Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.
But this is supposed to be okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.
[…]
On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.
But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
It’s a wonderful book about a bunch of goofballs who overestimate their own cosmic importance and believe they’ve discovered new ways of experiencing and writing about the world. It doesn’t travel under the disguise of being “Pilgrim’s Progress,” but is overtly transgressive, in its gentle, Thomas Wolfian way,.
I’m not young, but I didn’t grow up in a high trust society.
A few years ago I moved to a different part of the country, and was shocked at how trusting people were.
I know exactly how trust is destroyed; we all do. What mystifies me is how a high trust society comes into existence in the first place. It seems that trustingness on an individual level is extremely maladaptive.
“What mystifies me is how a high trust society comes into existence in the first place.”
Group selection. The power of high-trust group is so much greater than that of a low-trust group that it makes sense to compromise your individual interest in the short run in order to be part of it.
My experiences with organized religion make me leery of high-trust groups. They just don’t last long enough to get big. They self destruct too soon. I don’t see how any high trust culture can survive long enough to become the dominant culture in a large geographical region, group selection or no. They’re just too unstable.
Read that snorefest in high school. Boring then, and even duller now. Life among the lowly. Never read any more of that beatnik crap after that. Low budget dirtbags and the women and homosexuals that enable their so-called lifestyles. As an academic I could easily write up a paper, thesis or even doctorate on the subject of Kerouac and Kompany, but since I’d rather earn a dollar than snow a prof, let’s just say the story of white trash life has not changed much since that time. Add meth instead of belladona, Ed Buck in place of Ginsburg and the dots follow themselves.
The basic story is losers that can’t get a decent piece of ace and resort to a cross country smell fest (always helps to imagine the smells as well as the sights of pre-air conditioning America) is a tale of the end result of a liberal arts education. While today the Kerouac Krew would be on social media while working at Jack in the Box, the key to take here is that in the 50s these ‘people’ were considered useless tramps, while today they can be internet wonders. Which says all we need about the true value of technology. Knowledge unearned and unchallenged intellects lead to the moral and physical state that we have today. In the 50s participation trophies were earned in places like Anzio and Chosin Reservoir. And scum like the Beatniks were still merely something to pick out of one’s shoes after a walk in a cow pasture
Contaminated NEET: “The power of high-trust group is so much greater than that of a low-trust group that it makes sense to compromise your individual interest in the short run in order to be part of it.”
Yes. The power of high trust groups is huge. The Jews have a high trust community between themselves but rip off, murder and exploit everyone else.
“On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society…collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.”
It took us hundreds of years to get a reasonably high trust society and it’s being destroyed. It’s very sad.
High trust is powerful when there is an important battle for food, clothing, and shelter.
When HVAC and obesity becomes perfected enough for the low trust to live easily enough, the game is up.
Sam J.: “The Jews have a high trust community between themselves but rip off, murder and exploit everyone else.”
One relevant anecdote is “Operation Bid Rig”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bid_Rig
I have numerous anecdotes from history but no original theories. I can point to examples of Jews such as Bernie Madoff, the Bolsheviks, various Rothschilds, and many others. The overall pattern seems to be the following:
Some Jews — often intellectuals — desert the pact of Jewish identity and try to establish themselves as ethically trustworthy for all humans. These deserters are often outcasts from all communities, but that is not too painful for many intellectuals. Spinoza is the most famous example. Israel Shahak wrote of others.
The lowest-tier Jews are loud about their Jewish pride, but they are not smart, and they don’t reap many benefits other than their pride. The mid-tier Jews exploit non-Jews. The highest-tier Jews usually exploit most non-Jews, but every so often, the highest-tier Jews cheat and betray the lower Jews.
Jewish newspapers written for Jewish readers are often interesting sources of relevant anecdotes; example:
https://archive.fo/VGSXf