One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022

No, the Revolution isn’t over, N.S. Lyons warns:

One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs. What is called “Wokeness” — or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) — rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant — they hold them nonetheless. Such as:

The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” — thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…

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The mere act entitled women to respite from all other physical and social responsibility

Sunday, May 8th, 2022

Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers includes an attack on Momism:

During World War II, Wylie went to work for the Office of Facts and Figures (later known as The Office of War Information) in Washington, DC, but resigned when his superiors rejected his plan to tell Americans about the Bataan Death March and other atrocities committed by the Japanese, in an effort to stir their patriotic commitment to the war effort. Dispirited by this experience, Wylie returned home to Miami Beach, where, from May 12 to July 4, 1942, he hammered out a series of splenetic essays that comprised “a catalogue of what I felt to be wrong morally, spiritually and intellectually with my fellow citizens.” These essays would eventually be gathered into Generation of Vipers, whose 18 chapters skewered a range of supposedly sacrosanct American beliefs, groups, and institutions, such as organized religion, business, Congress, doctors, and the supposed goodness of the common man. But the chapter that ignited a firestorm of controversy and rocketed the book to bestsellerdom was “Common Women,” Wylie’s caustic attack on Americans’ sanctification of motherhood, a cultural syndrome Wylie dubbed “Momism.” This was tantamount to spitting on the flag.

Generation of Vipers (whose full title is Generation of Vipers: A Survey of Moral Want • A Philosophical Discourse suitable only for the Strong • A Study of American Types and Archetypes • And A Signpost on the two Thoroughfares of Man: the Dolorosa and the Descensus Averno • Together with sundry Preachments, Epithets, Modal Adventures, Political Impertinences, Allegories, Aspirations, Visions and Jokes as well as certain Homely Hints for the care of the Human Soul) sold terrifically when it hit bookstores in January 1943, thanks to the endorsement given it the week before publication by popular columnist Walter Winchell. The first printing of 4,000 copies sold out in a week, and the book just kept selling. Vipers went through 11 printings in 1943 alone and went on to sell 180,000 copies in hardcover by 1954. In 1950, the American Library Association named Generation of Vipers one of the 50 most influential and important books of the last 50 years.

“Mom,” Wylie begins the chapter “Common Women,” “is an American creation. Her elaboration was necessary because she was launched as Cinderella.” Here Wylie refers to an earlier chapter in which he explained how American women were inculcated in a distorted version of the fairy tale that conditioned them to expect material wealth, not because of virtuous activities but merely because they were female. “The idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift — an idea promulgated by every medium and many an advertisement — has defeated half the husbands in America,” Wylie wrote. “It has made at least half our homes into centers of disillusionment. […] It long ago became associated with the notion that the bearing of children was such an unnatural and hideous ordeal that the mere act entitled women to respite from all other physical and social responsibility.”

I haven’t read Generation of Vipers, but I have read Wylie’s 1930 novel, Gladiator, which many argue is the original inspiration for Superman, The Savage Gentleman, which likely inspired Doc Savage, and When Worlds Collide, which he co-wrote with Edwin Balmer, which (along with Armageddon 2419 AD) inspired Alex Raymond’s comic strip, Flash Gordon.

Posted in Media, Policy | 5 Comments »

The Party-state had added the artificial constraints of an information ecosystem sealed off from the rest of humankind

Thursday, May 5th, 2022

Xi Jinping regularly exhorts China’s diplomats, propagandists, journalists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural figures to “tell China’s story well,” T. Greer explains, but outside of its own borders, post-Deng China has a poor record selling the intangible:

Most observers place fault exactly where Dan does: the claustrophobic cultural environment of enforced political orthodoxy. A common ancillary argument is that party-state calls for innovative cultural production are themselves the problem. Cultural innovation happens at the level of the individual artist, this argument goes. Steven Speilbergs cannot be produced on demand.

I do not find this logic totally convincing. After all, China’s neighbors have done the exact thing Western critics and artists claim cannot be done.

Consider the “Korean wave.” What Ford was to the automobile, the Korean companies SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment are to pop. The stars and starlets of Korean popdom are selected, trained, choreographed, and publicized with a Tayloresque efficiency that would make the manager of any Amazon warehouse proud. The founder of the first of these companies famously declared that “S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology.” In the ‘90s he reversed engineered this technology with methods that mirror Korea’s famous chaebol: he began by consciously breaking down the constituent parts of successful American and Japanese pop hits, simplified these parts into scripts that could be easily replicated, hired foreign expertise to shepherd the design process, and then secured government funding to jump start his new export industry. From the beginning, South Korea’s pop record labels positioned themselves as “national champions” of the same mold and make as Samsung and Hyundai.

The success of K-pop hinged on two connecting tissues that bound together the South Korean music industry with Japan and the West.

[…]

To replicate the success of Michael Jackson, SM Entertainment hired a producer of a Michael Jackson’s albums to work with their stars! This was standard during the genre’s rise: throughout the aughts and early 2010s, the most famous K-pop performances were arranged, composed, choreographed, and produced by Western composers, mixers, choreographers, producers, and videographers.

K-pop was not entirely the work of foreigners: after delivering a new composition or developing a new choreographic routine, the Western expert would retreat to the background. Record executives would then review songs beat by beat, dance move by dance moves, making adjustments and reworking material until they were satisfied they had created something the masses would clamor for. K-pop was thus not just a self conscious appropriation of foreign music styles, but an attempt to create the next iteration of those very styles. If art can be thought of as a conversation, K-pop succeeded in part because its creators presented their music as the next turn in an existing dialogue.

[…]

My two younger sisters became K-pop fanatics in their middle school years. Day after day I would walk in the front door and see the two of them flopping about in front a computer screen, mimicking the choreography of their favorite bands. As with “Gagnam Style’s” viral rise, YouTube was the main mechanism of transmission.

These are not anomalous anecdotes. K-pop was the first musical genre to intentionally embrace streaming. From the beginning, K-pop labels sought to save on costs and circle around foreign gate keepers by bringing their product straight to Youtube. The website was popular in Korea early; as users of Youtube themselves, the executives at the big three record labels quickly realized that it was the shortest route to the foreign mass consumer. The Korean Wave would not have been possible without American social media. Silicon Valley built the highway that connects Korean producers and fans with audiences abroad.

This gets to heart of China’s problems—and these are not problems of cultural sterility. In my experience, Chinese intellectual life is often more vital and vibrant than what I see in the West.

[…]

My sisters became K-pop fanatics under the swayof Youtube channels and Facebook groups. Where are the center points of Chinese fandoms? Websites like Bilibili, Tieba, and WeChat. There are few bridges to link these Chinese sites with their counterparts in the West.

To the natural obstacle facing any logographic language in a latinate world, the Party-state had added the artificial constraints of an information ecosystem sealed off from the rest of humankind. The seal is permeable. In fact, it is breached every day — but these breaches are not free. The transaction costs of jumping the firewall and moving between platforms put Chinese producers at a disadvantage. The cyber infrastructure of the global commons is simply not as intuitive to Chinese executives and artists as it was to the Koreans who engineered the Korean Wave. Even most of the Chinese who live abroad interact with it surprisingly little; they bring the homegrown ecosystem with them in their pockets, and have no reason to leave it.

This is the first, and probably most important, challenge to building sustainable cultural hegemony. The Party-state’s decision to strengthen its hold on the discourse inside China came at the direct expense of its own discourse power abroad.

Posted in Media, Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

Elections are to a large extent bad showbiz

Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

America, like the rest of the West, is mostly run by permanent bureaucracies, Dominic Cummings reminds us:

Elections are to a large extent bad showbiz. The noise is high but the stakes often amazingly low. The parties scream about each other but generally whether X or Y wins changes an amazingly small fraction of policy, money, or real power — and has little effect on the permanent bureaucracies. (One of the reasons the Brexit referendum was different is it led to much actual weeping across Whitehall on 24/6/16 as the permanent bureaucracies faced something new — real change for them. Trump’s victory was sold as the same but clearly was not.)

The governments don’t control the governments. Conservative parties don’t want to control the governments and don’t know how to even if/when they do want to. Anti-conservative parties largely support the permanent bureaucracies and want more of them more than they want to escape the effects of being bogged down by them. The permanent bureaucracies certainly don’t want anybody elected controlling the governments, and they don’t even run themselves themselves! — nobody ‘runs’ them, everybody can veto everything but nobody has the authority to run them in the way effective organisations are run. The media portrays a ‘conservative’ government actually controlling the government as proto-fascist. And in the US/UK the courts increasingly use administrative law and judicial review to make it impossible for the government to control the government (‘the rule of law’ is now often used as a slogan to justify judges deciding political issues, which is a novel idea and an excellent device for Harvard/Oxbridge/media/officials to control/slow any executive acting outside their Overton Window of acceptable behaviour).

When nobody is in charge, you have chaos. Nobody is in charge of western governments. We see chaos everywhere. We see a chronic inability to think about hard problems under extreme uncertainty, decide and act at speed and scale. We see governments unable to escape the delusion that government largely involves chasing the media all day then cocktails with them by night. The political media is dominated by a subset of graduates who, like Oblonsky in Anna Karenina, largely cannot think for themselves and simply absorb and emit leftist political ‘views’ like clothes fashions.

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He has some showman skills, a good nickname game, and a sporadically good Twitter game

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

Trump made a lot of noise, Dominic Cummings notes, but got very little done:

And Trump showed:

1. He does not understand power in Washington.

2. He doesn’t have a CEO mindset or skillset in the Bezos/Gates/Jobs/Musk sense of being able to execute at scale and speed.

3. Like Boris Johnson, his insecurities mean he can’t face his lack of skills and trust/empower anyone to build the team to run the administration for him.

4. He has some showman skills, a good nickname game and a sporadically good twitter game. But like Johnson, he prefers to spend his time babbling about and at the media rather than the (often mind-numbing) problems of institutions and incentives you need to focus on to change big things.

This combination meant Trump made a lot of noise but got very little done.

He could not control the government. He was sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes idiotic, often right in his complaints that the media were lying, but very little he said mattered because his words did not connect to power. He annoyed the swamp but he couldn’t drain the swamp — not the tiniest corner. From the intelligence services to the public health bureaucracy, he ranted and threatened but he could not persuade them to change, he could not appoint people to make them change, he couldn’t close them, he couldn’t replace them. He could not even force the deep state to vet his appointments some of whom were given the run around for over 18 months by the FBI before giving up in despair. If you can’t force the FBI to vet your appointments, you can’t do much of anything. And though he hated the media, was seriously weakened by them, and wanted to weaken them he actually flooded his enemies with a wave of energy and money! As the boss of CBS said, Trump ‘may not be good for America but he’s damn good for CBS’.

Posted in Policy | 10 Comments »

It inevitably ends with subversion

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

The rule-abiding nature of genre means that there is an internal logic to its artistic progression:

It inevitably ends with subversion. When a genre’s possibilities have been depleted, the last trick left is to invert the tropes. This is a sign that the genre is out of new things to say. Since the professional class is rewarded for telling genre fiction, those who rise to the political class can only communicate in tropes. Increasingly, all political stories are told as inverted genre.

Author one tells a story about a good knight who slays an evil dragon. A trope is born. Author two is influenced by this story, but can’t write the same one, so writes about a knight struggling to be good who slays a sympathetic dragon. The genre is made complex, and the trope is expanded. Author three has to contend with both of his antecedents, and so he has less space to write a dragon story. The obvious remaining choice is to write about an evil knight who slays a good dragon. Perhaps this is done with a wink that pokes fun at the fantasy genre as a whole. Inverting a trope may seem like “subver­sion,” yet this process strengthens the genre and allows it to continue after it has exhausted itself. Author three’s story only works if the audience is familiar with stories one and two.

This process explains many of the popular political narratives of our time. “I’m socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.” Political stories have to change with changing circumstances, but our leaders only know how to tell genre. In order to tell a new story, they would have to abandon false certainty and set off into the unknown. Instead, old genre stories get inverted, and forms of authority which no longer hold value are kept alive through faux subversion.

The entire phenomenon of the nonconformist bureaucrat can be seen as genre inversion. Everyone today grew up with pop culture stories about evil corporations and corporate America’s soul-sucking culture, and so the “creatives” have fashioned a self-image defined against this genre. These stories have been internalized and inverted by corporate America itself, so now corporate America has mandatory fun events and mandatory displays of creativity.

In other words, past countercultures have been absorbed into corporate America’s conception of itself. David Solomon isn’t your father’s stuffy investment banker. He’s a DJ! And Goldman Sachs isn’t like the stuffy corporations you heard about growing up. They fly a transgender flag outside their headquarters, list sex-change tran­sitions as a benefit on their career site, and refuse to underwrite an IPO if the company is run by white men. This isn’t just posturing. Wokeness is a cult of power that maintains its authority by pretending it’s perpetually marching against authority. As long it does so, its sectaries can avoid acknowledging how they strengthen managerial America’s stranglehold on life by empowering administrators to en­force ever-expanding bureaucratic technicalities.

Inverted tropes also define the relationship between the Left and the Right. Rather than tell a new story, the Left and Right tell genre fiction that depends upon their mutual opposition for meaning. Pope Benedict XVI once argued that modernity brought the believer and the atheist closer together because the believer is tempted by doubt while the nonbeliever is tempted by “perhaps it’s true,” and both stories are linked by fundamental uncertainty. A similar dynamic ex­plains why our politics is simultaneously divisive and homogeneous. The Bass Pro shopper tells a story in which patriotism is expressed through the consumer choice to wear an American flag T-shirt. The Bushwick woman tells a story in which getting an ugly haircut makes her “nonbinary.” These stories don’t make sense unless they are told in opposition to the story of the libtard, or the patriarchy, respectively. Polarization makes political actors dependent on their political opponents, which increases divisions because any area of agreement threatens to erode entire political identities. These lazy stories find their apotheosis in our politicians.

Our politicians, their staff, and their political consultant remoras are the worst storytellers in society. Mass democracy has become a selection process that rewards politicians for being as shameless as possible. Indeed there is nothing more embarrassing and pathetic than the way politicians try to be cool or relatable. From wearing flannel to the Iowa State Fair to live streams in which they make a big deal out of drinking beer, politicians are constantly relying on the dumbest tropes.

Posted in Media, Policy | 10 Comments »

The professional class tells a variety of genre stories about their jobs

Sunday, May 1st, 2022

Genre fiction is any story created to explicitly appeal to fans of existing stories, John McElroy notes, and it often refers to sci-fi, fantasy, noir, and westerns, but also includes novels about novelists struggling to write novels:

Genre is the storytelling technique of the managerial class because its rule-abiding nature resembles a bureaucracy, and part of the reason members of this professional class seem increasingly out of touch is because they tell genre stories which expect the audience to accept recycled tropes.

The professional class tells a variety of genre stories about their jobs: TED Talker, “entrepreneur,” “innovator,” “doing well by doing good.” One of the most popular today is corporate feminism. This familiar story is about a young woman who lands a prestigious job in Manhattan, where she guns for the corner office while also fulfilling her trendy Sex and the City dreams. Her day-in, day-out life is blessed by the mothers and grandmothers who fought for equality — with the ghost of Susan B. Anthony lingering Mufasa-like over America’s cubicles. Yet, like other corporate genre stories, girl-boss feminism is a celebration of bureaucratic life, including its hierarchy. Isn’t that weird?

[...]

Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that “modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their intelligence,” and today employers rub this insult in workers’ faces with a hideously infantilizing work culture that turns the office into a permanent kindergarten classroom. Blue-chip companies reward their employees with balloons, stuffed animals, and gold stars, and an exposé detailing the stringent communication rules of the luxury brand Away Luggage revealed how many start-ups are just “live, laugh, love” sweatshops. This humiliating culture dominates America’s companies because few engage in truly productive or necessary work. Professional genre fiction, such as corporate feminism, is thus often told as a way to cope with the underwhelming reality of working a job that doesn’t con­tribute anything to the world.

[...]

This is, of course, a little dramatic, yet it’s interesting to note how genre is constructed primarily from prior stories, and so is always plodding away from realism. In entertainment, this creates clichés. But in the bureaucratic world, this creates stories that everyone repeats, yet no one truly believes. The stories serve a purpose, and so to criticize them as being phony, or not accurate, is always to miss why they are told. The professional class is susceptible to these stories because this is how communication functions within a bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies have established paths to power, and genre fiction is used to signal status along those routes. The key format is the résumé: a document designed to get as close to a lie as possible, while main­taining enough plausibility for the applicant to avoid laughing during job interviews.

Bureaucrats always feel that they are “in on the game,” and so develop a false sense of certainty about the world, which sorts them into two groups: the cynics and the neurotics. Cynics recognize the nonsense, but think it’s necessary for power. The neurotics, by con­trast, are earnest go-getters who confuse the nonsense with actual work. They begin to feel like they’re the only ones faking it and become so insecure they have to binge-watch TED Talks on “im­poster syndrome.”

These two dispositions help explain why journalists focus on things like impeachment rather than medical supply chains. One group cynically condescends to American intelligence, while neurotics shriek about the “norms of our democracy.” Both are undergirded by a false certainty about what’s possible. Professional elites vastly overestimate their own intelligence in comparison with the average American, and today there is nothing so common as being an elitist. Meanwhile, public discourse gets dumber and dumber as elitists spend all their time explaining hastily memorized Wikipedia entries to those they deem rubes.

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The way we teach literature signals that our society no longer has a coherent story about the purpose of education

Saturday, April 30th, 2022

As I recently mentioned, Marc Andreessen shared a “very interesting piece on the current thing” by James McElroy, and I found it had too many interesting bits for one post:

In an influential essay on how traditions solve questions of truth, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that instrumentalism appears when a tradition can no longer explain its older practices. The way we teach literature signals that our society no longer has a coherent story about the purpose of education. Everyone agrees with practical concerns about reading, writing, and the need for future doctors, but there is no justification for the vestiges of our older tradition. Why teach Shakespeare instead of compilations of top-notch corporate memos? At the high school level there is no answer, and so the way English is taught circumscribes how society views storytelling.

When high school students read novels, they are asked to identify the theme, or moral, of a story. This teaches them to view texts through an instrumental lens. Novelist Robert Olen Butler wrote that we treat artists like idiot savants who “really want to say abstract, theoretical, philosophical things, but somehow they can’t quite make themselves do it.” The purpose of a story becomes the process of translating it into ideas or analysis. This is instrumental reading. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent years meticulously outlining and structuring numerous rewrites of The Great Gatsby, but every year high school students reduce the book to a bumper sticker on the American dream. A story is an experience in and of itself. When you abstract a message, you lose part of that experience. Analysis is not inherently bad; it’s just an ancillary mode that should not define the reader’s disposition.

Propaganda is ubiquitous because we’ve been taught to view it as the final purpose of art. Instrumental reading also causes people to assume overly abstract or obscure works are inherently profound. When the reader’s job is to decode meaning, then the storyteller is judged by the difficulty of that process.

[...]

College is characterized in two contradictory ways: it is the only firm path to the upper-middle class, and it is a time of Animal House antics. This is so familiar that we often forget it doesn’t make sense. Want to be a respectable member of the upper class? Quick, bong this beer. Campus decadence is a sorting mechanism that elevates people who pay lip service to permissiveness, but don’t fully participate — a preparatory performance of the fake counterculture.

[...]

College has become a reputational Ponzi scheme, and the effects of this can be seen across culture. Upper-class fashion once tied back to luxury activities: sailing, tennis, polo. Now, it’s $300 cotton T-shirts and $400 sweatpants. Status is being a willing patsy.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Conformity is draped in the dead symbols of a prior generation’s counterculture

Friday, April 29th, 2022

Marc Andreessen recently shared a “very interesting piece on the current thing” by James McElroy, and I found it chock-full of interesting bits:

“Any educational system aiming at a complete adjustment between education and society will tend to restrict education to what will lead to success in the world, and to restrict success in the world to those persons who have been good pupils of the system.”

This professional managerial class has a distinct culture that often sets the tone for all of American culture. It may be possible to separate the professional managerial class from the ruling elite, or plutocracy, but there is no cultural distinction. Any commentary on an entire class will stumble in the way all generalizations stumble, yet this culture is most distinct at the highest tiers, and the fuzzy edges often emulate those on the top. At its broadest, these are college-educated, white-collar workers whose income comes from labor, who are huddled in America’s cities, and who rise to power through existing bureaucracies. Bureaucracies, whether corporate or government, are systems that reward specific traits, and so the culture of this class coalesces towards an archetype: the striving bureaucrat, whose values are defined by the skills needed to maneuver through a bureau­cracy. And from the very beginning, the striving bureaucrat succeeds precisely by disregarding good storytelling.

In America, the first cultural product of modern bureaucratic (and specifically “meritocratic”) sorting mechanisms was the managerial class of the postwar period. Although a subject of derision now, the rise of the “organization man” in the 1950s was accompanied by a huge demand for high culture. In 1955, more Americans paid to attend classical music concerts than baseball games. In 1956, fifty million tuned in to Richard III on NBC. And at the height of the ’50s great books boom, fifty thousand Americans a year bought collections that included Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. High culture was always the domain of the upper class, but suddenly the GI Bill and mass media opened it to large swaths of the population.

Not coincidentally, high culture lost value as a signifier of status, and the upper class began to complain about the stifling conformity of the organization man. This was a form of status anxiety; someone ridiculed as a soulless cog is not a status competitor. Not too long after, Susan Sontag helped create a new cultural status hierarchy. The new “aristocrats of taste” were those who embraced camp, the love of artifice, in order to dethrone the serious. The upper class no longer had to try to elevate their taste. They simply had to have the right attitude. These trends have been institutionalized. Today’s upper class is raised on a steady diet of pop culture that valorizes nonconformism; elites learn to signal their status through attitude.

Professionals today would never self-identify as bureaucrats. Product managers at Google might have sleeve tattoos or purple hair. They might describe themselves as “creators” or “creatives.” They might characterize their hobbies as entrepreneurial “side hustles.” But their actual day-in, day-out work involves the coordination of various teams and resources across a large organization based on established administrative procedures. That’s a bureaucrat. The entire professional culture is almost an attempt to invert the connotations and expecta­tions of the word—which is what underlies this class’s tension with storytelling. Conformity is draped in the dead symbols of a prior generation’s counterculture.

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You can believe all of those things and still find the current state of the discourse to be disordered and unhealthy

Wednesday, April 27th, 2022

People just want to feel good about war again, Freddie deBoer notes:

I want to suggest that you can think that Russia is clearly acting in an unjustifiably aggressive manner and that Ukraine has a right to defend itself, as I do; you can support sending further American arms and money to the Ukrainian government; you can think that NATO and EU behavior have nothing whatsoever to do with Russia’s actions; you can think that Russia’s motivations are pure mustache-twirling evil with no justifications in national security or realpolitik; you can pray for a swift and decisive Ukrainian victory; you can even argue that the United States should send troops and get into a hot war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf — you can believe all of those things and still find the current state of the discourse to be disordered and unhealthy. You can believe all of that stuff and still argue that the intense social mandate against dissent and hard questions is ugly and unhelpful.

[...]

So, to follow along, Americans focusing on America’s role in the world are guilty of insularity and self-obsession, but also only America stands in the way of victory for Putin. Does this make a lick of sense to you? You can’t simultaneously say that Americans are being self-obsessive when they discuss Ukraine while you demand that America do more and more for Ukraine. Calls for the United States to deepen its involvement in this conflict are definitionally the business of each and every American, including Chomsky, other left critics of prolonging the war, and me. It is nonsensical to claim that an American has no right to an opinion on conduct by America’s government.

[...]

It’s also worth saying that it is of course not 100% Ukraine’s decision how much of their territory and their people to surrender to Russia because that’s not how the world works. Russia has had and will continue to have something to say about how much territory Ukraine keeps and how many people it loses. Is that fair? No. But that’s life. Russia possesses a large and advanced military, as well as the world’s largest nuclear armament. Those facts have consequences, no matter what American pundits think is fair. Sometimes the world is like that. I thought the fact that bad actors sometimes do bad things, and that our efforts to change this will often simply make things worse, was a shared lesson of recent history. I think that living as part of the hegemon has led many Americans to chafe at the idea that there are any obstacles to implementing their will at all, that the world is an entirely pliable entity that will bend to our preferences if we just want it enough. But there has never been a time in post-agrarian history when there was not some sort of conflict between peoples or powers, and the ongoing devastation in Yemen demonstrates that bad things are happening in the world all the time. Whether they’re seen as major challenges to international norms is a matter of publicity.

I suspect that Chomsky’s deeper sin, in that interview, was to make the sensible observation that you shouldn’t think of foreign policy in the exact same moral terms that you think of the behavior of individuals. Foreign policy and warmaking are not easily mappable onto the ordinary moral intuitions that we apply to day-to-day life and the people around us. Chomsky is asking us to think less about simplistic considerations of good and bad and to instead practice some hardheaded cost-benefit analysis. Specifically, he’s suggesting that perpetuating the conflict by enabling short-term Ukrainian victories will ultimately only increase the risk of a truly ruinous war between NATO and Russia and result in greater destruction to Ukraine, without much changing the eventual outcome. Could he be wrong? Absolutely. Is he so wrong that he deserves days of bipartisan rage? I don’t think so. And I also don’t think that rage can be explained in rational terms. I think it speaks to the emotional miasma that has developed regarding this issue.

I think supporting Ukraine in 2022 has become like supporting the troops in 2002 because people are desperate for a morally simplistic contest in which the Goodies will nobly defeat the dastardly Baddies. Americans grow up surrounded by World War II nostalgia and feel denied their birthright of ethically uncomplicated and heroic wars. There’s also a deeper desperation to be positively inspired. I think most people in 2022 are profoundly disillusioned, in politics yes but also in a broader overriding sense, and feel beset by convincing critiques of every idea, party, movement, and institution in American life. In recent decades it’s felt like everything has been undermined and nothing has been built. We churn out college graduates who can critique everything yet create nothing. Even the most dedicated partisans seem to have a jaundiced view of their own side, saving all of their passion and energy for excoriating the other. You look at the discursive inroads the socialist left has made in the last decade in this country, and it’s the perfect example: we’ve achieved no power and little representation, but the leftist critique of conventional liberalism has infected liberals, they’re stung by it, they preemptively work to address it, they feel exhausted by it. I find it very difficult to locate genuine, uncomplicated, positive feelings about the broad left-of-center project anywhere. The migration of political discussion to social media has helped extinguish optimism as a factor in political life. Briefly with Ukraine it seemed that there was finally consensus on a major political issue, and broad American ignorance about foreign policy facilitates superficial unanimity. But the cost of enforced consensus is too high; the stakes here are life and death, and in such a context the need for robust and unrestrained argument is greater than ever.

Posted in Policy, War | 9 Comments »

Geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create the territory

Monday, April 25th, 2022

As J.R.R. Tolkien would put it, the superpowers are trying to build a secondary world that everyone else can inhabit:

Inside it, what the world contains is true: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The great game is indeed a game, but a game with a purpose of creating the rules of the game.

Think about it as a clash between two versions of the world. Or, more graphically, imagine a simulated landscape in which two or more computer programmers are fighting to redesign what appears on the monitor. The pixels keep changing from moment to moment. One second, the landscape looks like a mountain scene; then the mountains grow smaller and smaller until the landscape becomes a grassy plain. Some back and forth ensues until one of the programmers gives up and the other vision wins. Geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create the territory.

[...]

In his recent book, Jacob Helberg writes that the new wars are now less about who controls some piece of territory in Europe or East Asia than about who “controls the information networks and communications technologies that shape the distribution of world power by shaping the daily lives of billions of people.” He fails to draw an obvious but fascinating conclusion: what changed was that technology has rebuilt the world to such an extent that these networks are now the territory.

[...]

Just as new technologies slowly raised the destructive potential of direct conflict, a new avenue was opened: states can now fight one another not by winning in a direct battle but by setting the rules under which other states must operate. Call it a form of indirect government: perhaps your opponent will even assume the rules are natural or given—but in reality, you have moved one level up in the great game. Your opponent is playing a video game. You are coding it. I would reserve the term superpower for those states engaged in a battle to shape the rules. Everyone else is competing under the rules.

Listen to Russian president Vladimir Putin or any of the thinkers orbiting the Kremlin and all you hear is the same geopolitical dread: will Russia be forced to play by Western rules, or can it rise to the role of world-builder? Putin seems to believe that an independent and Westernized Ukraine would reduce Russia to a subordinate status. His is the classical gamble of someone who attempts to change the rules of the game but risks achieving no more than being punished under the existing order. The danger for the Western order is that the tools used to punish and constrain Russian power will erode the legitimacy of that order.

The Ukraine war is a revealing moment in the history of world-building. The global system suddenly appeared as a tool of power rather than a neutral framework of rules. There is some danger in this moment of revelation because a number of state actors in the developing world may themselves stop playing by the existing rules or even start looking for alternative systems of play.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Mencius Moldbug might have hijacked a few more brains

Friday, April 22nd, 2022

When Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) appeared on Tucker Carlson back in September, I was surprised, but I didn’t get around to watching it until recently:

It’s hard to judge these things, but I think he might have managed to hijack a few more brains.

In the interview, Carlson asks him about the origin of modern Progressive thought, and Yarvin brings up Reds, the 1981 film based on John Reed’s 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World, which depicts a subculture with the same values as modern Hollywood, but 100 years ago:

In 1915, married journalist and suffragist Louise Bryant encounters the radical journalist John Reed for the first time at a lecture in Portland, Oregon, and is intrigued with his idealism. After meeting him for an interview on international politics that lasts an entire night, she realizes that writing has been her only escape from her frustrated existence. Inspired to leave her husband, Bryant joins Reed in Greenwich Village, New York City, and becomes acquainted with the local community of activists and artists, including anarchist and author Emma Goldman and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Later, they move to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to concentrate on their writing, becoming involved in the local theater scene. Through her writing, Bryant becomes a feminist and radical in her own right. Reed becomes involved in labor strikes with the “Reds” of the Communist Labor Party of America. Obsessed with changing the world, he grows restless and heads for St. Louis to cover the 1916 Democratic National Convention.

During Reed’s absence, Bryant falls into a complicated affair with O’Neill. Upon his return, Reed discovers the affair and realizes he still loves Bryant. The two marry secretly and make a home together in Croton-on-Hudson, north of New York City, but still have conflicting desires. When Reed admits his own infidelities, Bryant takes a ship to Europe to work as a war correspondent. After a flare-up of a kidney disorder, Reed is warned to avoid excessive travel or stress, but he decides to take the same path. Reunited as professionals, the two find their passion rekindled as they are swept up in the fall of Russia’s Czarist regime and the events of the 1917 Revolution.

The film portrays Emma Goldman as a passionate defender of women’s rights, willing to get arrested to hand out pamphlets on contraception:

She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for “inciting to riot” and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

Quite a firecracker, that Emma Goldman!

Posted in Media, Policy | 3 Comments »

Boxing and jiu-jitsu have always seemed more important than any training in marksmanship

Wednesday, April 20th, 2022

I stumbled across an MSNBC opinion piece arguing that fitness-fascists have been recruiting and radicalizing young men with neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist ideologies. I rolled my eyes, but I was legitimately surprised by this bit:

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with “fanatical love of the fatherland,” would do more for the German nation than any “mediocre” tactical weapons training.

I’m honestly shocked that I did not know this, since I’m interested in both military history and martial arts. Here’s the offending passage (from 1925):

Now if the SA could be neither a military combat organization nor a secret league, the following consequences inevitably resulted

1. Its training must not proceed from military criteria, but from criteria of expediency for the party.

In so far as the members require physical training, the main emphasis must be laid, not on military drilling, but on athletic activity. Boxing and jiu-jitsu have always seemed to me more important than any inferior, because incomplete, training in marksmanship. Give the German nation six million bodies with flawless athletic training, all glowing with fanatical love of their country and inculcated with the highest offensive spirit, and a national state will, in less than two years if necessary, have created an army, at least in so far as a certain basic core is present. This, as things are today, can rest only in the Reichswehr and not in any combat league that has always done things by halves. Physical culture must inoculate the individual with the conviction of his superiority and give him that self-confidence which lies forever and alone in the consciousness of his own strength; in addition, it must give him those athletic skills which serve as a weapon for the defense of the movement.

Naturally, anyone recommending physical fitness or martial arts is basically Hitler. (Same with vegetarians, of course.)

Posted in Fitness, Martial Arts, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Mental illness is no longer something to recover from and fight against

Monday, April 18th, 2022

The younger generation’s understanding of mental health is completely destroying people’s lives:

I have met and helped and treated numerous individuals now who are my peers in age — anything from 18-early 30s. And so many have internalized a generational “understanding” of mental illness that is toxic and worthless beyond condemnation. Our youngest generations’ understanding of mental health enables, encourages, and at worst glorifies mental illness. I can not understate the number of times I’ve met a young woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, et cetera, their identity.

Accountability is absent to the nth degree. But more importantly, a lack of any accountability has deprived these people of personal empowerment and agency. Mental illness is no longer something to recover from and fight against. It is an identity and a definition of life itself. There is no reason to seek “cures” (which of course is borderline nonexistent in mental health but that’s a whole essay itself), there is no reason to look to better ourselves. There is no reason to fight our internal struggles at a personal level, without feeling the need to inform every last member of the community whom we interact with. This is not only society’s problem, but our peers’.

Recently I have been working with a woman a bit older than I am, but she is just an example of something I’ve seen numerous times. She understands every moment of high anxiety to be a crisis: deserving of calling hotlines devoted to suicidal people. Every second of discomfort is an attack on themselves. “Trauma response” is the only verbiage through which they understand how maybe a parent wasn’t so loving, so now a snide comment = mental health crisis. They have no contextual understanding how minor inconveniences can and SHOULD be resolved quietly to themselves by being a little anxious for a night. To them, it is an affront to their character, an affirmation that they are disabled and unable to contribute to society without constant affirmation. And they have the internet to thank.

The culture of mental health amongst millennials and lower glorifies and denies all responsibilities towards people with mental illness. Not to mention the flimsy and extremely thin definitions by which they diagnose themselves and each other. I have never in my life met a they/them who also didn’t call themselves “autistic” and “traumatized.” This is not a coincidence. The internet community they are a part of is destroying all sense of responsibility and personal understanding of agency and even sexuality. The result is people aged 14-mid 30s who have no grasp of improving themselves or working on their mental health. The aforementioned woman feels zero responsibility for losing now dozens of friends who did something between refusing to be a part of her “crisis plan” or simply not acknowledging her severity of mental illness. But I’ve seen her dozens of times. She can hold down a job just fine. She shows more initiative than any homeless person (of which I’ve worked with hundreds) I’ve ever met. But her understanding of herself and any struggles is so absolutely poisoned by this ridiculous generational attitude towards mental illness that she will never recover. To not be a part of the cult is in of itself a toxic trait to her poisoned mind.

A second of anxiety is a crisis. Two panic attacks in a week merit hospitalization. A close friend refusing to validate these things is valid grounds for terminating the relationship. And so on, it repeats. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I’ve now met numerous people who would otherwise be functioning members of society who instead have no belief or understanding that they could be just that. Instead they are queer disabled anarchists with trauma response issues unable to hold down a job… because when you surround yourself with enablers and increasingly lenient definitions, something as simple as an anxiety attack once in your life will quickly turn into being “handicapped” and separate you from society in perpetuity.

Posted in Policy | 5 Comments »

The Pentagon builds its budgets in five-year plans, much as the Soviet Union once did

Sunday, April 17th, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseThe Pentagon builds its budgets in five-year plans, Christian Brose notes (in The Kill Chain), much as the Soviet Union once did:

Once the Pentagon starts paying for people, places, and things, it has to keep paying for them. This means that the majority of the money that the Department of Defense plans to get in future years has already been obligated by past decisions. And once those programs get started, it is incredibly difficult to stop them, because of how many stakeholders in and out of our government benefit from continuing them at all costs.

[…]

Of the limited future money that remains unspoken for, the process to plan how to spend it begins nearly two years before the Pentagon actually receives a dollar of that money from Congress.

[…]

In that gap of time, entirely new technologies are developed. Brand new companies are founded. And the Pentagon cannot plan to take advantage of any of them, so it programs its future money toward capabilities and technologies that it knows about now, which makes it exceedingly difficult to be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to unforeseen conditions.

[…]

What’s more, if the Pentagon wants to shift, or “reprogram,” any of this funding for other purposes, it often requires permission from four different congressional committees, and the total amount of money that the Pentagon is allowed to reprogram in a given year is roughly .5 percent of its budget.

[…]

As each layer of bureaucracy was added to govern the sprawling defense enterprise, some power shifted to the top. But much of this was power on paper. In reality, most power still remains at lower levels, concentrated ironically in what are known within the largest non-democratic institution in America as “communities of interest.”

[…]

What this means, in practice, is that countless decisions affecting enormous amounts of defense spending are made by entrenched parochial interests spread around the Department of Defense that have neither the authority nor the incentive to make bold moves that change America’s defense program. This leads the Pentagon’s many communities of interest to view their senior leaders, who come and go every few years, as tantamount to part-time employees who are not around long enough to really matter—or, as a friend in one of those communities once put it to me, “the Christmas help.”

[…]

Military servicemembers are only in a given job for a few years before they rotate to another one. In that short time, they are rarely rewarded for rocking the boat or raising problems up the chain, least of all when their complaints regard the failure of their own institutions to do new things or adopt new technologies for which few people as yet see a need. Such disruptions are more often viewed by the powers that be, who manage military careers, as a reason to doubt whether a person is a team player who deserves a top job in the next promotion cycle. Those who are rewarded are people who shepherd the existing programs of their respective communities of interest through the budget process with as little change as possible.

[…]

The Navy fixates on “ship count.” The Air Force fixates on its number of squadrons. The Army fixates on its “end strength,” the number of soldiers in its ranks. And the Marine Corps has traditionally fixated on amphibious ships.

[…]

For example, despite decades of progress in unmanned aviation, both the Navy and Air Force are planning to spend billions of dollars to develop new, manned fighter jets that they expect to deliver to the force many years from now.

[…]

Both services are also developing autonomous aircraft, but they are limiting them to missions centered around traditional, manned fighter jets—refueling them, in the case of the Navy, and defending them, in the case of the Air Force.

[…]

The truth is that Congress has considerable power to correct the failings and oversights of the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base, but Congress too often uses its awesome powers for things that just do not matter that much to the future effectiveness of our military. It is hard not to think that this is related, in some way, to the significant reduction in the number of members of Congress with military experience, which is roughly half of what it was thirty years ago, which contributes to a growing unfamiliarity with the US military among the very people charged with overseeing it.

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Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

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