do not? Does the modern system seek to make slaves of us by constantly provoking our desire but always keeping its fulfillment unrealized?

There is so much to desire. Would we not seek all and sacrifice everything just for the chance to desire it, to be titillated with that infinite and glorious promise, if not even fulfilled with any reality? Is that the irresistible promise of sex today? Not the promise of an actual homecoming and fulfillment, but the promise of the promise? The visitation of the goddess, the worship of Aphrodite, the desire of pussy itself? Is it an abstraction, or a person, or ourselves? Will we be given more and more ways to find it in ourselves and in the idols and rites, the facsimiles and graven (or encoded) images of pussy? That is the name of our new goddess, the syncretistic goddess of the modern era. Innana, Astarte, Aphrodite, Hathor, Rati, Venus, Pussy.

Being freed from her other duties of divine mother, the upholding of the state, patronage of the hearth, marriage, fertility, and even love, pussy can fully inhabit the role of goddess of lust and pleasure and desire and beauty of the body. She has become a simpler goddess, all her power concentrated into one immense demand for worship, one great rulership over us. Sex. Sex alone. All of the limitations removed. All of your desires presented and pricked, forever.

Her image looms over us with immense breasts that will never feed any hunger but lust, a wide-splayed dripping pussy that will never carry any life but the parade of thrusting cocks and dildos and their overflow of cream pies and squirting and oozing cum, male and female. A red-lipped mouth made lovely for sucking and licking and whispering words of lust. A great, rounded, curving ass, taken also for just this use, for licking and for prodding with toys and for filling with cocks and semen till it brims with white and abused inverted red.

This is the whore of Babylon. No one said she would be neat and prim. But she is inifitely and exquisitely sexual and powerful. How could anything of such unchecked power and abandon be confined? How could you hope to contain such a thing? With all it promises, how could you justify it? It promises everything!

Reliable birth control and pornography are the innovations most responsible for the birth of this goddess. She was born from the bodies of the earlier deities. But media, the new power of her images, has given her cult a reach and a reality undreamed of in previous times. She can be represented to us everywhere, with infinite ease, in ways we could have scarcely dreamed of a few decades ago, at little price. The various cults of her devotees, the rituals and images they treasure of her, are so ubiquitous that you can’t avoid them, and so they have become accepted. Prosperity, medical care (antibiotics and antivirals), no-fault divorce, technology allowing men and women the opportunity to share more spaces, and changes in norms for clothing and behavior have all played their part.

None of these are necessarily bad things, they’re just things that happened, conditions that changed because of technology or history, because of the environment we found ourselves in. Some were part of the normal spectrum of changes that occur from society to society as conditions change. But some were drastic, radical changes that could never have been conceived of before. The internet and advances in medical care and birth control in particular are historically and biologically unprecedented. They allowed us to cut loose things from the goddess that had always been fundamentally entwined and inseparable. We were able to cut sex loose from the things that constrained it and even produced it (and that it has always necessarily itself produced). And in so doing we made it a new kind of thing. A thing that had always been nascent, but never able to survive on its own. And now it is supreme.

Look at our society. We are wealthy enough to survive without spouses, we are healthy enough to be careless without consequences, we are liberal enough to provide sex without relationships, we are controlled enough in our bodies to have sex without fertility, we are far-sighted enough to have access to nudity without people. After five or six decades we’ve gotten used to all those massive restructurings of human sexuality. We’re used to porn, used to sex before and outside marriage, used to birth control, used to STD treatments. We take all that for granted; things that no one has ever been able to take for granted before.

If I want to see a naked woman, I can. If I want to see a very specific kind of woman, or kind of sexual act, I can. For free. Within minutes. If I get an STD, I can get it tested for and treated. If I have sex, I don’t have to worry about pregnancy, or we can end it if by some chance it does occur. If I go on a date, there’s a decent chance I’ll get to have sex with my date that night, and a good chance I’ll get to have sex with them before I ever have to actually enter any formal relationship with them. All of that is just so blatantly true that you can take it for granted. You can take it to the bank. It’s all easy. The work has already been done. All you have to do is embrace that freedom and accept the gifts the world offers.

Some are still reluctant to accept, but most are converted, in secret if not openly. Why deprive yourself? Why resist the goddess and her gifts and promises? Aren’t just her promises better than anything else in your life? And for those who seek and enjoy her gifts, isn’t it a needless and cruel tyranny to try to take them away? Isn’t it terribly backward and retrogressive and a denial of our freedoms? We bought them dearly. They’re a privilege no other society has been able to enjoy. And you want to take that away? This is the birthright of all people born in this age. To serve and to enjoy.

We don’t make love, we sure don’t have “marital relations”, we don’t “lie together as man and woman”, in a way we don’t even engage in mating much (in the old scientific sense). We fuck. We fuck pussies and throats and asses and titties. We double up and triple up and go through one after another after another. We fuck each other and we fuck ourselves. Whether the power of that worship is all promise or all reality, whether it feeds us or merely extrudes us in desire, we are fucked.

Somehow, despite all the power of the promises of pussy, people seem to be getting less satisfied and more afraid. They act like animals being shown food but not fed, or like people fed junk food instead of whole meals. They crave more, but look and feel worse. The promise is there and is more demanding than ever, less restrained than ever, more glorious than ever. But it seems like maybe we’re actually having less sex on the whole, as if relationships are failing more, becoming harder to find. As if men were growing more afraid of women and women more afraid of men. As if the reality and the human intermediaries seem less and less worth the trouble and less able to be our conduits to the goddess. The clearer we see the goddess represented, the less adequate her servants seem.

Where will it all end? What sort of deity have we birthed? What are her demands on us, and what does she give? Can she be resisted or contained and restrained, and should she be? How can the old goddesses of hearth and fertility and pleasure and beauty stand up next to her overwhelming fire and her images blazing before us? What would we not be willing to give up to her sacred flames for the chance to stand in her glory? Family? Fidelity? Fertility? Health, money, wealth, society, humanity? What might she demand? What might she devour? And what will she give us in return?

Men in particular seem to already be given over to acceptance of and devotion to the goddess. They were easy targets. But women are targets too, and are unwitting devotees and participants at least. Pussy shapes their lives as well as those of men, even if they think of it less, or differently. Fucking is what they get in life, because that’s what’s available.

I can’t speak as much to the female experience. But their lives have been drastically altered. In fact the changes, the rise of the goddess, have in many ways been conveyed by them. Their lives and approach to sex as representatives of the old goddesses have changed. They have left their old devotion. They sought the opportunities presented as much as men did. There was a lot to be gained, many responsibilities and dangers they had carried and had to regulate their behavior and the behavior of men to control, that could finally be escaped.

Women are, after all, the primary supporters of the freedoms of opportunity presented by birth control, abortion, and no-fault divorce. They relieve women of consequences and from bearing the responsibility of sub-optimal choices and situations. Women in general are more unlikely to be unhappy with a relationship, more likely to be dissatisfied (despite men being the more notorious wanderers). And they had a greater desire to be free from STDs, since they suffer disproportionately from the long term consequences from them, particularly in regard to infertility (and they already have a much shorter reproductive window than men), and can even pass diseases to their children. Sex is already harder for women in so many ways. Women want more and are more easily harmed and are less easily pleased, and so are more easily displeased. And so, naturally, they embraced options to mitigate those displeasing results.

Men, who often themselves conveyed those negative consequences, weren’t displeased at being relieved of the consequences of their sub-optimal actions. It made it possible for them to have more chances with women, including more sub-optimal ones, encounters which women didn’t need to fear and avoid as much. And so both men and women strengthened the conditions that birthed the goddess. They both were merely pursuing their interests. Men didn’t want pussy locked up and held captive by all these other concerns, and now women didn’t need to keep pussy locked up and tied to all these other concerns of health and hearth and fertility either. Together, they set fucking free, set pussy free, and the new, unencumbered goddess emerged. Freed love.

Maybe it had to happen. Maybe the old religion was so corrupt and laden with failures and problems that couldn’t be negotiated or solved that it simply had to go, had to be swept away. The old order was scoured away for its failures and sins and false promises and dead end traps and collateral damage. Its antiquarian rituals and limitations and its blindness and inflexibility.

And now love is free, and must be. Love does not admit impediments. Or perhaps love does not admit encumbrances. Love has shed its burdens and emerged purified of the encumbrances of history, tradition, law, biology, gender, and even human reality. It is free. So what is it? What beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? The vast image of the Spiritus Mundi comes slowly into focus, and we see what this collusion between the sexes has birthed.

I cannot describe it. It stands before me. It is wild and free and beautiful and animalistic. It is ambitious and proud like an advancing mammoth and amorphous and ever-changing. It wants to be and doesn’t know why it is. It is dispassionate and thoughtlessly easy, and it is terrifying and impossible. It is ecstatic and spiritual, and it is hot with heavy breath and the smell of sweat and the stench of bodies’ secrets exposed.

I love it, I desire it. I must have it, and it must have me. I cannot chain it or resist it. This is my duty and fealty. This is everything. It is everywhere. It is our right, and it is our mission. Its promise of paradise is greater than all the treasures the world has to offer. It is Eden, it is utopia; even the hope of it is better than life itself and all the things in it. It is the hope of what is to come. It is the promise of salvation in the eternal bosom of pleasure and fulfillment and the kingdom to come.

When the whole world accepts the goddess, when nothing stands in her way, then the new day will dawn for all of us, and our happiness will no longer be stolen by the tyranny of the old gods. When that day comes, all will know her glory. All will love her. And tremble.

Response to the Dark Horse podcast

Here is the relevant clip. This is actually just a transcript of a comment I posted on that video.

https://youtu.be/JZ_MEX0vtRE

I just read a whole book on this subject called Cheap Sex. In which it is argued by a sex researcher that the economics of sex have shifted so that the cost of it, and of all kinds of sexual freedoms, has dropped drastically, largely driven by technological advances (not cultural ones). And one of the end results is actually greater inequity. Women lose out the most overall, and only a very specific sort of male that is able to properly capitalize on the new market benefits the most. Good looking, desirable, casual-sex-desiring men win the most because they get what they want and have to pay the least for it and have to give the least to others of what those people want for it.
On a side note, if you’re basically arguing that something isn’t good for a person and isn’t good for society, isn’t that likely to be exactly what traditional values structures mean when they say that it’s wrong? And, restrictive as it may seem, doesn’t saving sex for marriage seem like a pretty effective strategy for preserving the value you risk with casual sex? I mean, if you had to codify an ideal, realizing that likely many people will fall outside it, but wanting to provide a guideline that circumscribes what it would be beneficial for the majority to at least aim at and aspire to?
It sort of seems like you recognize the actual practical value of beourgois approaches, but you don’t want to seem uncool or restrictive and actually have to bring the bad news to the kids that they’ve got school tomorrow and they need to get ready for bed. I suppose there is an argument for a strategy that tries to lead people into a value and ideal without actually laying it out as something with a true demand on them and their behavior. You try to explain the value of the rule so you don’t have to actually codify the rule and apply it externally. And certainly, people should choose something because they see the value behind it, not merely because of external compulsion. But that’s also largely a function of maturity and someone gaining the ability to actually see and follow what’s good for them.
People are bad at that, especially the immature. Kids often need the rules long before they’re able to understand the reasons behind the rules. You can’t always wait for them to mature enough to be convinced before they’re already at risk of suffering the consequences of the behavior. And immaturity isn’t always limited by age. And our short term instincts can often overwhelm our more reasoned positions. Make hot, willing, naked women available in front of a man (real or digital women), and they will be hard for him to resist. He might throw over his career, his reputation, even his family in a moment of impulsive desire. So what do you do? Will you deny and them and your society the value of an ideal or standard? Is that really fair? Or does it just save you face and save you from being the bringing of bad news and being the disciplinarian, under the guise of moral sophistication? I’m not saying that moral sophistication and understanding the underlying reasons behind moral proscriptions isn’t incredibly important, and that getting shallowly prescriptive without that sophistication behind (or in front of) it isn’t absolutely essential. But is refusing the actually define a rule, understanding all that, actually being a good parent? Are you truly helping the person? Are you truly helping yourself? The need not to have shallowly understood or shallowly applied rules and laws doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them. And, admittedly, many people don’t understand the reasons behind a lot of the laws we have. They just navigate them to the degree they’re willing. And if they’ve had a good education and good examples they will eventually come to understand why they’re there and what value they’re preserving and what dangers they’re forestalling.
Anyway, I think my point was, that it doesn’t really seem that sexually retrogressive to have “save sex for marriage” as a social ideal. And dissolving it as an ideal doesn’t seem to have actually seem to yield the positive results that destruction of a negative limit might have been expected to yield. Lots of people already didn’t save sex for marriage. Today, when we’ve dropped it altogether as an ideal, rather than making things better, it seems to have made things harder for a lot of people and worse for a lot of people and less satisfying for a lot of people. Sex has become cheap. Relationships have become unstable. Women especially suffer in the new economy, which doesn’t favor the sort of long term investment (even in just their physical pleasure, much less emotional lives) that they often desire. If saving sex for marriage was really so bad, we should have expected better results from abolishing it. If that was sex positivity, it shouldn’t have sexually impoverished so many women and unequally advantaged and disadvantaged so many men. It should have resulted in better provision for everyone, not worse. The mere fact that removing that prescription actually resulted in worse outcomes is a strong argument in its favor, or at least a good argument that it was not “sexually regressive” but was actually, ironically, in many ways sex positive.

Are friends family too? 

There an interesting cultural narrative I’ve long noticed but never commented on. The identification of friends as family (or family substitutes). Obviously, the narrative of lonely, lost, and dislocated people finding a home has a long history. Even the ancient story of Ruth from the Bible runs along these lines, although she substitutes an actual family (her in-laws) for her original family. And there have been lots of close friendships in many ancient stories that were equated to family closeness.

So there’s really nothing news about the narrative, per se. So it never seemed worth noting. But it seems to have grown lately. As the idea of actual familial solidarity has waned, the idea of “found family” has risen, and friendship has taken on a larger and larger role of actually defining what family is, not merely supplementing or substituting for it. I recall watching Spaced, where they made the argument quite explicitly that this motley collection of friends was the modern family. And lots of kids TV shows preach a similar value system. As Phineas and Ferb said “Friends are also family, I’m not talking just blood relations”.

All of this is an interesting, but I would argue necessary shift. Human need a family. We need a pack. We’re not just social, we’re hyper-social. Our way of being requires more than one of us for our selves to be adequately expressed and our lives lived. A human baby requires an enormous amount of social investment and interaction to become a functioning adult.

The problem is, if you glance around at a lot of our narratives about the traditional family structure, our packs have fallen apart and become fractured and separated. The people in Spaced have to seek family in their friends because their actual families are far away, indifferent, or even hostile to them. So they go looking for family in their roommates, friends, neighbors, even landlords.

This is, I think, is a necessary move by all humans, to seek community. But I think one way in which it has changed is how much more necessary it has become because actual family has become such an unstable value to base human community on these days.

The problem is, as inadequate as family often is, friends and acquaintances are also a somewhat unstable foundation for community. At least the sort of friendships we tend to have these days are, mediated as so many of them are by things like social media, coincidental nearness of work or living proximity, or shared interests and hobbies. Realistically, how long do you expect your relationship with your roommate to last? People live very unstable and changeable lives. We don’t stay in the same towns or jobs or houses for years and years any more. We’re always reinventing ourselves. It’s very normal and expected for young people to write things like “best friends forever” in each other’s yearbooks, but the experienced eye of adulthood knows those are the platitudes of youth and lack of perspective and experience. You have no idea how far your life will take you from where you are, and even from yourself as you are, in the years to come.

Ironically, stable long-term friendships are actually more a characteristic of the older generations like the Boomers and Greatest (who also had more family solidarity and continuity) than for the following GenXers and Millennials who came after them. My father in law still goes back to all his high school reunions in his home town every five years and keeps in touch with his old classmates and cares about what happens to them. I haven’t even been to one reunion, and I’m probably more connected to my hometown than a lot of people.

The thing is, friends aren’t family. Yes, they are important to our lives, yes, they add so much, yes, they can even function like a family for us, yes, they can and often must fill an important void for us. But you can’t simply say that they “are” family and the two are equivalent. What makes you think, if you can’t maintain the integrity of your relationships and closeness with the people most innately prejudiced in your favor to do so, that you can maintain it with anyone else? Your family is literally part of you, and you are part of them. And you all know each other intimately and have had to live with one another and share an immense amount of significant experience. If that can’t keep you together, what makes you think something else will, in the long run? What makes you think that will provide a stable, long term basis for your function and value and connection as a human?

I’m not saying that it can’t, just that the odds were already stacked in family’s favor, so if that’s not stable, then what makes you think anything else will be (apart from your deep need to believe it)? It’s hard to care about other people. It’s hard to be a good family member even for people who are actually in your family. And what unites you in the case of an actual family is far more tenacious and unchangable and fundamental than many of the other connections between us that come and go.

Saying that friends=family is a bit like saying that zoos=habitats. It’s not that zoos can’t be amazing, that they can’t provide wonderful care and safety and provision and an enriching environment. But it takes a special effort to pull it off. It’s not the same as the ideal natural environment. A group of giraffes in a zoo may be very happy together. But it’s not the same thing as an actual herd of giraffes in the wild. We shouldn’t dismiss the value of the zoo and the experience of the animals there. Of the herd that they enjoy (now I’m thinking of the herd/family concept from the Madagascar movies). But saying that all relationships have value is not the same as saying that all relationships are equivalent.

Relationships differ. Family and friends differ. They have different qualities. They are not indistinguishable substitutes. Humans need family, and humans need friends. And we have a wonderful amount of flexibility in how we can fill those needs. There’s something truly special and unique about both of them. And we can do either of them poorly and may turn to the other to try to fill that void. I would always argue that the most complete human life should ideally seek friends as well as family, and acknowledge that seeking the function of outside friends entirely within the family can actually be a problem and can have some limitations and disadvantages.

But the family is a remarkably complete and flexible social structure. It provides both commonality and difference within itself. It’s a complete microcosm of a society. It is the fundamental functioning cell of complete human life. It’s not easy to replace or substitute for, if you’ve lost it or if it’s ceased functioning. Family isn’t just some generic social connection you can substitute with government or coworkers or roommates. I’m not saying those things don’t matter or that it won’t often be extremely necessary in practice to actually make those substitutions to help make up for what we lack. The point is that there is a real lack, a real loss that must be compensated for, because family really is something special. It’s not easy to replicate.

For all that Vin Diesel preaches about his group of coworkers are a family, for all that the characters in Spaced argue that they’re a family, and in a way they are, it’s still not quite the same sort of thing as the original, fundamental unit that all such associations are an extension of and reiteration of. You may need it desperately to function that way, more and more if you lack stability in that original, fundamental unit. And I think that’s something we see more and more in our cultural expressions. The desperate need to fill the void of the family. And we very much want to to convince ourselves that we haven’t lost anything and aren’t missing anything, that we aren’t diminished or more alone that we should be, that friends or coworkers or even government and society itself can fill that role just as well, that all such provisions are equivalent.

It’s just not entirely clear, as much as it hurts to admit it, that it’s true. And it’s also not clear that deconstructing the idea of the value of the family so we don’t know what we’re missing, substituting a belief that all significant relationships and social structures are equivalent and interchangeable, will actually help us in the long term. I don’t think the best way to survive the loss of the value that family provided is to deconstruct our belief in it. I don’t think that’s the best approach even to replace it. After all, if you don’t even understand or value what you’ve lost, how can you replace it? You won’t know how. You won’t even know what it is that you’ve lost and will just go on in hungry searching, devouring whatever you come across isn’t he hope it will fill that need. Watering down the idea and identity of what value the family had going for it won’t actually make it easier to find what we’ve lost, and it certainly won’t make it easier to fix it.

Instead were creating a generation of young people who feel that something is broken or missing and are hungry and searching to find it, but have also been denied the knowledge of what it is that they’re looking for, or even the ability to admit their loss openly to themselves. They should be just fine, according to our modern theories. There shouldn’t be any difference, any unique loss. They should be doing and feeling just as good as anybody.

But they don’t. And they don’t understand why. And that eventually that leads to anger and resentment. Because they don’t get why they should be feeling any differently, why they shouldn’t be just as complete as anyone. The results should have been the same, they’ve been told. The inputs are equivalent, so the outputs should also be equivalent. So if they’re not coming out that way, then somewhere there has been a betrayal. Someone has cheated. Someone has stolen something.

And they incorrectly misidentify who has actually robbed them. It isn’t the people who are feeling or doing better, it’s the people who made them the false promises. That it made no difference, that it want a big deal to let that go, that there wasn’t a need to cherish and care for that kind of relationship, because it wasn’t really that special or unique. You could easily make an equivalent facsimile and have whatever you wanted and be unconstrained and unaffected and have it all.

Real life doesn’t really work that way. Try as you might, good as it might be, an animal in a zoo is never going to be exactly the same as an animal in the wild. The inputs are different, and the outputs will also be different. There will be limitations endemic to each situation. This shouldn’t be a reason for despair or for abandoning all efforts. But it also isn’t a good reason to lie to ourselves. That won’t actually help us. Zoos didn’t succeed at providing for their species by simply denying or ignoring the qualities and value of the animals’ lives in nature, or by arguing that there’s no difference between life in captivity and life in the wild. Zoos got as good as they have by learning how to recognize the value and contributions and conditions of the environment in nature. They work with those innate structures rather than against them, rather than ignoring them or taking them for granted.

Family is the society nature gives us. Friends (and to a larger extent communities and even states) are the society we build ourselves as a further extension of that unit pattern. Both of them are treasures. But they’re not the exactly the same treasure, and you don’t value them better by flattening them or rendering them generic and interchangeable. It might hurt to realize what we’ve lost and what we’re seeking, but it won’t help find it or avoid losing it if we act like it never happened or doesn’t matter.

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