Making Nobody Happy

In response to the case of an article by an evolutionary biologist that referenced the difference in strength levels between the men and women being censored by Instagram as “hate speech”.

People should never have generated the category of “hate speech”. It’s such a weird concept.

Hate is an emotion, and we aren’t generally well equipped to make firm judgements about or decisions based on the alleged subjective emotional states of other people. It’s a very slippery and vague thing to hang so much significance on. And yet we find it everywhere. It is a cultural phenomenon. It’s very hard to pin down all the meanings it has; legal, cultural, moral, and psychological.

I don’t think it’s even possible at the moment to chase down all those questions of what hate (speech) really means, not here at least. The more pertinent question is, what is its function in our society? Simple. It’s a tool. What is it a tool for? How do people use it? Like all language, it has a conventional social significance based I what we use it for. So what do we use it for?

I would answer, based on my closest and most practical reading, that it is a tool for creating exceptions to limitations on the regulation of speech so it can be safely made the subject of moral, legal, social, and psychological force and control. It’s a means for creating a special class of acts that you’re able to break the usual restrictions and limitations of regulation on, because it has been classified as a special kind of act that justifies it. It’s “hate”. It allows you to being force to bear that you otherwise could not.

Hate is a term we use for opinions, positions, attitudes, and actions that would normally be within the scope of your own personal discretion, but that have because of their special status been excepted from those freedoms and protections. And in the case of actions that would in themselves be criminal in an ordinary way, it overlays a separate, secondary level of legal, moral, and psychological significance and censure. That is my functional definition, or rather diagnosis, of hate.

Moreover, because hate is a subjective psychological state, it allows us to bring to bear the forces of moral, social, and legal censure against people purely on the basis of their subjectivity, on the basis of who they are, or who we impute them to be, people possessing a “hateful” internal state. It allows certain ways of being, and any expressions that might indicate them, to be expressly forbidden from the outset. And because it is such an inherently subjective designation, it has enormous flexibility in its potential use.
The fact that this article I mentioned was classified as “hate speech”, to the point that it fell afoul of systemic regulation and actual censure, shows just how much force the term “hate” allows you to bring to bear. The use of the term is far more revealing of its nature than anything else about it. It’s so powerful that it’s kind of amazing, and it can be wielded with remarkably arbitrary and unquestionable power. Just like that, you can get a scientific article, one containing virtually no emotion, whose claims are perfectly verifiable, pulled off a public platform as “hate speech”. The whole concept is a social and legal doomsday weapon. And we are only just now starting to take it seriously when we see (the beginnings of) just what can be done with it. Because the answer is, as this should demonstrate, almost anything.

A better functional definition for hate speech would be “speech that I hate, that I can therefore bring social, legal, and moral force against, specifically on that basis”. Because its central concept is subjective, its application is fundamentally subjective. That isn’t a moral argument, it’s a technical fact. Hate is in the eye of the beholder, and the only real limit on diagnosis is how easily some determinative quorum are moved to feel it. The central irony of hate speech is that it tells you far more about the emotions of the accuser than the accused. And that, I deem, has always been its nature, for better or worse. We don’t condemn hate speech because it is hateful, but because we hate it.

P.S. It is easy to suppose that when we imagine the potential consequences of such cases, that we overstate their practical potential. It seems really awful from an ideological standpoint, but less so from a practical one. It’s not really a big deal, just a silly little paper being censored. As if ideology and what we do in public society had no impact on the actual behaviors we will eventually exhibit.

People don’t just talk or think in a purely idle manner, they are generating simulations. They are playing mental games as practice for real ones. But mental games are often limited by their real-world applicability. You may have ideas that are very hard to implement, or that few others share. But when enough people share an idea, and it takes fewer than you would think, ideas begin to spill over into practice. A culture develops new rules of what’s possible.

In countries with fewer protections, such as China or Singapore, you can have the police show up at your door for a comment you make on social media. But the same holds true now for countries like Scotland and Australia and Canada. You need to be careful what you say, because you might run afoul of the law. And I don’t mean for bomb threats, I mean for unacceptable speech that violates hate crime standards, speech like that in this article. People can and do lose their jobs and see their lives and careers assaulted and censured and punished. This isn’t hyperbole, it’s already happening.

The leap from social censure to outright legal punishment is one that is becoming easier and easier to make. Already in England, Canada, Scotland, and Australia it is being made. Cases have already begun to trickle in, precedents are being set. Far from being subject to mere social censure, failing to use preferred pronouns in Canada has now, in an actual court case, been declared a legal violation of human rights and subject to legal consequences and enforcement. In fact it has been deemed a crime against humanity.

Why? Because legal structures were put into place making it possible a few years ago. Social structures against hate speech were given legal powers. Matters of personal speech are now governed by legal force and criminal punishment. And once that door is open, it’s open. Speech itself has become a legitimate matter for government regulatory control.

The problem we often encounter, when we create and take hold of such novel structures and powers, is that we don’t really have a clear idea what it is that we have just made possible. We imagine the potential uses of our inventions through very limited and rosy glasses, and we neglect their real potential, as well as what a difference a little time will make. These things always take time.

The fact that this particular scientific article could be classified as “hate speech” and censored from public viewing is a warning that we’ve unleashed powers that have already evolved beyond our control or expectations. And the leap from social punishment to legal punishment is only a matter of adding a few legal structures and removing a few legal limitations. A leap that is already being taken all over the western world.

It may be alarmist to point all this out, but if I am alarmist it is only because what we see happening is alarming. And the barriers holding things back from becoming even more consequential are far less substantial than we imagine. In fact they are already growing so thin that they are being pierced in a dozen places.

Afterward: In response to some objections someone raised to the preceding article.

As someone who spent years taking quite a bit of verbal and physical abuse, I can guarantee that they’re both unpleasant. But there is a massive difference in how we treat them legally. Even with my kids, there’s a big difference between calling someone names and physically hitting your sibling. No one denies that subjective states matter, and words matter. There are just some things that are much easier to regulate legally, and some things you should take the greatest pains not to regulate, not with legal punitive force, except in the most extreme and limited of circumstances. And speech is one of those things.

– She then raised the example of how you aren’t allowed to shout “fire” in a crowded theater as an example of a precedent for the regulation of speech.-

Yes, the fire example just goes to show how careful we have been historically about any restriction of speech. We restrict speech in that case because it could directly result in an immediate panic, causing dozens of people to be trampled to death. That’s a pretty extreme case, for which we make a little exception, and it’s really more of a joke now than a real thing anyone is worried about. It’s not like there are any pending cases.

Even to get some minor restrictions placed on what people can say about health products on their packaging required a bunch of children to be poisoned first (read about how the FDA first came to be). And even now we make tons of exceptions with lots of loopholes and even create complete exemptions for some products (like herbs and supplements), so they can be free to lie to and endanger you.
And, having been on the receiving end of a lot of poor treatment, I have a real sense of the value of these freedoms. Some freedoms just can’t be safely curtailed, at least not by the government. Some things should be left in the hands of people. Some forms of agency, and yes, consequence, are too important to give up.

Given the option, I wouldn’t wish things to be different for my own sake. I don’t want more things criminalized, especially essentially human subjective and interpersonal experiences, even if it means I had some bad ones. Often, when I was being physically mistreated, the one freedom I still had, literally, was speech. And I used it as a way to fight back. Because although I couldn’t stop what was happening to me physically, that didn’t mean they could make me feel bad about it (Socratic reserve), and they couldn’t stop me from telling them what I thought about it, including the fact that I wasn’t very impressed.

That probably bought me even more punishment, because people don’t like sass when they’re trying to break you; they expect you to grovel, or at least act distressed. The fact that I never gave my persecutors satisfaction made me a perpetual challenge.

Having been subject to regular verbal abuse during that same period of around eight years, I also can say that that’s part of why I’m against bringing the law into such things. It’s just not the right domain for those powers and solutions.

Some things have to be left in human hands to figure out and struggle through. You can’t legally compel people to respect or like or be kind to one another. And if you try to force them by law it doesn’t work, you create a sort of bizzare, fearful, performative mechanism, a facsimile, pharisaism. And it becomes terribly hard to control. It runs away with itself. It precludes real human interaction in an area that is just too precious to mess with. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it matters too much.

It’s not easy to describe how and why controlling speech doesn’t work. It’s worth learning about countries that have gone down the road of policing language. Not just in a personal, human, or social sense, but legally. It all sounds good, it’s sold as a good thing, as an act of kindness and safety and protection. But it always goes terribly, terribly wrong. It’s a classic pitfall. Some powers are just to extreme for us to wield responsibly. And there’s something particularly wonderful about the freedom we all gain from having speech be free of government control. As Americans it’s easy to take it for granted, who have never missed it. But by the time you get into a situation where you do, you’ve already let things go too far to object.

Vulnerability is a precondition of identity

Limitation is a precondition of story

Confinement is a precondition of a game

Removal of these negative preconditions, freedom from them, removes their consequents from our lives. These truths are tragic, but not evil. If we wish to play the game, if we wish to have a story, if we desire to inhabit an identity, we must accept incarnation into all the tragedy of mortal life. And the crucifixion is an object lesson in what that may entail. But the resurrection is an argument for the worth of such endeavors. If you live you may suffer the worst of injustices; if you submit to be mortal you will suffer a mortal’s lot. But the journey may be worth the cost. And suffering and finitude make the story possible. 

I recently remarked to my wife that most of what people take for their morals are really just the product of their circumstances and the demands placed on them. What people value depends on the necessity or luxury to being able to value them, and so they vary according to the situation. So most people who imagine themselves as sitting in one place would find themselves just like everybody else in another situation. You do what you need to do and you do what you can do. And most people aren’t much better than whatever those demands and opportunities allow.

“Doesn’t that make you a moral relativist?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it makes me a moral psychologist. Understanding why people believe what they believe isn’t the same thing as saying there isn’t anything they should believe, after all.”

“I don’t know, she said. It sounds like you’re justifying some pretty terrible things. It’s not easy to square that with being a Christian.”

And to that, I also have to disagree. I can’t summarize what I said at the time, but I can summarize what I think. In point of fact, I think Christianity leads you right to the very position that I was expressing.

First, as a faith, Christianity has never been afraid to tell the hard truths about the world and about ourselves. It tells a rough and complex story about all kinds of people struggling through a very confusing and challenging world. Neither the picture of God, nor of the world, nor of people that the Bible offers has the simplicity of a cut and dried ideology. They are astonishing and terrifying in turn. They surprise and disappoint us continually, as real people do.

One of those hard truths is the sinfulness of all, men and women, young and old, modern and ancient. You’re not better than anyone who has ever lived, innately. All have fallen, all have gone astray. It is the central fact of Christianity that mankind is in need of saving and is capable of things it can hardly comprehend. If you haven’t come to terms with that about the human race, the entire human race, including your favorite bits of it, including yourself, then you haven’t come to terms with either the fact of sin or the need for grace, and therefore have not in any real way grasped the message of the Bible.

You could argue that Christianity cannot, in fact, cure the disease it diagnoses, that its hope of salvation is a false hope. In fact I think you could take that position and still have succeeded in grasping, if not believing, the gospel of the Christian faith. Regardless of whether you think Christ has the power to save us from our sins or grant us eternal life, I think it is undeniable that Christianity has correctly diagnosed the disease. And even if the disease is uncurable by the means it proposes, diagnosing it is still an accomplishment, and it at least takes a good stab at managing a terminal condition.

I don’t think there has ever been a more accurate and complete picture of the problem of human existence as the Bible presents, and I have certainly looked. It presents it in many unusual ways, through stories and poetry and songs and history and speeches and biographies. So much of the content is locked up in forms other than mere declamatory prose, and invites exploration and thought rather than mere collection. The truths it teaches cannot merely be taught, they must be experienced. In fact one of the problems, from a structural point of view for its later followers, is that the book doesn’t tell you what to make of it. It leaves you with an obligation to consideration, which leads to a great variety in interpretation, and so to much disagreement.

Often modern Christians, as well as the critics of Christianity, try to sell us in turn on the idea of the faith as something either absurdly meek and wishful and effete and vague and indulgent and open, or as something absurdly harsh and draconian and confrontational and unequivocal and demanding and discriminating. And they will happily describe Christians as both sheep and wolves in turn. This strange scism, both in advocacy and in criticism, is perfectly understandable. You will find plenty of fodder for both interpretations in there.

In any case, a nonbeliever who has truly grasped the reality of sin may be closer to the kingdom than a pious priest of a more naive and self-righteous cult. Cults are what happens when the great seething, terrifying, glorious mass of the faith gets cut down to a more mangable ideology, a reduction of its being to a single element, a limited truth, a limited purpose, something more manageable and containable for human minds and hands. That is why cults are so easily steered to someone’s personal ends, while the greater faith as a whole is so hard to contain and direct and is so messy and diverse.

The temptation to limit the scope of the Bible is always the greatest temptation. We wish to cut it down to our own size, to something we alone could have thought of and can interpret fully. That eliminates our reliance on others, as well as any pesky reawakenings or contrary notions the text might try to force on us. We don’t just desire truth, after all, we desire a truth we can possess. And if we can possess the truth, then we can also possess the way and the life, and that’s halfway to becoming God. And the prospect of God becoming something far more manageable and containable in us is far more appealing than letting ourselves be split and torn open in the impossible task of trying to become more like him.

To return to the earlier question, no, I’m not a relativist. But people are, cultures are. It’s the easiest thing in the world, and we vastly underestimate how much we have gone wandering after our own concerns, how much we merely echo the luxuries and demands of our situation. We indulge in beneficence when it benefits us, and we indulge in tyranny when it does the same. And many, probably most, people live as their particular nature and the conditions of their world demand they live, good or bad, soft or harsh, bold or cautious, considerate or calculating.

Most of us are no better nor worse than any others who have ever lived, but would do as they have done, were we in their shoes. The values we hold today are largely just the fashions, necessities, and luxuries of our time. And if our structures suddenly changed drastically, or we were transported back in time or forward into a new state of affairs by some fickle turn of history, we would find that we are little different from anyone else.

Why are we so fascinated by stories, real or imagined, of apocalypse, where the world, in some form, ends and people revert to a savage state? We don’t just feel it to be true, there is even some part of us that wishes it to be true and fondles the idea of having our constrained potential unleashed and tested. Some part of us longs for the chance to make a novel choice, to act as we truly would and not merely as a product of our present limits, and to discover that freedom or that slavery by an upending of all the established rules. It’s hard to say if this desire is perverse or noble. The outcomes, for most of us, would I think be less good than we hope. Only a tiny minority of people turn out to be genuine heroes in a pinch.

I remarked to my wife recently, on a less serious and much more nerdy matter, that the original Star Trek laid all the groundwork for the story arc of the Klingon Empire, and TNG and DS9 simply followed through. (Bear with me, this has some relevance.) We’re told quite clearly in the original series that one day the Federation and Klingons will be great friends, uniting their strengths of space-Yankees and space-Scots-Irish. At the time this seems impossible to both sides. The Klingons are clearly the villains of the galaxy, brutal and aggressive, the sworn enemies of the idealistic and peaceful Federation.

How could such enemies become friends, without completely changing who they are or giving up on their most essential beliefs and character? The guiding beliefs of the Klingons are what drive them, for good or bad, and make them what they are. Survival must be earned, is their first belief. Klingons play the game to win, is the second.

It’s one of the little surprises of life to find out that there are people who approach life differently than you do. Some people don’t truly play to win, and may even play to lose (to others). And plenty of people feel that survival and success is a right, rather than a privilege that must be earned. Agreeable and disagreeable people exist, and one of the most shocking discoveries you can make is that both qualities have their benefits and vulnerabilities and are likely to be ruined without the other.

Again, that’s not relativism. My wife, no doubt, would side unequivocally with the Federation against the Klingons and find it very hard to justify their approach or overlook their pathologies. But the Federation has its own pathologies, TNG proved that, with many episodes revealing the decadence and hesitancy and bureaucratic ineffectiveness of the Federation. And the Federation needs the Klingons. DS9 proved that. Only the caution and bravery of the Klingons was able to keep the Dominion at bay.

I’m not excusing their brutality. But it proceeds, even in its perversion, from something that is correct, something that is true, something that is good and needed. Wisdom lies in recognizing that, even in their worst moments, there is some sense and some value in radically opposing approaches. While at the same time, we recognizine that there is, even in those things we prefer and approve, the seed of something false and dangerous.

The line of good and evil is drawn down the heart of every man and woman. And in most cases, whether we approve or disapprove this or that particular action or person, they are simply following their own path, convinced that it is right, responding to their desires and needs and the demands placed upon them, whether that’s in the peaceful and benign world of the modern first-world country or in the difficult past of a more savage and uncertain time. Savagery and nobility exist in all times and places, and it is not always so easy to identify them as you would think, especially for those who will only ever consent to understand any time or any people and conditions but their own.

The moral objectivism of even many modern Christians is a ideological luxury, the product of their time, and not the result of any deep consideration of or confrontation with reality. They have never truly been tested, and because they sincerely do not believe that they are capable of the sorts of things others have thought and done, they cannot have truly grasped the nature of sin or the need for grace. So long as they imagine themselves as better or different, so long as they draw moral distinctions based on clocks and conventions, they miss the terrible and wonderful truth. That they may be driving their world and their lives into a fate no better and no less terrible than those of the past, and that they are just as able to be given grace as those of the past.

I love John McWhorter. There’s something just deeply attractive and loveable about that man.

Having said that, John MacWhorter suffers from one enormous flaw. And it’s a flaw for which he is to be admired. He judges the world by giving other people the same credit he would to himself. It’s noble, it’s careful, it’s fair, and it represents his greatest flaw as a thinker, a profound failure of imagination.

Some people would use the word naive. But people use that term in such a limited manner. What if someone’s only great flaw waa that they were so much better than everyone else, so good and cautious and well-meaning and earnest and dedicated and pleasant and hard-working and kind, that they couldn’t even imagine anyone else being otherwise? Especially deliberately. Or that, even if they were not being deliberately degenerate, that those people’s well-intentioned attitudes and actions would not ultimately turn out well. He gives his opponents so much credit.

I once mentioned this concern of mine to my wife, who was listening to John talk. “Then he’s wrong to be fair and balanced?” she asked. And I had to think hard about that. Partly about what my answer was, and partly about what the question really meant. My wife is a very admirable person. In fact she reminds me immensely of John. They both have a love of linguistics, and both are sterling examples of the optimistic, morally upright, hardworking descendents of the German pietists.

But both of them are also descended from the MacWhorters, which spins a thread of stubborn independence and waywardness through them. Perhaps that’s merely a coincidence, but I have always known my wife to be a bit at war with herself, as her wilder, more passionate side struggles to express itself through the intense orderliness of her public face. I have also found this same tendency of John’s in my wife, to judge others as if they were herself. As wise and earnest and fair and well-meaning as herself.

As a structural approach, this is a very praiseworthy and useful thing to do. It’s something most people need to learn to do better. Just, not my wife, and not John MacWhorter.

Because the simple fact is that most people are not remotely like them. They give the rest of humanity far more credit than they deserve by comparing other people to themselves. And so although it is a morally praiseworthy act to think in such a manner, it is not an epistemologically praiseworthy act.

This brings us back to my wife’s question. Is John wrong to be so fair and balanced? I think my wife meant the question as she thinks, ethically. She strives to live well; she judges herself constantly. And because she is such a harsh judge and must prove her worthiness before the universe so strenuously, she behaves in a way that is both morally blameless and also terrifically productive (she’s an amazing person and model employee).

And to that question, an ethical question, “Is it not morally praiseworthy to be so careful and cautious and fair in your estimation of the intentions of others?” I have to say, yes. What a fine fellow he is to behave in such a way.

But he’s also often wrong, is my complaint. And personal moral ambition to be generous to others may be admirable in its earnestness but still wildly miss the mark of truth, in part because of its earnestness. The final goal is, after all, to grasp the truth. So there’s no point in saying that you’ve been fair and balanced in your presentation of the situation if the situation itself and the people involved are not, in fact, fair or balanced.

The problem with judging people as if they were you, in this particular case, is that both my wife and John are such extremely uncommon cases. It’s like judging all dogs, what you expect them to be like, how they will behave, what they’re capable of, purely on the basis of Lassie. Exceptions make for interesting case studies but make for very bad rules. And in this case we have got hold of the exceptions, leading us to impute to a whole class of people traits that are actually fairly exclusive, while ignoring fairly common traits that most of us share. I’m not like my wife. I’m petty, aggressive, deceitful, lazy, selfish, and full to the brim of self-importance. And most people are more like me than they are like my wife, in my experience.

Perhaps it does us little credit to have such a low opinion of one’s fellow man, sir! Well, that’s a good ethical argument for embracing naiveté, but for all its generosity it doesn’t fix the epistemological problem, which is inaccuracy. Most people are far more petty, far more dangerous, more extreme, more lazy, more selfish, more thoughtless, and just generally far more capable of voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing than fine people like John and my wife. I admire them for their qualities, but I don’t remotely imagine that they are in any way remotely representative of an average human. If anything they’re bizzare specimens most people consider mythical, like a unicorn.

And when it comes to judging other people and their ideas, that’s actually a serious problem. You can’t actually present a “fair and balanced” picture of things in an epistemological sense of you’re not actually capable of conceptualizing the realities of what other people are, in fact, like. If you don’t have an actually reasonable account of human nature. And the consequences of being epistelogically corrupt are more than epistemological and theoretical. They often turn out to be quite practical and ethical. When you don’t know or speak the truth you are very likely to do harm or fail to achieve good.

I’ve often speculated about the origin of this particular form of blindsight on the part of my wife. She’s almost comically unable to conceive of how anyone could actually do or think or be the kinds of things that so many of us do and think and are. She wants to believe the best of people. In some odd way I think she is compelled to, because she sees the moral order of the universe as so palpable a structure and herself as so terribly exposed to its censure. The confidence of others must surely be born out of their own excellence and security before those demands, right?

This is merely a personal opinion, but I would guess that people of a hyper-ethical, highly orderly, high-conscientiousness bent are not at all well-integrated, generally, with their Jungian shadow, the personification of their own dark and dangerous side. In part because the idea of such an identity within them is so threatening and so hateful that it cannot even be countenanced. To allow it to approach would be to risk destruction of the very edifice that holds the censure of the universe at bay, their sanctity. And in a way, the shadow has been hidden from them by being exaggerated into a comic version of itself, imperfection. And if you don’t understand the horror of that words, then you haven’t met a person like John or my wife.

In a personality like this, the true basis of the shadow has been hidden, while the terror of it has been relocated to something more benign and approachable, but no less terrible for all that, the specter of imperfection. To have not done your utmost, to not be blameless. This mild phantom that most of us live with as the default state of things, is, for the upright, a horror not to be borne. Such a spirit must hang over them always in a most conspicuous manner, as it takes so little to invite it in, only the merest laspe in perfection.

And this, you will see, is why people like John and my wife make for excellent moral exemplars, but suffer certain handicaps of their epistemological vision. They can’t see beyond the specter of their own worst instincts, which are personified best as “imperfection”. That’s a failure of imagination. Because imperfection isn’t the real risk, the real shadow, the real spectrum of possibility.

These upright people still have a shadow, but are not very well acquainted with it, although they think they are, because they live in daily existential horror of the specter of imperfection. But there is a real shadow in them, as there is in all humanity. And until you have become acquainted with it, you cannot truly grasp the nature or possible depths of evil, either within yourself or within someone else.

It’s a curious fact that my wife genuinely doesn’t want to know just how bad other people are. She doesn’t want to see it. Interestingly, she’s spent a lot of time working for non-profits where you can’t avoid seeing and hearing about a lot of terrible things quite regularly, but she has always surrounded herself with the “good people”, the hard workers, and the people who are trying to do good as well as do well. Charities don’t merely seek to observe the sad facts of the world or ponder them philosophically, they are optimistic in nature. They are full of people trying to change things, to make them better. They are full of hopeful action. And that, in many ways, matters more for one’s outlook than the fact of all the bad things. There is always the hope that you will reduce and perhaps even conquer them by your efforts. And that is the optimistic morality of the conscientious mind.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We would all be very, very poorly off if we did not have these people. But for all the immense good that they do and have done throughout history, if they have one flaw it is that they are uniquely ill-equipped for conceptualizing their own true capacity for danger and evil, their shadow. And that means they are also limited in their ability to understand it in others. That probably helps to keep them sane. They couldn’t maintain either their optimism nor their earnestness if they did not possess such a blindness. And many of them fight every day against chaos and evil, just because of the sort of people they are, because they cannot understand or accept it and wish to make what is crooked straight.

In the same way that those of us with a more integrated (and perhaps more cynical and accommodating) view of ourselves and others are reliant on these upright people to keep caring, keep striving, keep believing and doing our best, they are reliant on us to guard and protect that earnest optimism from exploitation and vulnerability and lack of perspective.

But those efforts probably won’t be well-received. They will likely be seen as a kind of moral evil, doing other people an unkindness. They will seem like pessimism and stirring up fear and doubt, as harshness and baseness and extremism. But the problem is, people are base, people are harsh, people are extreme. And if you approach a system with assumptions that are grossly inaccurate about the actual components of that system, you will make bad judgments and predictions. You will expose the system and your work to unforeseen dangers.

As unkind as a more skeptical view of other humans might be (and I am not advocating cynicism), it is even more unkind to allow people to be harmed by the false assumption that people (or their ideas or actions) are harmless. The problem with being fair and balanced is that people aren’t.

Often the reality is, not only are many people not going to be cautious and balanced and circumspect and carefully skirt the edges, avoiding any imperfection, many of them have already gone way further down the road of danger and disaster than you ever imagined. Not only is it not impossible that some people will take that nice idea of yours, that bit of license, and not use it perfectly, there’s probably already a far larger contingent who have embraced the extremity of the worst abuses of where it could go. Places you never imagined.

That, I think, if why we have different types of people. We all have our fatal flaws, or our innate vulnerabilities and blind spots, our own areas where we are weak. The solution to that problem is other people, and our relationships with one another. John and my wife are in almost every way superior to me, but in those small areas where they are inferior, behold, these are people whose strengths match their weaknesses and whose weaknesses match their strengths.

The doctrine that “no one is good but God” isn’t a theological axiom so much as it is a practical observation. Only that which is everything at once is without flaw. Anything less is always subject to the limitations and corruption of its own particularity. Only God possesses the kind of complete internal relationship and union of all that brings perfect balance and harmony. And that is why marriage is a picture of the divine, because it is a tangible union of the finite into something more complete and interrelated and fundamentally productive.

It’s terribly easy for us to resent and criticize others for their shortcomings, many of which are directly consequent of their greatest strengths, while puffing up our own strengths and ignoring our own consequent weaknesses. What is better is to learn. To learn to see what we do well, and how that innately makes some things hard for us, and to learn what others do well and what is hrd for them. That way we can come to value and respect one another for those very things that create tension between us, while sheltering one another’s vulnerabilities within the fortress of each other’s strengths.

Can you make people better by force and fear? A response to John McWhorter’s anger about a writer for the NYT being fired just for referring to the N word during a discussion. Not using it, referring to it.

I’ve always had a rebellious streak. When I was told I couldn’t drop the flag during the flag ceremony, I let it drop just a bit to figure out why. Would it somehow bring disaster? Would the nation fall if I did? I also remember not standing for the national anthem at basketball games. I’m not saying that I was being brave or clever. I was just stubborn and didn’t like being expected to do something without being told why.

I’ve never had any motivation to use the N word. These days I feel tempted to, not as a pejorative, just to say the word out loud so we can see that it won’t destroy us. To break its hold. Not so we can say it, there’s no need to say it, unless of course you had a good technical reason to refer to it (as John pointed out). But so we can not say it freely.

I understand now why you’re not supposed to drop the flag. It’s not about the flag. It’s a ceremony with certain conventions that are symbolically allowing you to participate in a ritual that teaches you about the need to maintain some level of basic respect for your country, because without it your world could fall and you would lose something important. It’s the same with the anthem. The song doesn’t really need us to stand or somehow it will bring literal disaster, but by standing we reaffirm our collective belonging and commitment to this unity of nationhood, and show that we value it.

I still don’t think that dropping a flag or not standing is a big deal. I could do them and it wouldn’t harm me or America. I know where I stand with America. We have that negotiated. But because I see the value in the symbolism I can now freely choose to engage in it, freely choose to not stay sitting, instead of being mechanistically compelled. And for a rebellious person like me, that’s a pretty good conclusion. A more reasonable person would have just engaged in the ritual and learned the implied lessons from doing it and wouldn’t have had to spend decades puzzling it out intellectually.

Tyranny and fear, as tactics, aren’t great ways to produce good character. They work somewhat on small children, and past that point only work as a restraint or limit on evil. They aren’t a positive force. You need more than mere force and threat to actually make people better than they are.

Are ESG’s silly or wrong somehow? In a market economy people are free to pursue and place value on whatever they choose to, including long term structural goals at the expense of short term maximal gains.

People have the right to be complicated and value things other than sheer volume of profits. Heck, I didn’t go into the business I’m in because it’s maximally profitable, but for many other reasons that could be considered “social values”. They have a value to me, and I set that value next to the decreased remunerative value, increasing the total value of my work relative to other fields. My work isn’t just profitable, it’s fun, it provides jobs for young people who I get to choose, it provides a product people don’t need but that is really fun and that I care about, it has a lot of variety, it’s close to home, it’s creative, it lets me have flexibility to be with my kids (and is the sort of work they can be with me at), it gives me freedom and independence, it provides a place for people I care about to meet and make memories, I get to meet a lot of interesting people, and it provides a way to benefit schools and children (which matter to me).

The value story for my work is quite complex. And frankly, maximal profit is not at all a major factor. For some people, that is what matters, and they are free to pursue that. I don’t have a problem with that. We just need to not have a problem with each other and feel free to pursue our own strategies toward our own ends without getting obsessed with comparison and condemnation.

I’ve had employees leave me for better paying jobs, and I’ve warned them that they may be underestimating the non-monetary value of the jobs I provide. And a lot of them change their minds and come back when they realize I was right, that there is a fiscal value you can set on flexibility, sustainability, and a positive environment, that makes it worth working for me instead of somewhere else.

Investors have the right to invest in whatever they value. As long as they don’t then go on to say that other people can’t invest in what they value. So profit and productivity-focused investors and businesses who object to ESVs either need to grow a thicker skin and some balls and not worry about what other people are getting involved in and not be so distracted by the intangibles those other people are pursuing and stick to their own, or ESG people need to learn to be content pursuing their own values without needing to brag about them and force them on everybody else. And people do use a certain kind of guilt and social compulsion to sell ESVs.

Giving that moral cache up as selling point might be tough for ESV investors. There’s a certain moral glamor and status that people are seeking when they pursue certain prosocial, PC, progressive values. They don’t just want to pursue them, they want to be seen as someone who pursues them. They want the superiority. And that means there has to be someone they are are superior to. And they need to make that point, so the comparison can be drawn.

It’s not enough to just do good, not even enough to just say “I am doing good”. You really want to say “look what good I’m doing, and how good I am, and how much better that is than the people who aren’t”. That need comes with the natural pharisaical tendencies of all humans. We love to make large our phylacteries. We wouldn’t invest so much, and talk about it so much, if we weren’t trying to secure our status. And status only registers when you’ve got a comparison.

So I can see why there’s some tension between ESV proponents and their critics. What you have here is a conflict of status systems. Both are definitely seeking status, and both are using some kind of marker they want to deal in and aquire to get it. For one group, it’s money. For another, it’s a kind of highly visible social-moral currency that resides mostly on the internet and on social media. They’re both presumably impressing someone. But I hardly think either side will win an argument with people who don’t share their currency that the other’s is worthless.

Without going into great detail, I’m going to say no. An emphatic no. But I also have an emphatic yes to add to it. Yes, being Christians should inform our politics. But Christianity should not. Because, if it does, there is a very real chance that we will start to identify our politics with Christianity. And that’s idolatry. That’s setting the finite and corruptible works of man up as the work of God. That the road to ruin, perhaps worse than sinful error.

It was far harder to convince the Pharisees, who believed they had encapsulated God and his holiness in their law, than it was to convince the sinners of the world. Any time you make the mistake of identifying a political movement or philosophical movement with Christianity and holiness itself, you are on the road to destruction. Not the ruin of apostasy, but the ruin of pharisaism and religiosity and self-righteousness. A false religion is more dangerous than no religion at all, because it peddles a false salvation.

So no, our politics shouldn’t be informed by Christianity. But being Christians should inform our politics.

The 21st century person is in half a dozen kinds of therapy, formal and informal, all of which tell them that they’re wonderful and special and that everyone else is terrible and is out to get them. 

The 21st century person believes that everyone is the product of deterministic social construction, but their own identity and the thoughts they express are cutting edge and unique and authentic. 

The 21st century person is unmarried and has never had any lasting relationships of any length and will need all the help of technology to have children, if they ever do. 

The 21st century person expresses their individuality by pursuing all the most popular causes and trends. 

The 21st century person has no tolerance for pain or deprivation, and measures their sophistication by how harmless they are. 

The 21st century person is deeply consumptive, always in need of popular goods to make their life exciting or meaningful or moral, and congratulates themselves for being different from everyone else before and around them. 

The 21st century person isn’t sure what gender or sexuality or possibly even what species they are. They’re a demi-romantic, non-binary, deer. A species that, like a lonely Pinta island tortoise, is unlikely to figure out where they belong to before they enter the hallowed halls of strange and unique creatures that have since gone extinct. 

A response to the argument that you could win the abortion debate by allowing only women to vote on it, as more women than men favor restricting abortion. 

   This sounds like a good tactic but sets a terrible precedent. It trades a dubious short term win for an unknowable long term cost.

    If more women than men favor restricting abortion, then that should be something people talk about. The public narrarive says that abortion is a women’s issue, that it is something women as a whole are for, and the fight against it is about men trying to control women a bodies. But if it’s actually the case that it’s men who favor abortion and women who are more concerned about it, then that should be a talking point.

    Maybe the current state of the debate is a battle between some women who want it vs some other women who don’t, and men don’t care or largely feel obligated to support one or the other group. Maybe some men do care, but for purely selfish reasons. Maybe others also care, for purely moral reasons. But if the deepest crux of the battle, the largest group opposed, is women, on what’s supposedly a women’s issue, then clearly the whole debate needs to be publicly reframed.

    One of the biggest political weapons of the pro-abortion movement is their argument that it’s not really about abortion, per se, it’s about women’s rights. And so you can’t be against abortion without being against women’s rights, and therefore against women, is their claim. And that helps deflect some of the heat that comes from arguing against people who want you to stop killing babies (at least that’s how they see them). 

    But even if it’s highly relevant that women are, in fact, greatly divided on this issue, reframing the terms of rhe debate and struggle, that doesn’t mean that it would be a good idea to redefine how we engage with, vote on, and decide important moral issue and policy decisions for our nation. 

   As another aside, having only women vote on abortion as an issue concedes one of the most key points of the abortion movement. It cedes the territorial claim, that abortion and pregnancy are simply a “women’s issue”. That men have no essential stake in the lives of their children. That the children, the unborn themselves, with society as their proxy, have no claim either. That it’s just a women’s issue, for them to decide on internally.

    You’re betting your ability to engage this issue on the fact that more women overall would favor more restrictions, so why not exploit that and stack the deck? But what if sentiment shifts, just slightly? Then there’s no way to bring in other stakeholders, including fathers and society as a whole, because you already cut them out and made this very serious issue nothing but an internal matter for women to decide, with reference to nothing and no one else but their own interests. I think that’s giving abortion activists exactly what they would want. 

-The discussion continued for a while, and a fellow named Tim said, “We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest. – Thomas Jefferson. Tear down the legal system.”-

    Tim, that’s a misquote. That’s from a famous letter where he’s talking about how the world press has exaggerated the supposed anarchy and rebellion taking place in the new country of America. He was explaining that it was really just a few people in Massachusetts, and there had been none of the widespread chaos many continental critics had predicted for the new political system. He even applauded the passion of the rebels, being pleased that at least they aren’t indifferent. But he also thought they were wrong, and that the solution waa pardon the rebels, to correct their misapprehensions, and pacify them.

   Jefferson wasn’t advocating rebellion every twenty years, he was praising the fact that in the twenty years since the US was founded, they’ve only really had one small rebellion of a few folks in one little state, which is impressive, since so many people thought the country wouldn’t hang together at all. He was defending America against its critics abroad and extolling how peaceful it had largely been and advocating a peaceful solution to the rebellion. 
    It’s certainly true that Jefferson was OK with a little unrest, and with a few people being killed in the process of figuring out the new nation (the rebels, killed by the government) because thats a normal part of political engagement and inventing a radical new kind of government built on democracy. He basically said that the cost of having an engaged populace is that a few people will die now and then as the price of a free people.

   Jefferson was coming out of the revolution, and had a revolutionary attitude toward bloodshed. But wasn’t actively advocating to overthrow the government. He was genuinely pleased that there had only been one small upset in twenty years. And he advocated for the government to reeducate and pacify the rebels. That’s not the same thing as the bald claim that you should overthrow the legal system or have a revolution every twenty years. Under such conditions, nothing would survive and no one could succeed. 
    The American system is revolutionary in its ability to balance stability and revolution. Other forms of government were well-known to be far more stable than democracy. But America went for democracy, even though it was less stable. But instability itself wasn’t America’s strength. It was the price of freedom. And if it gets out of hand it can bring down the nation. Even Jefferson knew that. 

    Jefferson was at pains in this letter to disabuse his reader of the notion that a democratic America would mean a continual, chaotic, neverending revolution and fighting amongst the people. That was the argument the foreign press was using to disparage America and argue for the superiority of the ancient monarchies, aristocracies, and oligarchies of the old world. America isn’t in continual chaotic  revolution and shouldn’t be, he argued. Yes, there is revivification, engagement, disagreement, even a little chaos; but it is contained, controlled, and resolved through the mechanisms of the constitution. It isn’t just a perpetual revolution.

   You’re advocating for the bad version of exactly what Jefferson was at pains to say America wasn’t doing. 

This is funny, but it’s also kind of serious. The APA has basically taken the position that what has previously been understood as “deviant” sexuality and gender ideations are perfectly healthy and only require affirmative care, and traditional sexual and gender ideations are fundamentally diseased (disease classification is connected to harm, and they’ve declared them fundamentally harmful) and require confrontation and correction. So queerness is good and healthy and traditional masculinity is bad and pathological.

It’s a big deal when that’s the official position of the dominant medical society for mental care. Especially when you consider that the majority of all past and present humans fall into the category of traditional gender expressions. They’re not just saying that traditional masculinity can go wrong or can become pathological, but that it is pathological, that it is inherently abberant and needs correction in itself, just for being itself. It’s something men need to be cured of.

Apparently being a manly man is quite an awful thing. If you don’t do something about it, it might even turn you not-gay, or worse, anti-gay (the most dire of social and psychological diseases, right up there with racism and sexism and transphobia). Those are at least some of the worst risks, according to the APA. And because it is pathological and unnatural, it has no excuse, and does not qualify for affirmative care or validation, like transgenderism or homosexuality or other alternative (but actually natural and essential) sexual and gender identities.

This position essentially argues that to be not-gay or not non-gender-nonconforming is, fundamentally, a disease. And to be gay or gender non-conforming is the definition of healthy masculinity. Basically, the best man is a trans man (or possibly a trans woman, depending on how you view them). They’ve either fully divested themselves of the toxic culture of men, or inhabited masculinity from a position free from it.
Setting all the ethical and psychological arguments aside, if that’s the case then what kind of #@$%ed up species are we? Who makes a species that’s supposed to work like that? And what’s the long-term plan for the future of the species? And how did we make it this far, if half of the species has been, essentially, a disease plaguing and distorting us and doing everything wrong for millennia? And if we “correct” that disease, what happens to the species?

Traditional men do have one thing going for them. They’re responsible for 100% of all the pregnancies throughout human history. Even gay and trans men who had children did it with a woman, using their penis, bowing to the toxic conventions. Traditional masculinity has a toxic hegemony and monopoly on impregnation. Which is a problem, if they’re fundamentally an abberation, a mistake, a disease. Someone needs to get on that so we can eliminate that problem and get rid of these monstrous apes that have plagued us for all of history with their abberant sexual identities and grotesque cisgender sexual activities.

It’s funny, because a while back I wrote a blog article arguing that the ideal feminist woman, the ideal modern woman, was a trans woman. That they had a better claim to the crown of feminism than a ciswoman possibly could. And that article was provoked by arguments I had heard from trans women along exactly those lines, that the future of feminism belongs to trans women, not traditional women, who were fundamentally toxic because of their ties to traditional gender roles and power structures.

I went through the arguments offered and found that, within the context of prevailing feminist and psychological theories, the trans activists were right. They did have a better claim to being the most true and healthy version of femininity, because their identity fundamentally challenges and upends gender norms. But that was just a review of the arguments of activists. I wouldn’t have expected the APA to back me up.

So here we are. The ideal, healthy version of men and women is now some version of a gay, transexual, gender-nonconforming, or other such person. The ideal man is a not-man (in the traditional sense), and the ideal women is a not-woman (in the traditional sense). The future belongs to the not-thats, to the rebellious and creative counter-cultural heroes of innovation and counter-programming. What that means for the species identity and its future isn’t clear, but it is clear that it will subvert your expectations, and that’s the cultural currency these days. Someone better get on the horn and explain this to Russia and China and all those uncontacted tribes in the Amazon so they can be saved from the diseases that plague them.

I have to add an asterisk regarding gay people, though. Most of them were never making the argument that they were the normative case and should replace it. They had a sense that they were an alternative, not the standard, and still beholden to the breeders to keep things going. And even, in some cases, to have something to stand in alternative to.

Most of them weren’t looking to supplant or eliminate normative sexuality and gender identitites, they just wanted to be added to them. That’s a very different argument than the argument that heterosexuality and traditional gender itself is a disease and an abberation, and not one that can be tolerated or accepted among varying alternatives, but one that must be confronted and corrected.

In fact the whole category of being gay is really under threat by the newer, fancier concepts underlying gender nonconformity, trans identity, queer theory, and whatnot. Gay identity is still very tied to and dependent on heterosexual identity concepts (and realities). It’s not clear that if those heterosexual identitites fall that gay identities won’t fall with them. Which is probably why more and more gay people are questioning the direction of their own advocacy organizations, like Stonewall.

Some gay people are legitimately concerned that gay identities are being erased by trans arguments, or that they’re being called out as bigots by identities more marginal than their own. It’s not correct to assume that there isn’t any internal conflict within the world of the acronym crowd. MF only contains two identities, and there has been a heck of a lot of conflict and disagreement between those two. Is it likely that there would be none among a group of five to twenty six letters?

Anyway, don’t only expect to see cisgender, heteronormative men and women push back against this shift in classification. There is a whole host of people who have some something at risk in such a massive change in the way we view our species.

After watching all the recent, revisionist versions of Cinderella, which focus on how the heroine is doing just fine and doesn’t need to be saved, valued, or rescued from her plight by anyone (much less a man), I sometimes wonder if women would appreciate it just as much if we released some updated romances where the men felt the same about women, where they felt just as indifferent, needless, and independent?

Wouldn’t a more modern prince stop groveling at Cinderella’s feet and go off to live his own life and savor his own accomplishments and interests? Perhaps he would even realize that marriage is simply a trap to contain his independence and gain access to his wealth and labor, leading to him instead embracing a bachelor existence of self-realization and casual sexual relationships? How would women like the men in their stories to become as indifferent and critical and dismissive of their need for women as modern heroines are of men?

Get those poor guys some porn and free them from the restrictive hegemony of the relationship industrial complex! These romantic heroines are exploiting men’s need for sex and the pleasantries of femininity. Men don’t need no women. Men can do it all and have it all on their own. Modern life can liberate them. After all, you can buy or pay for almost everything women traditionally did for men. You can hire someone to clean (or just do without), you can buy food at a million places, you can buy decorations with ease online, you can find companionship among your friends. You can live a perpetual adolescent dream and never have to sacrifice yourself to the demands of the other sex.

Women, or at least our idealistic heroines, don’t need men any more. And so I assume our heroes shouldn’t need women either. In today’s world, what do you need women for? All the comforts of life are available if you have the money, and you can save a lot of money by not wasting it investing in the opposite sex. You get yours, boys. If sex is necessary, you can get it without needing to commit to a romantic relationship any more. And porn is free and scratches that same itch and requires virtually no investment or effort. Porn doesn’t demand a stake in everything you have and earn. It doesn’t make any demands of you or expect it to do anything to deserve it.

These comparisons may seem strange to women, but that’s only because they’re women. Men, I’m sure, can understand. The feelings generated by such tactics are similar no matter where you’re standing.

But all of this is rather beside the point. Cinderella is about many things, and masculine dominance isn’t one of them. It’s entirely a female fantasy. It’s a female empowerment story and always has been. All that has changed is the predominant idea of what empowerment means and how it would be good to dramatize it in a story.

Bad fortune tends to be pretty extreme in fairy tales. And reversals of fortune are just as extreme. The heroes aren’t merely slightly less well off than they could be; they’re orphans, cursed, destitute, lonely, betrayed, poor, hunted, enslaved, captive, or crippled. And they don’t just slightly improve on their circumstances, they achieve extremes. They become rich, beautiful, powerful, free, famous, blessed, and beloved.

Cinderella is a story of extremes. She’s at the bottom and she ends up at the top in an unexpected and miraculous reversal of fortune. It’s not like she was doing OK and over a period of years and gradually improved her lot. And her destitution wasn’t just economic or social, it was familial. She lost her family and had no one who was on her side. That’s a pretty big deal, and would have seemed an even bigger deal to people of the past than it is to us today. Your family was everything; your people, who were in your corner, against the world. And Cinderella had lost that, and worse, fallen into the hands of enemies.

But she has a chance to escape, to be welcomed, to be seen for how loveable she truly is, for just a single night, and along comes the most powerful family in the country, saying that they want her. The prince is her point of connection, but it’s far more than just a man that she gets. She gets justice and validation and deserved transformation from the universe itself. She goes from serving girl to princess in a moment.

Part of what the story is meaning to address is this feeling of injustice, that sometimes the world is just terribly unjust and cruel and seems to be set against you, even when you’ve done nothing wrong, even when you’ve done everything right. And that’s something that really bothers people and their moral sense, but it’s a very realistic thing to be bothered about. There is an arbitrary and unjust element to fate, as well as to the capricious vindictiveness of others. We feel that we should have people to love us, and that the people in our world, especially our family, should fulfill that need. But sometimes that’s just not the case.

People can dreadfully disappoint us, even when we do everything we can to please them. It’s terribly unjust and tragic, but it’s one of the truths of human experience. And fairy tales are usually about addressing the deep truths of human experience. If you fail to capture the nature of the story, then you fail to capture those deep truths.

And that’s where some of the modern adaptations fall down. If you blunt the suffering and injustice of Cinderella’s situation, you hobble the entire point of the story. And although there are many wonderful stories about working your way through difficult experiences, Cinderella isn’t about that. The injustice she faces is extreme, and it’s arbitrary. Maybe it’s even worse than arbitrary, because it’s not only unconnected to her own behavior, it’s almost in spite of it, it’s anti-justice. Like Jesus, she gives kindness and service and receives cruelty and destitution. She reaps a reward opposite to what she puts in.

That’s a very specific sort of problem, one that is real and troubles us and one that can’t simply be gradually worked through. Because the whole point is that even her best efforts have yielded only more suffering. Modern retellings that attempt to soften either the nature of her suffering or what her pursuit by the prince really means for her have missed the point.

The prince isn’t a man, exactly. He’s barely even a character in many tellings. He’s more like the emissary of fate, a force for moral justice that the fairy godmother serves. He’s a conveyance. He’s a means for the reversal of arbitrary or actively unjust fortune into just fortune. In a moment Cinderella gains a single means that conveys both economic, social, and familial triumph. She doesn’t just have status, she has the highest status; she doesn’t just have a family, she has the number one family; she doesn’t just have security and wealth, she has the most security and wealth of anyone in the kingdom.

A prince is just a really good way to get all that really quickly, because those are the sorts of goods a prince has and that he would be willing to give wholesale to a serving girl purely on the strength of his own personal esteem for her. Offering a girl the world is exactly the sort of thing a man would do, and exactly the sort of thing a woman would appreciate. It’s appropriate. It’s actually realistic.

As I’ve said, Cinderella isn’t only or even primarily about male-female relations. It’s about the relationship of struggling humanity to the whims of fortune, and the injustices that even the good must often endure, and our wish to see good be rewarded and recognized instead of punished and abused for its goodness. The prince is, as I said, a convenient and appropriate and realistic symbolic mechanism. But it’s a moral fantasy more than it is a romantic fantasy. That what gives the story of Cinderella its universal appeal. Because even if we have never been a serving girl in a household ruled by someone who isn’t our parent, we have all suffered unjustly and had good deeds and good work returned with scorn and failure. So it’s a moral power fantasy, expressed through a distinctly feminine lens.

Another way to look at the story of Cinderella is as a story of social status, and justice and injustice within the female dominance hierarchy. Regard, again, that men play a very minimal role in the story. Who is she in a struggle with? Her mother and sisters, other women in her family. Or rather, people who pretend at being her family but in no way behave like it, exploiting and abusing her and degrading her.

The people in her family should be the people preserving and defending and advancing her status and value. But she has been deemed a loser within her own intimate circle. And the most intimate circle for women tends to be other women. And they can be terrifically cruel, as well as terrifically kind. Cinderella is in a tight-knit group that forms the very world around her, but that world has judged her and decided that she is either a rival that must be removed or an insect that must be stepped upon.

That’s a rough fate. And one we can all sympathize with, men and women. We all, after all, desire the approval of the group. We want to be loved, valued, welcomed, and esteemed by our intimate peers. Often it is the deepest desire of people’s hearts and something they spend their whole lives chasing. But Cinderella has been judged and rejected by her group and has no prospects for improving her lot. If social media existed she would be getting piled on by her entire friend group. In the race for status within the feminine social hierarchy, she’s the biggest loser.

The fantasy that the prince represents is the fantasy of escape into and validation within an alternative hierarchy. One that isn’t concerned about her low status. And although there are many hierarchies, the only true alternative to the feminine social heirarchy is the masculine social hierarchy. What better answer to the censure of the feminine hierarchy than the acclaim of the masculine?

Is it just arbitrary that it’s a prince who enables this transformation? Not at all. Who you can select or attract as a mate is perhaps the oldest and most effective measure of status within the social hierarchies. It’s an easy measure of just where you ended up. And women are absolute social elitists, when it comes to mating. As much as they desire to be fair and equalitarian when it comes to children or to those they feel magnanimous toward, they are ruthlessly competitive when it comes to sexual rivalry. Not only are they in competition with one another, they are brutally selective when it comes to men, focusing almost exclusively on the upper quintile. They focus on the best because they think they deserve the best.

From Cinderella’s point of view, her virtues have been disregarded or outright punished by her female peers. She has suffered. Her value has not been recognized. But along comes a prince, a representative of the very pinnacle of the male social heirarchy. And assortative mating means that only the women of highest value will be able to command the attention of the highest value men, and vice versa. So if you’re a man and a high status woman chooses you, that really says something about you and how well you have been judged by the feminine heirarchy. And if you’re a woman and a high status, perhaps even top status, man pursues you, it means that you must be worth pursuing.

Having a prince fall in love with Cinderella is an argument that her own feminine social hierarchy can’t possibly respond to. It smashes all their conclusions and wrecks all their systems. It reveals that they were always dreadfully wrong about her, and she really was a princess all along. The job of the prince is simply to recognize that fact and pursue and realize it in spite of the arguments and even direct efforts of the feminine hierarchy to dissuade him. He will not let her go, he will not forget her, and he will not accept the efforts of the sisters to pass themselves off as the real princesses (another key part of the story). The prince is insightful, he can identify the true princess; he isn’t fooled by false appearances. He is determined to reveal the truth and find the true princess, and that princess is Cinderella. And that feels fricking good!

In this sense, proving the corrupt feminine heirarchy wrong is the crux of the story. The prince is the key person who can be convinced of Cinderella’s worth, and he is the one who has enough status and enough independence, coming from an outside heirarchy (and moreover from the top of it), to stand up to and override the system Cinderella inhabits. She’s been chosen by the top dog among the males, and that means her sisters were wrong in assigning her bottom status. So wrong, in fact, that it calls into question the whole structure, and typically in most versions of the story the mother and sisters get their just desserts and end up at the bottom themselves.

Assuming they live. There’s one version I read where they end up committing treason attempting to prevent Cinderella’s marriage and get executed for their trouble. But in either case, when Cinderella rises she takes the place she properly deserves and brings the whole feminine social heirarchy that had abused her into its proper order. Nature, or some benevolent cosmic force, seeks justice.

The prince is the mechanism, he’s something we can understand and believe in. But Cinderella in its classic form is a story about the triumph of goodness and justice in the face of both arbitrary and deliberate misfortune. It doesn’t need to be “improved” or “fixed”. It’s terrifically complex and well thought-out. And the attempts of modern storytellers to improve it so often fail because they don’t actually understand or appreciate what the story is about or why it has lasted for so long or been enjoyed by so many different people and cultures.

Cinderella tells a story we all understand, about something we all care about. It’s a fairy tale, a classic myth. And Cinderella is a hero. She always has been. A moral hero, the best of all heroes, suffering in the worst of conditions. And she wins on completely appropriate terms for a moral hero, on the basis of her own excellence. She’s a female Luke Skywalker, whose sword was not his strongest weapon, but rather his character. That’s a tale as old as time, and one worth telling.

A false god is any finite and limited thing, any desire, any ideology, any program, any belief, that has been elevated to the level of a divine universal. And our pantheon today is just as rich as that of any age, perhaps moreso.

    Our rituals, our displays, and our fervor are just as earnest in the modern era as those of our ancestors. And I don’t mean all this metaphorically. This is what false gods are, what they have always been. How the gods are conceived or personified or identified or ritualized, and what devotion to them means, changes from age to age and culture to culture. All peoples find acceptable ways of monunentalizing and conceptualizing their gods within the language, conditions, conventions, and artistic and social displays of their time.

    But the underlying nature of the gods, and the underlying nature of what they mean to their followers does not change very much through the ages, because people change very little, and it is only modern hubris that imagines people today are so very different from those they are only some scant generations away from.

    The state can be a god, safety can be a god, the home can be a god, diet or exercise can be a god, rationality and money and generosity and risk and fashion and sex and respectability can be a god. Look through the actual lists of the gods of many cultures and you will find a list of all the things those cultures valued, and they’re the same things that we value today. And it’s quite clear that many of these cultures were quite aware of the ritualized and iconographic nature of their gods. Why else have so many of them and such specific gods? Gods of poetry, archery, housekeeping, sexual conquest, generosity to beggars, vengeance for jilted lovers, oratory, strategic planning, wine, celebration, field work, the environment, justice, just about anything you could imagine. All the things people value. 

   Are we really so different, except by cultural convention? We set up avatars of our ideals and give them our reverence and make sacrifices to them of our time and goods so that we may enjoy their blessings. All gods say the same thing. Give me your devotion, make me first in your life. This value isn’t just a thing, this is the thing. Build your life upon it and you will be rewarded. 

   The symbology of the gods was well understood in ancient times, and if not always analyzed, was fully articulated through story and ritual. And sometimes it was analyzed, even hundreds of generations ago. Socrates in 400 BC had a long conversation with a priest where they remarked on the fact that to most Greeks the myths were understood to be largely metaphor and symbolism, but no less true or defining of human life for all that. Devotion to a god, an ideal, and a praxis; something we represent to ourselves with an avatar of what we wish to be and pursue through a path of devotion, and the proclamation of the superiority and divinity of our ideal and our desire to embody it.

   Whether the religious nature of such devotion, ritual, and proclamation is understood or not, it happens, and it does its work. The functionality is contained in the activity, even when its nature is not fully, consciously understood. The NBA doesn’t literally exist as a thing, although it has personified avatars we revere as its representatives. Despite not being an actual thing in any sense, it is quite real and quite powerful in the world that humans inhabit, which is as much humanity itself and its desires, beliefs, values, conventions, inventions, and ideals as it is any physical reality. The world we inhabit isn’t merely a physical place, it is a social place. We live within one another, and within what we all value and believe in. 

    The key insight of the idea of a false god is twofold. First, is the realization that a god may not have the power over its domain that it has claimed. Devotion to that god may not give you the proper pathway to understanding and competence within that realm of being, nor a means to become the envisioned ideal. In this way one god may defeat and supplant another within their realm, if they prove themselves the stronger, often through the success or failure of their followers, whether that be the god of a nation or the god of specific personal interest or devotion.

   Better gods replace less adequate and successful gods through a kind of empirical testing process, much as specific scientific and psychological theories are tested and replaced by stronger, more effective ones. The previous gods were adequate and true enough, but proved false in the testing as they fell before truer, more powerful, more adequate gods. 

    The second and far more abstract and theoretical sense of false godhood is the challenge that comes from Judaism, which questions not merely the adequacy of the gods but rather the entire conception of the elevation of the finite to the level of the infinite. Nothing less than the ultimate deserves to be elevated to the level of the divine. Only that which contains all and orders all can be truly set in the place of worship and avoid idolatry. 

I think part of the reason men and women communicate differently is that they teach themselves to communicate differently. If you want to succeed in a social group of young males you need a very different skill set from young females. I should know. Most of my friends were girls; most of them still are. But as a boy and as a man I’ve loved inside the masculine world too, by necessity.

Young men teach each other to take a beating. And to give one. They play very rough and tumble, and their social interaction involves a lot of teasing and a focus on shared pursuits (like games). When boys talk they don’t do a lot of personal sharing, but they do engage in a lot of ribbing and testing to see whether you can take a joke and give it back in the same spirit.

It’s the same with their physical activity. And if they ever get involved in any serious conflict they shove each other around, and it gets very physical and explicit. But it’s very finite, generally. You make your displays, you show your teeth, you fight and then it’s over. Back to the game. This develops a very specific kind of approach and attitude, a very distinct idea of what the proper social game is and what’s acceptable and how you succeed in it. You have to be able to both take and give some hits to earn respect among boys. And even nice boys like to joke and tease a lot and like to compete a lot and focus on either things or on shared pursuits, not on each other.

As a father of two girls, I can attest that they inhabit radically different and way more complex social systems than I ever did. Systems that I am often overwhelmed and mystified and shocked by. Just as shocked as they sometimes are by what boys will do to each other.

For one thing, girls share a lot more; a lot more of their focus in on one another. Their conflicts are internal, more covert, longer lasting, more complicated, and often involve struggles and attacks on the other person’s status in the group. My daughters have often seen one of their friends try to cast another rival girl out of the group. The girls will take sides and sympathies and alliances will shift and sway. Fights play out over the course of a week, or a month, with few to no explicit or physical confrontations (a threat that is constantly looming in male conflicts). The various parties involved try to get the group on their side and cast the other girl out. It all becomes a very complex negotiation, with all kinds of risks, and constantly shifting loyalties and negotiation. Even the peacemakers, like my oldest, can suffer and become targets for their unwillingness to choose a side, failing the test of loyalty from both parties. It’s like watching the UN at work on the playground.

I never had to deal with that kind of complexity when I was a boy, and even being especially adept at relating to girls isn’t the same as being part of their structure. And I confess that I have often been a helpless outsider, despite spending most of my life around groups of girls. I just don’t have the same skills, the same understanding, the same motivations, or the same standing as the real members of the feminine hierarchy. For all that I understand and appreciate girls far more than the average guy, being in a social group of girls is a very different sort of education than being in a group of boys.

My niece was homeschooled along with four brothers. And when she joined public school in middle school one of her biggest challenges was that she fundamentally didn’t understand how to negotiate the female social structure and deal with and succeed with other girls. She learned fairly quickly, but she will always have a different perspective on it because she never took it for granted.

Most of us take whatever social system we grew up in for granted, as the default of what the world just is and how it works, with its respective rules and means and rituals for negotiation and success. And while all cultures are localized, there are big, broad tendencies that unite them as well, and one of the biggest unifying cultures is sex. Boys and girls, like many mammals, naturally seperate themselves into seperate cultures around age 6-8. And it’s in that seperation that they teach one another the rules for success in their respective hierarchies.

But as I said, the problem is that boys and girls don’t teach each other the same things. You only get half the story of how to succeed. And what boys and girls teach one another is both different from and independent from what adults teach children they need to do to succeed with adults. The influence of peers, the culture of the peer group, is a massive influence, perhaps the most important influence, on children once they reach school age. Stephen Pinker certainly posits this as being the case in The Blank Slate, that peer influence is the dominant force of social learning after young childhood. But that domain is largely out of the hands of the parents, except insofar as they can control where their children are and who their peers will be (which many parents do, either by at minimum choosing where to live, to encouraging or discouraging certain friends, or sending them to a specific school, or even keeping their kids at home with their siblings in home school).

Anyway, the point is that adults don’t actually have that much control or influence over what their children learn from their social groups once they reach school age. And those groups will be defined by many things, but especially by sex, by male and female peer groups, and within those groups by the local culture and dominant personalities. And those groups will test one another and teach one another and reinforce one another in very different skill sets. And that isn’t necessarily a great preparation for a world where we come together with the other sex quite often and have to inhabit vast amounts of overlapping territories and hierarchies. Both sexes are in for a rude awakening when they realize that their experiences with their same sex peers have been very insufficient in preparing them for understanding and living alongside the other sex in a shared world.

On a side note, I think it’s appropriate and informative how the terms “girls” and “boys” attach more to the internal group identities of males and females than “men” or “women” do. I noticed this while I was writing. When boys and girls seperate into their own culture it is as “boys and girls”. When they continue with those habits into adulthood we still use those unique terms. A “boys’ club”, a “girls’ night out”.

“Woman” and “man” are different terms linguistically and psychologically because they introduce, as puberty and sexual maturity does, the added element of the relationship of one sex to the other. A girl is a member of the female social structure, young or old. A woman is a member of the inter-sexual social structure. She has a relationship to men, a status within that structure, as well as in relation to other females. Men are men in relation to women. Women are women in relation to men.

Boys and girls stand in relation to themselves, to their own group. It’s also accurate to continue to use the terms boys and girls as diminutive, even for adult groupings. As single group identity is more confined and also arises in immaturity, there is a sense in which manhood and womanhood are inextricably from maturity. You can be with the boys, but you’re somehow less than a man, because you are limited to that level of identity. If you want to be a man, you have to rise out of boyhood into a larger, more complex world with very different and often more challenging demands and rules and relationships and responsibilities. You take on the burden of your relationship to the other sex in a larger society, with all the difficulty and judgement and potential that entails.

It’s one thing to succeed in your own particular sexual hierarchy. It’s another thing to take that identity into the larger world of humanity at large and the ongoing species life. It can be a pleasant respite, and a necessary one, to return to the world of the single sex world, to indulge in a girls’ or boys’ night. It’s not at all clear that we are meant to leave those worlds behind entirely. Rather, it seems we are to carry them up with us into the larger world of the next stage of development.

But we are meant to move up. Puberty, and the very real need to continue the species, drives the segregated social circles back together. And it’s often not a pretty sight. But a lot of work has taken place behind the scenes. Boys and girls have developed each other and taught each other within their circles. And they have established a certain sorting, figured out where individuals stand within the group. Then the young men and women meet and take in the results, and it helps them to choose and connect with one another. We know who the people in the other sex are because their group tells us. They’ve figured out who is dominant, who is dangerous, who is marginal, who is popular, who is admired, who is loved, who is quirky. We have an idea what sort of person they are, thanks to the testing and sorting and establishment of identity within each sex.

Learning how to interpret the results of the intra-sexual social group in a way that is useful for inter-sexual socialization is a pretty complex skill. One that your parents and culture have hopefully been able to give some input on, not only your peer group that lacks much actual experience.

Men are struggling, no one cares – a talk by Warren Farrell

    This commentary is more in response to the headline than the actual forementioned discussion, but yes, no one cares. Men don’t care because they’re too competitive. If some men fail, that’s not really our problem; if anything it’s to our advantage. Why care about your rivals if their failure removes them as rivals? And women don’t care, because women only have sympathy for other women and for children, or for someone who can present as a child, as helpless and threatened by predation. And men aren’t good at doing that.

    When they’re upset, men generally fall back on aggression and withdrawal, which makes them look like dangerous predators. And women are inherently suspicious of or dismissive of erratic, dangerous, and disorderly men. Women don’t like men who aren’t doing well and aren’t being productive and helpful and generous, unless they’re children.

    And men don’t like men who are doing well, because that’s a rival that might be a danger to you and your position. Allies and followers are useful, but it’s their responsibility to make themselves useful to you, not the other way round. If you can’t be bothered to be one or the other, then you’re either dangerous, or a rival, or a useless burden. And it’s hard enough to get things done and survive and succeed already, thanks. We don’t need any dead weight or potential enemies. So the sooner you can just go ahead and die off and stop endangering the rest of us, the better. 
    Women do have a greater sense of solidarity and beneficence, but it’s mostly for one another, and a large part of its purpose is to provide protection and solidarity and exclusion against low-value and dangerous men. Children, or people who can present as children, get a pass. They don’t get solidarity, they aren’t treated as responsible equals, but they get largesse and sympathy and kindness and protection. They get patronage. 

    But women don’t give $#@%all of that for a bunch of predators. If they’re failing and dying, good. Peg the patriarchy. Whatever doesn’t serve women’s security and wellbeing, or the security and wellbeing of their children, can go $#@% themselves, and hurry up too. Women can be just as merciless as men. They’re just differentially selective. And their confrontation and power structures are more subtle and covert. You might not even know that you’ve been cut out or cut off, if you aren’t paying proper attention, until you look down and suddenly notice that the locks have been changed or your arm’s come off. 

   This talk’s title is, of course, an exaggeration. Some people of both sexes clearly do care. The fact that this discussion is being had is proof of that. What is meant, I suppose, is that caring isn’t a broadly enforced cultural value. In a state of nature, or at least in the current cultural state of nature, it isn’t anyone’s natural instinct to care about this problem. It requires a special awareness or awakening of concern. It isn’t on most people’s minds, for the reasons stated. Men lack even the basic physical features that would help them command sympathy. They look far more like wolves than puppies. And they’re not great communicators. 

    And I could be entirely wrong, but it’s at least possible that part of the reason why upper class white women find it so easy to project childishness onto minorities (and so respond to them maternally) is that 1. Being less familiar and distinct as minorities, it is easier to project both positive and negative ideations onto them (which isn’t really anyone’s fault, it’s just how less familiar things are processed), and 2. Both maternalistic and paternalistic white people have trained black people in the role of inferior wards of a superior culture.

   Parental care isn’t necessarily a bad instinct, and it’s natural enough and perhaps sometimes even appropriate. But whereas the paternalistic condescension of slavery (in its more paternalistic forms) was more obviously exploitative, and the return demanded for care of their wards was labor and productivity, maternalistic condescension is just as determined to treat people as perpetual children, but with different aims.

    Rather than being a tyrannical father, white people now are more like a devouring mother. White people don’t want labor now, they want love. They want you to love them and listen to them and never leave the house or disagree with them or become independent. You belong to them, because of their love. You owe them your loyalty and to never leave. I think Shelby Steel, Jason Whitlock, John MacWhorter and many others have covered this topic fairly well. 

    Of course it’s not really fair to generalize that it was “white people” in some catchall sense that did such things. Slavery is hardly a new or unique idea. It was a human universal. The particular paternalism of some corners of American slavery was enacted particularly by a certain select group of Southerners, particularly the Cavalier culture. And parasitic maternalism has been the province of a select group of Northerners, particularly the liberal descendants of the Yankee Puritans. And it’s not surprise that black people, coming out of one system of care, fell into the opposing one. The Yankees were natural allies, after all. These allies just got a bit too addicted to their role. 

   One of the great miracles and great tragedies of humanity is that we are so adaptable. We are so adaptable that we will change in response to however the world is represented to us. Which also means that people will behave in the manner of the thing that you treat them like.

     It also means that we are vulnerable to being twisted and distorted by our environment. It also means that if someone stands between us and the environment and twists and distorts or removes its feedback, that we won’t be able to adapt to it or correct ourselves, or that they may be able control and manipulate our adaptation for their own ends.

    Humans respond to incentives. Incentives are both explicit and tacit. But whichever they are, they come down to our world asking something of us, telling us what we need to be. And we respond, often without thinking. That’s how amazing our adaptive capabilities are. We don’t even need to know that something is working on us, much less understand how. We already possess the tools to respond unconsciously.

    As a result, what incentives we experience, the demands and feedback we get from our world that tell us what we need to be to secure our place in it, that tell us what sort of thing we should be, will drive our instinctive emotional responses and behavior, often without us needing to be aware of it.

   Because so much of the mechanics of how this process works are unconscious, it’s not something that we can do to people consciously very easily. Or rather, we do it easily but do it very poorly or in a very confused and contradictory and silly manner. Because we never stand outside the system ourselves. Even when we are attempting to consciously navigate how to respond or how to manage incentives, as a parent, a boss, a teacher, or public policy expert, we ourselves are also subjects. We are ourselves caught in the web of incentives and adaptation, not only to other people in the broader world, but from the very people we think we are working on.

    The degree to which children teach us how to treat them has been grossly underestimated. They instinctively punish and reward us and train us in how to treat them long before they ever have any conscious idea of such manipulations. Far from being a blank slate, they often treat us as if we parents were blank slates that could be molded to fit their needs and desires, despite the vast differences in our capabilities and the huge difference in plasticity between us. The fact that it is almost childishly easy for a tiny, barely developed human to take control of the behavior and emotions of a grown adult and turn them into a sycophantic thrall only escapes being absolutely shocking to our beliefs and sensibilities because it is so easy and common that we don’t even notice it as anything unusual.

     Maintaining control in a parent-child relationship should be effortless and easy, if the parents were truly in charge and on the outside, shaping and socially determining the child as they saw fit. But the reality is that it is desperately difficult to remain in control, and the great pressure at all times is to simply give in and let the child run things. And that doesn’t start later on, that starts on the first day and continues throughout their whole lives. The illusion that we are somehow in charge is maintained by the fact that our adaptive instincts are so powerful that we can’t distinguish our children’s demands on us from our own voluntary actions.

     A parent that completely neglects or abuses a child in response to their demands, that parent is in charge of themselves, in a way. They’re doing exactly what they want to do and aren’t being told what they should do by anybody else, much less a demanding child. They aren’t responding to any incentives and punishments being heaped on them from the outside. The parent that locks up their child in a crate, that does whatever they wish with them as if they were a mere object, that parent is a social determinist. That parent is treating their child as a blank slate, a ball of unformed clay they can do with just as they see fit.

   Everyone else is caught in something far more complex. A kind of dance, a struggle. Desire and reality, venture and feedback, give and take, testing the limits of capability, developing a relationship of dynamic input and feedback. As much as we like to imagine ourselves as our own creations, we are the product of an immense architecture that brought us to this point and that we carry forward with us, whether we like it or not. When a child shows up, they immediately, without needing to be aware of it, know how to incentivize and punish their parents. Those mechanisms put out feelers, looking for subjects to act upon. And without hardly even realizing it, they sieze on things deep in us that we didn’t even know we were carrying around. We have receptors ready-made for the inputs that infants are ready to supply.

   But that’s merely the beginning of the process. We aren’t deer, who carry most all of that needs to be done in life in their unconscious instincts. Our species is far too developed and complex and adaptable for us to do that, and our children are far too helpless and undeveloped when they are young for us to do that. Many mammals can stand up, or at least make their way to whatever it is they need to do, within moments or days of birth. And within mere weeks they may be quite capable, compared to our young, who can do virtually nothing at that age.

   In fact there is only one thing our infants can really do well at that age, and that is: communicate with their parents. Not consciously; instinctively. That’s what human babies can do. They know how to work on us adults. They’re almost completely useless themselves. But the small noises they make, even the shape of their heads and eyes, their smell, all the little ways they react and reach out, all these things are powerful actions upon the world, upon the only world that matters to them at that moment, their parents.

   Deer and horses can already manipulate and navigate their environment at a very young age. So can human children, but for them the environment that matters and that must be manipulated and acted upon is people. That is the most fundamental innate environment for humans; one another. And the way we navigate and act in it is through communication, a thousand different tiny ways of sharing information that we don’t even know we’re doing.

    We are born able to navigate this world of people and communication, and grow immensely in our ability to do so in our early years, almost entirely unconsciously and instinctively for quite a long time. In fact infants are such powerful communicators that many adults find them almost irresistible. You can’t argue with an infant. You can’t ignore them. And if you do so they will punish you in ways that can shred your psyche. Have you ever been stuck somewhere in close proximity with a crying baby? Then you know the kind of weapons they wield and how vulnerable adults are to their effect. They’re not something you can argue with.

   Infants make demands on an instinctive level that goes straight for your most basic motivational and psychological systems. A child can build you up or break you down in moments, in a way that adults can hardly hope to achieve. It’s possible, certainly. Some adults are very good at it; they’ve wedded conscious effort to innate capacity. But children can do it without thinking, from day one. Nature, as part of their development, gradually deprives them of some of their early tools (fortunately) forcing them onto more equal playing ground with other members of the species. And when they find that they are up against other children who are just as capable as themselves, they learn to negotiate and adapt and communicate in ways that are more democratic and less autocratic. But make no mistake, parents only rule their children insofar as they avoid being ruled by them. 

Want to hear me pontificate about myself? Who doesn’t love that kind of thing? No, seriously, this isn’t narcissism. I wrote the following entry as I was trying to analyze and understand myself. I don’t know why anyone else would care about that. But maybe it could serve as an example for self reflection? Is that even more narcissistic? 

    I took a personality test recently, a pretty good one. It’s strange, I show up as a somewhat disagreeable person (average for a man), highly creative, highly intellectual, and very unconscientious. That probably explains a lot about why I don’t do well fitting into structures and why I’m not as successful as I could be.

    I think I’m fairly conscientious by training and by choice. But not by nature. Being smart helps make up for that, since I can usually figure something out to save myself in an amount of time that most people could never pull off. My cleverness gets me out of a lot of scrapes my lack of character got me into. People like my wife just never get into them. 

   But I’ve wondered sometimes if I’m a bit cowardly too. I probably am, and a bit lazy. I’m a little unwilling to stick my neck out and risk getting into a conflict. I’m not especially agreeable, I don’t feel compelled to get on board with what other people think or want, but I also don’t want to bother fighting to make them think what I think or do what I want. I don’t like putting my own neck on the line and I don’t care enough to get involved. 

   I don’t like confrontation or controlling other people. I’m very conflict-avoidant. And I’m also just a bit soft. I get very emotional about things, even if I don’t show it. And I’m not a naturally angry or dominant person. I’m much nicer than you might expect. I’ve held come employees, male and female, while they cried, including one who was two to three times as big as me. I notice very fine details about the people I care about, even if I often don’t directly look at lots of other people. I’m extremely cuddly and affectionate and passionate. I’m deeply moved by music and movies and shed tears very easily. I don’t make personal statements of feeling often because I get too emotional and feel too vulnerable. 

     My wife often makes fun of the way I unconsciously emote along with the characters in the movies. I guess I do a lot of mirroring, which is a very prosocial thing to do and fairly empathetic, despite the fact that I’m a very emotionally restrained and controlled person. I just don’t like being manipulated or forced I to playing a role or feeling a feeling without my consent and without it being earned. I have very strong feelings, so perhaps that’s a protective instinct.

    As much as I want to confront people and test ideas, and as much as I appreciate watching other people debate, I’m not sure I could do it. I think in part because I’m just too tenderhearted. My dad has told me many times that I have an especially sensitive conscience, particularly so out of all his kids, and I never really understood that and have often argued against that assertion. But how we see and understand ourselves is often different from how others see us. And sometimes they have insights we lack. 

   I’ve always thought of myself as being a bit selfish and mercenary. I like to think through all kinds of possibilities that most conscientious and decent people wouldn’t even consider. I sympathize with criminals quite a bit, and the worst ones the most of all. In fact if I was to be a criminal, I can’t see any point in being a petty thief. Such transgressions would hardly be worth the effort, and would be a waste of moral freedom. If you’re going to violate norms, you may as well push it to the limit and lay claim to as much territory as possible. 

   The part of me that really like exploring and understanding and testing the limits of the abyss are able to imagine that I could really do some awful things. But that leaves out the other side of me. The very tender side that really doesn’t like to fight or see anyone in pain. I think being bullied as a child, rather than giving me a taste for retribution, instead gave me an inherent reprehension for needless cruelty.

    I’m human, so I can get very angry and very depressed and deranged. Anyone can, under the right conditions. And I have felt possessed by destructive rage, avarice, envy, resentment, and lust. Degrees of them that seemed to possess me and fill me up so I couldn’t contain anything else and it felt like they were just going to burst out of the top of my head and take control of me.

   But such possessions rarely last very long, and are always restrained and resisted by something in me, some residual psychic safety valve, a bit like that switch in your brain that keeps you from acting out what you do in your dreams. And once I calmed down I very swiftly regretted and repudiated my feelings of a moment before. I would wake up, and the dominant intelligence would reassert control over the monster, as Ted Bundy put it.

    His problem is that he actively wanted to suppress the intelligence and release the monster, and he took serious steps to help it, such as heavy drinking. And I have always avoided such things like the plague, because I don’t want to ever not be in control of my own faculties. That’s about all I have, in the end; the manner in which all this that is me hangs together. What’s the good of knocking all that to bits and then having to live in reintegration with the consequences of what the disintegrated parts of me did while the totality of me was absent? That’s a recipe for trapping yourself in a need to continually inhabit a limbo of disintegration and suppression, so your complete, fully conscious self won’t have to live with it. So I have a horror of surrendering any part of my intellectual autonomy and control. And that’s protected me. 

    I think I am a much more sensitive person than I give myself credit for. But I’ve concealed and controlled it so well that I’ve fooled myself. It would explain a lot about my behavior. I can see it in my marriage. I’m not naturally neurotic or prone to negative emotions or melancholy, but I feel things very very deeply. I can be hurt very deeply. I can be deeply needy. Deeply passionate. Deeply disappointed. Deeply hopeful and fearful.

   I think the tendency of things to go well for me in life (despite the bullying and widespread rejection by women and poor health in my youth and whatnot) aligned with my natural optimism and passion to keep me pretty calm and confident and happy for most of my childhood. And I had great parents. I cannot overstate how great my parents were. My joy was so deep and strong that the trials and tribulations of daily life weren’t unable to affect me much.

    But then I had my first really serious heartbreak and I came apart a bit. My whole system started to work against me. I recovered and matured, I believe. And I was able to be courageous and optimistic again. But I think married life finally broke me. I never expected to face the things I faced in marriage, the sorts of deep challenges and disappointments and fears and isolation that went beyond anything I had ever imagined.

   There were also other negative experiences and influences that eroded my other islands of personality. My vocational dreams collapsed. That was pretty huge. Enormously so. I still don’t know exactly what to do about that one. And it’s been a good twelve years. I alao had some bad experiences with churches that really drained me and in some ways repeated my experiences from high school (not with church, with relationships). And I stopped having friends. And I was radically questioning my faith too and giving up on that, to see if it made any darn difference. And that’s not an easy step to walk back from.

    If you put all those together, that’s are most of what keeps a fella going and sane. Is it any wonder I got super erratic and depressed? What would you do? I think this is one area where my intelligence and my good upbringing helped again. Although I came apart, I did it so competently and with so little fuss and obvious impact on my behavior that most people couldn’t tell it was happening. Or really anyone. I was too good at keeping things together. I had a carefully crafted machine of functionality that knew how to operate my life independently of what I was thinking or feeling deep down, and I had just enough life left in me to let it carry me around and keep things together while I fell apart internally.

    I don’t know if I inherited that capability from my dad or learned it from my mom. Both seem plausible, so maybe it’s a bit of both. We all have social and behavioral machines we build to help carry whatever it is that we are through the day of impositions and annoyances and disturbances and onerous labor. They’re like exoskeletons we build out of bits of ourselves and bits of the people who teach and train us and shape and inspire us. They help us do what some parts of our flesh would be too soft and reluctant and limp to do otherwise. 

   But at some point you do have to address the state of things within. I won’t pretend that I have all the answers, but the funny thing is that if you keep going, however slowly, however painfully, however uncertainly, you eventually get somewhere. And I had spontaneous and unexplained gifts of grace and strength. I did make some good decisions. And some things did get better. I’m still a pretty messed up sort of person, and I don’t have the same confidence  that I had at one point in my life. But I’ve also been through a lot and haven’t given up, and just knowing that, knowing that I do actually have some resilience and some ability to improve, and so do my circumstance, is encouraging. People don’t survive on happiness, they survive on hope and purpose. And I’m not all out of those yet. 

One thing I’ve learned from being a parent is that people don’t appreciate kindness or generosity that they can just take for granted as part of the structure and entitlement of their personal universe. It doesn’t change them either. There’s no personal element, so it conveys no personal enlightenment. They don’t receive it from someone as anything other than the nature of life and fate, and therefore they cannot truly appreciate it.

Generosity like that takes no root in your heart and germinates no life in you that you can give to another. Kindness and goodness abstracted and made into a condition of being just becomes another part of the terrain that you don’t really see and take for granted. It becomes parts of the walls and floor that you see in minimal navigatory detail.

I’m someone who really appreciates systems and collective action, and I really appreciate abstraction. I prefer to think in generalities and avoid the concrete and personal. And I wondered for a long time why my own father always insisted that there was something about personal generosity and care, both as the giver and the receiver, that was essential to what people truly needed. I spent ten years keeping his words in the back of my mind. And it wasn’t until I had had children for ten years myself that I suddenly understood. Having children gives you insights into the mind of humanity you might otherwise not get. Or at least refuse to admit.

From an exchange with a friend who is a pastor. After looking through a list of recommended resources he got from another pastor.

I don’t think Christians have really learned to recognize “social justice” yet as an actual competing religion that’s trying to absorb their faith under its own ideological umbrella. And the danger and proximity is closer than many of them might think. The cultural orgins of Social Justice aren’t just in Marxism or postmodernism or relativism, they’re in Puritanism too.

The people descended from the Puritans stopped being Christians, but they didn’t stop being religious, and they didn’t stop being Puritanical. They just found a new theology. Social Justice has very much grown out of or perhaps infected cultural Puritanism. That’s why it has such a dangerous appeal to American Christians.

It’s a 900 pages, but “Albion’s Seed” is a super interesting look at the cultures that shaped early America. Follow that up with A Conflict of Visions or The Vision of the Annointed by Sowell, then Woke Racism by John MacWhorter, and you can actually see the cultural line straight through, starting from Puritanism. And it helps answer a lot of questions. Why this movement came into our culture through education (Puritans created our educational system, especially the elite universities), why it’s utopian (Puritans were social utopians), the emphasis on moralism and performative appearance, the elitism and social exclusion, the shaming and excommunication, the intellectualism, etc etc. These are all distinct cultural qualities and practices of the Puritans.

But whereas in the past those qualities were wedded to a Christian faith and helped rid the country of slavery and spread education and knowledge and the rule of law, today they’re spreading a far different gospel and indoctrination into a new, graceless, ideological, and balkanized religion. But they still feel like Puritans; they’re still getting the same feeling of self-righteousness, divine confidence, moral authority, and utopian excitement out of it.

Some authors who only focus on the ideology only see the intellectual Marxism and relativism and postmodernism. They don’t know enough social history to recognize the cultural element and see why certain parts of America were so primed to embrace this new religion, and why it found the home and avenues it did. The place had already been prepared for it. That’s why there’s a cultural continuity between the busybody “church ladies” of yesterday and the SJWs of today. They’re the same people.

Technology no doubt played a role too. For women in particular, the invention of birth control disrupted the traditional family structure and opened up new avenues to women, which came with lots of benefits. But people failed to realize that they had just completely redefined the fundamental conditions of existence for half of humanity, which had been stable for tens of thousands of years. Increasingly dislocated from the venues of home and family, those same maternal instincts went looking for something to attach to and found government, administration, and activism.

And it also goes without saying that this also ended up completely altering the fundamental conditions of existence for men as well, and the basis of the relationship between the sexes. As far as transforming the human social landscape goes, it was at least as big a change as the development of agriculture, and happened a thousand times quicker. Those existing instincts weren’t just going to go away. They were cut loose from their previous restraints and uses and set free to search for other places for those interests and abilities to lodge and be used. And some of that excess capacity has been good, and some of it has been problematic.

Women also suffered another major change to the stable structure of their cultural existence. Media technology changed the scope of information gathering and sharing and the way female social structures and power dynamics are conducted. The invention of the “like” and “share” buttons in particular changed the entire social landscape. Women in particular have a habit of wanting to share concerns. Men like to confront them, women like to share them. But the way, the scope, and the means were always limited by proximity.

So what happened? Instincts that were tuned for policing concerns that were “inside the walls” of an intimate community took on a very different character when they were applied to the carefully selected and curated data taken from a nation of 300 million, presented as if it was representative of your intimate surroundings. Data that was inherently distant and abstracted and isolated from context or feedback or nuance hit with the force of the shared lives of intimate and proximate aquaintances.

Social media essentially has taken gossip, which had previously been a more personal and minor (on a social scale), intimate threat, and turned it into an international powerhouse with the strength to level cities and ruin nations. How much of what passes for news these days could more accurately be classified as gossip? Either idle, or the more refined, judgemental, manipulative, social-status jockeying kind?

Anyway, those are some of my personal theories. Puritanism was looking for a new religion, women were looking for a new forum to express their displaced maternal instincts (from the moralistic to the protective to the administrative to the indulgent), and gossip as a social ill was supercharged. At the same time, the loss of anchoring religious beliefs combined with a broad loss of confidence in unifying cultural narratives following WW2 (one function of which is justifying the existence of the culture in the face of the judgment of history). People were looking for something to believe in, and were already suffering from deep doubts and disappointments and disillusionment, which the years only compounded. Douglas Murray explores this a bit in “The Strange Death of Europe”.

I’ve read elsewhere in Camille Paglia and Francis Schaeffer how the degeneration of art reflects the loss of the heroic narratives that drive and empower cultures. Shelby Steele also talks about this in White Guilt, speculating that there was a growing need for a cultural ritual, a mythology, a rite, that would absolve the West of its sins (whose felt presence did not actually diminish with the fading of religion but instead became unregulated and unmanageable and incoherent) and would let America find a way to justify itself before the judgment of history. All great cultures have felt a deep need for religion, ritual, and especially sacrifice. A means for justification, a way to appease some judgment and provide legitimacy and moral authority. Morale.

And philosophy had been through some tough times. All the grand theories and narratives had collapsed. Optimistic enlightenment had given way to cynical existentialism and nihilism, and people very much wanted something to believe in again. And along came postmoderism, promising to make something out of nothing, to make a faith out of skepticism. Throw in a dash of disappointed Marxism, wondering why the predicted future hadn’t panned out as expected and looking for a new dynamic upon which to test its ambitious utopian theories, but the “right way” this time, desperately wondering where to find some proper oppressors to overthrow and some oppressed masses to liberate, and you’ve got a revolution looking for a cause.

And men, as I said, have been thrown into as much confusion as women. The vast social changes in the needs and demands of women, as well as how women can get those needs met, have deconstructed many of the traditional avenues that structured male direction and meaning in life. Women don’t need them as much as protectors or providers, but that doesn’t mean men stopped having those instincts. They’re still kicking around inside them, looking for something to attach to.

Often they get subverted into video games or porn or recreational pharmaceuticals or other pleasantly distracting pasttimes that simulate fulfillment of those instinctual urges. And those men still left standing are wondering what they have to offer any more and what they’re for. They have aggression and competitiveness and a desire to confront and produce that they can’t find a proper home for. And in a mostly peaceful world their traditional role as hunters and warriors seems useless, or even counterproductive. Where are the predators to bring down, the lands to conquer, the enemies to defeat, except somewhere on a digital screen?

Men are looking for a war to fight, and they’re looking for a place to make safe for women that will make them want to share it with them. They’re looking for prey to hunt and bring down, to bring back and win some honor. And lo, a new war and a new enemy arise whose pursuit and scalping will bring them honor, and even better, make a place of safety and provision and justice that women will want to share with them. That’s not just how it is now, that’s how it’s always been.

So you’ve got all these different needs that have been created. You’ve got tools just looking for something to be used on. And by and by there’s a wonderful collision of demand and supply. Someone provides the looked-for answers. Purposes to which to apply cultural, technological, ritualistic, social, political, and sexual abilities and assets. Because an ability, a power, is itself a kind of need. It needs to be used, it needs a reason to be, a way to fulfill itself and justify itself and inhabit itself through application.

As silly as it sounds, Jeff Goldblum was right when he said that “you can’t have a revolution without somebody to overthrow.” The revolution needed an oppressor and a victim, the culture needed a mythology for ritual justification and sacrifice, women needed infants to care for and predatory threats to identify, men needed a enemy to be asked to confront and a cause to take responsibility for, Puritanism needed a faith to serve its piety and socio-religious dreams, America needed a religion, people needed a purpose, powers and instincts unleashed by technology needed somewhere to go and something to be used on, a people drowning in aimlessness and relativism needed a vengeful God to judge and inspire them.

People needed all these things, but they could not or would not look to the solutions of the past. They wanted a new God, a new revolution, a new ritual, a new faith, a new utopia, a new definition of sin, a new identity, a new kind of family, a new child to care for, a new purpose to serve, a new war to fight. And social justice, woke ideology, critical theory, whatever you want to call it, gave it to them.

Maybe the traditional bulkwarks of society were at least somewhat complicit in that, failing to meet the needs as they arose, misidentifying the problems that were arising and how they should be addressed, remaining too secure and insular within their own enclaves, being too willing to cede the discussion and do the important work of articulating the positive vision they had to offer.

A culture that fails to articulate its own positive vision for each generation will almost always fail to regenerate and reproduce itself. The survival value and entrenched nature of the conservative positions maybe made it too easy to take those positions for granted and made generations of parents unable or unwilling in prosperity to communicate what they had learned and been sustained by in poverty and struggle.

Who knows, maybe our apostasy is simply a natural consequence of extreme wealth and decadence distorting our experience. Remaining poor in spirit when you’re ridiculously wealthy and secure and free isn’t as easy as it sounds. And as a natural consequence of your own success and striving, your kids tend to grow up spoiled and entitled and suffering from a skewed idea of what the natural default assumptions and expectations for life should be. Can a church that doesn’t suffer really understand what it means to need and follow Jesus? I don’t know if we really know the answers to these questions.

It is easy to imagine how we can be destroyed by our aggression, our poverty, our selfishness, our licentiousness, our despair, or our ignorance. It’s less easy to imagine how we might be destroyed by our comforts, our security, our piety, our achievements, our earnestness, our idealism, or our learning. Critical social theory isn’t so dangerous because it captured the worst instincts in mankind, it’s dangerous because it captured many of the best.

I have heard religion described by some American conservatives as the basis for freedom. I’ve also heard it described by some American liberals as being the basis for oppression and confinement.

I don’t know about religion in general being responsible for freedom; it depends on what you mean by freedom. Ultimately, being able to do whatever you want, with no constraints, isn’t exactly freedom, because it has no purpose, meaning, direction, filter, or structure. There’s nothing to tell you to go this way rather than that way and it all becomes an impulsive mess.

That kind of freedom isn’t for anything, and ends up being more like slavery, or arbitrariness. You become enslaved to your own passions, momentary impulses, individual biases, and unconscious psychological systems. There isn’t any logos or guiding intelligence to them, no order to them, it’s just a free-for-all. Whatever instinct or emotion triumphs in the moment to moment rules.

Religion increases freedom, in my opinion, because it helps bring order to the psychological and social chaos. It provides structure and discipline over the various competing elements within the psyche and within society. And that let’s you actually deliberately accomplish things and have purposes and work to fulfill them. It brings the various instincts and emotions into organization beneath the banner of a higher purpose and organizing principle.

That’s a more robust version of freedom. Being able to go any direction but having no really compelling reason to go or not go in any of them isn’t freedom, it’s aimlessness. Real freedom is purposive, the ability to reach a desired destination or state, or at least to proceed toward it.
I think that’s why people like Jocko Willick say that discipline is freedom. Because it’s by constraining our systems and passions and capabilities according to a purpose that we bring all our warring elements into a coherent order that lets us actually proceed toward complex, multi-layered goals. And he’s hardly the first person to make that argument; people have been making it for thousands of years.
Our modern conception of freedom is probably most dependent on Judaism and Christianity, with a dash of Socrates and his disciples, because they focus so much on individual responsibility and individual agency. The two go together. They’re functions of one another. If you can have no individual responsibility then you can hardly have freedom, because you have no role in your own actions and choices. If you are to have individual freedom, then you become responsible for your actions. If you are responsible for your actions, then you have freedom, however it may be confined. You can’t seperate these two; they’re inextricable.
As the ideals behind those traditions fade, Judeo-Christian and Platonic Greek, we erode the ideological grounding of that definition of freedom. It becomes incoherent. There are other conceptions, but our society was built on that one. People like Kant and Descartes have tried to make those singular ideological propositions sit up and bark on their own, without the support of their context within a larger religious structure that cuts across all the dimensions of life, but generally that’s only been convincing to intellectuals like Kant and Descartes and not very useful for the common man. Most people kept the skepticism and dropped the moralism. Why bother working your way back to God? Why not just keep him gone and hope the bits we like that emerged from those philosophies keep working on their own? And of course thinkers like Neitzsche were very skeptical about how well that would go and what actual alternatives were likely to arise in the resultant vacuum.
Wealth, of course, removes the impression that there is any restrictive structure to the world or any limitations on us and how we have to live in the world, or even what the world is and what we are and can be. Wealth increases the impression of absolute freedom, but often erodes our posive freedom. It also erodes our willingness to listen to the universe and adapt to it rather than declaim to it and make demands of it. That’s why it is said that it’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Being rich makes you feel like God, like you can do anything and order the universe and your own life as you see fit, and don’t need anything outside yourself and your wealth, the source of your power.

Religion is fundamentally about learning what the nature of the world and ourselves are, what our capabilities and limitations are, and figuring out how to proceed toward a desired vision of ourselves and the world based on those constraints. It is about learning, acceptance, discipline, and action. It is about adaptation, fundamentally. But if you’re rich, you feel no need to adapt. You can adapt the world to yourself, like a little diety. So in that sense people don’t become less religious, their religion just grows smaller. It’s no longer as big as the world and and long as time, it’s as small as themselves and as short as their own life and its prejudices, interests, and desires. It’s a tiny cosmology, and the gods that rule it live within each person’s heart.
And that’s one reason why some legal and social freedoms we have enjoyed may begin to erode. When each person is a god unto themselves, or rather a competing pantheon of gods within themselves, that can create some serious conflicts. It might even remind us and disturb us, as we knock into one another, that our divine rule isn’t as absolute and unconstrained as we would like, that there is competition that crashes up against us and contradicts us and pushes back on our authority and security. And we very much don’t want to be pushed back into a game of adaptation and selection, because we might discover that we could be selected against, judged, by God, by the universe, by evolution, by the human genome, by history, whatever you like to call it. We certainly can’t let anyone call into question the fact of our our security as the chosen and blessed and divine ones.
I have to agree with Norm Macdonald and many others that there really is no such thing as a truly non-religious or atheistic person. We all have religion by nature. We have an ideological and value structure, we have direction and purpose and meaning of some kind. That’s what it is to be human. The question is simply, at what level of extension does that authority and meaning preside? At some universal, eternal level?

For many people, secure in their wealth and their own divinity, the answer is no. So, with that kind of universal God disposed of, authority simply descends down the metaphysical ladder a few steps to the nearest similar entity. Technology and wealth have eroded our belief in the authority and power of individual natural forces, the domains of the pagan gods; they have allowed us to sieze control of those domains and our destinies. We no longer fear, worship, or are controlled by them. So the most logical inheritor of moral and ideological and teleological authority (the definition of purpose and meaning) is ourselves. Humans. We’re the closest things to gods around here. Which is exactly what Neitzsche observed. We are god now, by process of elimination and inheritance.
How this affects freedom, especially freedom of speech, isn’t obvious. To some degree it is necessary to control other people to maintain our individual godhood, or the appearance of our godhood. If there really are people who genuinely disagree with us, after all, who don’t or won’t conform to our vision of what our godhood means and how it should be exercised, that could be a massive threat to us. And the resurrection or survival of the previous dead gods is just as big a threat, because their claims are in direct competition with our own divinity.

I think there’s a lot of pressure to maintain some kind of social solidarity and uniformity, in maintaining the illusion that everyone wants the same thing and thinks and acts the same, and all individual relgions have the same aims, means, natures, and outcomes.

After all, in a truly relativistic environment, indifference and autonomy are only one possible outcome. With individuals as the only true divinities (and no universal authority) what’s to prevent you from seeing everyone else as direct competition and deciding that it’s perfectly within your own interests to dominate or destroy them? You don’t have any claim other than your own authority to do so, but no one has any claim greater than their personal preference and authority to disagree. So why not get the xactly what you want? Why not have everybody against everybody, as in the days of old, when all the gods were at war with one another?
People are actually pretty savvy. They know that you have to have some mechanism to constrain the autonomy and authority of individuals. That’s why systems like the Soviet Union, which preached that there was no god but the state, and that the state was only the manifestation of the will of the workers, was so tyrannical. It was necessary to act as if there was a unity and uniformity and solidarity, to reinvent the image of God in an illusory edifice of oneness and equivalence among the people. It is a necessary lie, a religious lie. And one day that lie simply fell apart in the USSR. It just stopped existing, and the various states within it had to go find their own way. The whole system was built on lies. But lies must either be protected, or they must be lived out to their conclusions.

The reality of the USSR was that there was no equivalence, no unity, no uniform and integrated and equally prospering collective god. There was a people at war with itself and with the universe, and a hidden well of repression and bloodshed devoted to hiding the consequences of the lies.

If I could take some inspiration from the work of Thomas Sowell, particular his “Visions of the Annointed”, abridgement of free speech is a useful and perhaps necessary step in sealing off a people from the natural feedback that the market or the world or evolution or human nature or God might otherwise provide. This kind of interference is an imposition and humiliation to a people who have already achieved divinity and righteousness as a birthright of their very being. How can the great vision that exists for the freedom and independence and happiness of all mankind be allowed to do its work if people are allowed to criticize it or act out of lockstep with it?

In this case, the wisdom of the annointed must silence the complaints, opinions, and rebellion of the rabble. Their ravings are not merely divisive and distracting, they are destructive to the great work, and actively harmful and humiliating offenses against the divinity of the annointed. To invoke any higher claim or argument is, after all, to denigrate individual humanity itself (or the state, or the favored ideology) as something less than the limit of all morality and meaning. That is why there is no room for them in the glorious utopia. That is why freedom of speech must be the first thing to go in Olympus, lest the gods’ ears be tweaked by intolerant and disrespectful commentary.
We aren’t anywhere near that kind of state here in the US. But the lesson of history is that there’s also nothing really preventing us from heading there. Plenty of countries have changed, plenty have made terrible mistakes. Often in the service of their own best desires and ideals. There’s nothing to say that the freedoms and prosperity we enjoy are simply owed to us by the universe as part of our divine right and could never be lost. They’re contingent. We gained them, and we can lose them. Not all in a day. That’s not how it usually happens.

For us Americans there is a greater danger than to some, because freedom is so much of who we are and what our country and its identity is based on. Our systems is much less able to survive without freedom and what truly preserves it, because our world is much more dependent on it. It’s not clear what we will be or what will define us or hold us together if we lose the love of freedom. Russia has its own racial solidarity and oligarchal traditions to fall back on. We don’t have that. We’re a radically diverse and divergent people, united primarily by a desire for freedom. What will we be, if we are no longer the land of the free?

The documentary Chernobyol, is not only good, it is one of the best things I have ever seen in my life.

   I wept several times. When the divers volunteered, when the puppies were shot, when the female scientist argued with Luchenkov trying to get him tell the truth about the control rods. And finally, at the end, I legitimately sobbed seeing the footage of the real scientist and reading about his suicide and the resulting changes made to the reactors.

    Much like The Gulag Archipelago, it is a scream against the cost of lies. Pleasant lies, for the good of the people, for the good of our ideals, the desire to not see what we do not wish to see, the desire to avoid facing what must be faced. The cowardice of telling people what they want to hear and what we want to tell them.