The best man at my wedding and lifelong friend was a very normal and successful person.
The other day I was talking to him and invited him to meet us halfway between our two families at one of those indoor water parks that the kids like.
"Sorry, we don't do anything indoors."
The reason for this is that they are still masking and isolating over COVID. The wife drives this more than he, but he's on board enough. They won't take the child to any indoor activities, still, as of a month ago.
I don't know how to characterize this other than a "mind virus". My friend has heard the *arguements* for why what he's doing is insane, including from me. But they don't work. Nor can I write it off as his being "mentally ill" like some blue haired Palestinian protestor. He was perfectly normal before this. And he definitely didn't have a "victim mentality" in his personal life, he was an optimistic go getter.
The Palestinian stuff actually is useful here. He's very worried, being a Jew. But when I tried to link Palestinian support to BLM and how Jews had become "white", he just crimestopped. BLM was a noble and pure attempt to help the victim, but Jews are the victims, not the Palestinians. He just doesn't "get it." Like his brain just bugs out and he can't understand what's going on, but he knows it shouldn't change his believes in any way. It's just some weird thing he hasn't figured out yet, maybe it will just go away if BiBi goes or something.
I could list another similar situation with a close friend from Vietnam who now lives in LA and whose wife went to Harvard. Again, nothing like the kind of warped personality you would expect. No previous signs of insanity before 2020. Then all of a sudden, boom!
Hell, I could list my own mother. She's not masking at least, but she was for two years and doesn't appear to have leaned anything (still an intense news watcher who believes what she's told).
I just don't think argument works. I think when people publish op-eds they are maybe trying to nudge and re-direct their own side. "This is what we believe now, we have always been at war with East Asia." It's how you let people know one day to hug someone in Chinatown and another to hide in their homes. But its not meant to argue, its meant to instruct and coordinate.
I probably about 90% agree with you. I just think that when you write “I just don't think argument works.”, you’re being too extreme in the other direction.
It’s the old “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time”.
But it’s also that for most people, there is a time delay before the argument “works” even for the some of the people some of the time.
Perhaps not unlike why advertising works best when the message is repeated many times.
There are very few of us who are willing to change our opinions on a dime. I was politically left of center (and uninterested in politics) when I graduated college, and still into my early 30s. Took me about 7 years to go from there to full-fledged conservative-leaning libertarian (or libertarian-leaning comservative, idk). It took 9/11 to move me from being moderately on the right politically to being fully on the right (imperfect though the political right is, the political left was noticeably inferior even in late 2001, and of course has gotten *much* worse in the 23 years since).
Four years of isolating your child from living life is a pretty big combination of time and severity. These aren't abstract political opinions that don't matter, they are how he's living his life. The guy has his own sky diving license and he won't let his kid be a kid over the flu.
Just last week I tried to talk a friend into finally doing IVF. He's held out seven years of infertility because "the church says it's wrong." Now his wife is almost 40. Times up. Still couldn't get through to him.
I’m not denying your claims re: “most of the people most of the time”; I *endorse* them.
I object only when you go to the other extreme of “all of the people, all of the time, permanently”.
*Most* people are neither that dumb nor that smart.
Most people don’t change most of their opinions quickly (no doubt some, especially these days on the left, will change specific opinions when signaled - mind-virus-like - to do so by the elites at the top of their coalition).
Although I don't buy everything that Gad Saad is selling, one thing I admire about Gad is that he is among the minority of prominent Jews whose views represent a refreshing change from those of knee-jerk liberal Ashkenazi (?) American Jews like your friend and his neurotic Jewish (?) wife. Of course, it helps that Gad is a Jew of Lebanese/Syrian descent who fled Lebanon with his family due to the Lebanese civil war, and he has firsthand experience with Islamic Jew hatred. Sounds like your friend is a lost cause. I agree that continued support for black causes by liberal Jews is mystifying given the lack of reciprocity, and indeed, the apparent antisemitism of a significant segment of the targets of their compassion.
I wonder if people just don't have quite enough to occupy their minds/time. I know they have places to be, stuff to buy, plans to make - everybody's driving around all the time - so I don't mean in that sense of having nothing on the calendar - but nothing truly demanding?
For both limited time and a lot of other very important factors, it's simply impossible to independently scrutinize and verify all but a tiny fraction of beliefs, even the subset of ones the proper application of which have a direct and significant impact on one's personal welfare. There is no alternative to loads of epistemic shortcuts, heuristics, and having to simply trust certain makers of certain claims and hope that you can rely on various cultural mechanisms and social institutions to possess an "epistemic security system" resistant to hacking and which tends to weed out a little error and bias things in the direction of better accuracy over time. In the case of major live disputes, it's hard to blame people from making their best guess and following the implied course, though often there is a common psychological tendency to forget that initial uncertainty and subjectivity and unjustifiably jump into overconfident insistence on universal objective truth.
McCloskey has argued that a shift in cultural attitude that assigned higher social status to merchants, businessmen, and entrepreneurs was a key development that enabled the economic takeoff of certain European countries in the late Renaissance and then period of early Industrial Revolution. Putting aside the question if whether that claim is accurate, what we need today is a similar attitude shift with regards to claims, which lowers the status of claims made by those without conspicuously observable skin in the game - that they are living those beliefs and stand to win or lose big if those beliefs are true or false respectively.
You're joking. There are no greater examples of the lawyers who run things reducing their skin in the game to zero than the prosecutors and judges who let criminals run free in neighborhoods they'll never live in. If they were forced to live in the violent crime hot spots, then they would have their skin in the game, and obviously run things a lot differently.
And perhaps relatedly, it causes their brains to atrophy? Can't underestimate that people may be getting dumber.
I was once very struck by a video clip I watched - this was back when Bernie Sanders was briefly a force in politics. Ezra Klein. Now I think Ezra Klein was a fairly young man at that point. Just a few years beyond whatever Ivy League school or schools he attended. He was doing pretty successfully, though, to land an interview with Bernie at his peak.
Bernie said something or other about mass immigration being a "Koch Brothers conspiracy". Or "what the Koch Brothers want", or something. Which obviously aligns with my view lol, but that's not important.
What struck me was that Klein was shocked - wait, wut? What do you mean by that?!
I thought that was so strange. I mean, I went to a state school so I have never had much interaction with the brightest-and-best-in-class but it astonished me that someone who had gotten to that media position (interviewing a presidential candidate, or soon-to-be candidate) would not have heard that talking point before, and even if not - would not have been able to think quickly enough on his feet to understand it nonetheless. I mean, it wasn't subtle.
"Now I think Ezra Klein was a fairly young man at that point. Just a few years beyond whatever Ivy League school or schools he attended."
Ezra Klein (in)famously attended UC Santa Barbara to start, transferred to UCLA where he graduated, and has never attended any prestige/elite schools.
In the early blogging days I had an extremely minor blog but on a couple of occasions got links/notice from Matthew Yglesias when I'd point out how incredibly dumb, naive, or ill educated Ezra Klein was compared to Yglesias among the annoying leftist set. Matt was subtle enough that he never called out those parts of what he was linking, but that was the only common element. I was highly amused.
Klein has always seemed strong evidence for looks preference helping a career, Yglesias for someone overcoming it with greater talent.
When it comes to persuasion in US politics, many of the dynamics we see are because the people have no direct role or stake in either the process or the outcome. You opened the "Three Languages" book with a comparison of your experience on a jury with your experience with larger political discourse. The major difference here is that the jury deliberates on an unmediated exercise of power. Only in unusual circumstances will a court set aside a jury's verdict. Usually, when normal citizens (and even individual politicians) discuss politics, they are not doing something much different from yelling at the TV. The actual exercise of power over an issue with the Ukraine war is highly mediated, and the news media is often not the most important medium, but rather money and relationships are.
So e.g. the decision to go to war in Ukraine was made in secret, pushed this way and that way by secret diplomacy, secret spying, secret transmissions of money, and the very occasional barely-perceived news media article. At no time was this issue sent to the people in an unmediated fashion as it was in Thucydidean Athens when the assembly had to decide whether or not to send the military to Syracuse. By the time the issue went to Congress, it was accompanied by a high pressure money campaign, of which the most important part of the campaign was likely money and not the medium of persuasion through words. There are other ways to persuade people than by words, such as by paying them off. Even in the Thucydides example, the author notes that many of the Athenians in the assembly voted for the doomed expedition because they expected to make a lot of money doing it and heavily discounted the words of the opposing orator because of it. So too in our world.
The most popular single polling issue in this election is government prices of prescription drugs. Its in every single democratic campaign ad spend.
I work in the industry. My takeaway is:
1) The government negotiated higher, not lower, net prices for the whole basket.
2) The IRA changes dramatically increased, rather then decreased, cost to the government.
To cover these facts up the IRA contained "premium stabilization" to increase the direct subsidy to cover up any increase in bids. The original CBO score was based on an assumption about what the direct subsidy would be. Now that it's higher it is going to cost a lot more then the CBO said, but the member will never see that and the media will never talk about it. Further, CMS came in with a "demo" that lowered premiums $15+ essentially by fiat at taxpayer expense, including a lot of other sweeteners for the insurance companies. Some Republicans protested that this was an illegal bribe to cover up the IRAs fuck up before the election, but nothing will come of it. Do they want to be "responsible" for premiums increasing?
So tell me, how would "the people" rationally debate the merits of this legislation? What odds do they have? What odds does "elite human capital" have? Tyler Cowan has spoken a lot of this issue, most of it stupid and full of lies.
The people's representatives ostensibly "debated" it with the aid of their staffers (who are paid like fruit pickers) and industry lobbyists (paid well). The well paid ones instructed the people's representatives to dump government money on their clients. The honor paid to the people was to call it the "Inflation Reduction Act" to show that everyone involved was taking public concerns seriously and respectfully.
Elite human capital got what it wanted, which is to externalize their costs onto the government and ordinary employees.
But if you polled the other 99.9% of EHC that didn't have a direct stake* in the outcome, they did not get what they wanted. Like I don't think your average prog wonk, let alone their readers, would be happy to learn the the IRA was a scam that did the opposite of what they were celebrating.
It might be fair to say they don't care, they only care about the dopamine rush of "doing something". But that simply makes them the same as the plebs, and means that nobody looking out for truth is at the wheel.
*Hell I'm directly benefiting from this big time and I don't even want it. Most people I work with are disgusted and would gladly have preferred a different outcome.
Imagine the reaction of a very smart but also naive lover of high-literature upon hearing that, after having lobbied for such an outcome for many years, "they" had finally given the green light to the project of adapting one of their favorite novels into a film. "Wonderful!" The reaction should be "Terrible! They'll ruin it, like they have ruined every other similar attempt at cinematic adaptation of high literature." They should have known better to even have tried to lobby for it in the first place, but probably they don't even watch movies, they only felt it would be cool for there to -be- a movie, maybe on a subconscious level they think it would raise the status of of people with their tastes in authors and literature - but consciously they didn't think it through.
So it's "wonderful" news only because they don't know better, aren't even aware of their problem because they don't realize the depth of their obliviousness and ignorance about "the industry".
Now imagine their crushing disappointment and even sense of betrayal when they watch the crap that comes out of the end of our contemporary entertainment industry's digestive system when it tries to eat a high-brow book. It can barely eat -comic- books. And what comes out of an adaptation is not an attempt to be true to the author's vision and intensions but to include the unmolested only to extent optimal to achieve the industry's business purpose, which trumps all other purposes. Moral: If you place your innocent daughter in the care of a pimp, don't act so shocked at what happens next.
Dan Williams offers up a straw man for the term mind virus, by sharing that people can be persuaded by rational arguments. The term mind virus in the contexts I understand is that someone is using a proxy for rationalization, based on a mosaic of feelings. Yes, people can be persuaded rationally, but logical fallacies and misrepresenting data/reality do not fit in the rational box.
I mentioned this in his post, but it seems worth mentioning here for consideration. A few of his rhetorical flourishes did give the impression that he was throwing out social contagion along with "mind virus," but other, more specific claims imply keeping the former and dispatching of the latter. This relates to his other posts about epistemic vigilance. It's not that we can expect (what we consider to be) rational argument to be effective, but rather we can expect what is effective to be more rational than we think it is from a distance.
It's worse than that; he missed the point at the very start but just kept writing.
Really, all he does is help to better -define- "mind virus" by offering a more complete and technically mechanistic description of the phenomenon of social psychology of which "mind virus" is - duh - merely convenient shorthand for ease of communication especially across tiers of intellectual sophistication.
It's deployed in a derogatory manner because accepting false, irrational claims without scrutiny for bad social (i.e., 'tribal', 'status-imitating') reasons and which, when implemented individually and politically, have terrible personal and anti-social consequences is -worthy- of disparagement! He says 'slur', but this is misleading, because he means "unjustified, empty slur", as if it were actionable slander* which it is not, in the sense of truth being an absolute defense. "Luxury Believer" is the same idea as "infected with the mind virus", but not a 'slur' in circulation because no one uses it: it sounds clumsy and makes you wince just trying to say it.
What are we to make of right-of-center intellectuals who like to spend their time attacking -mere shorthand- the few times some novel political coinage actually starts to get some traction? "But the low-brows who hear it will think crudely and won't consistently use the term in a hedged, verbose manner displaying a full appreciation of the subtleties and ... blah blah blah." Ok, propose some better shorthand (narrator: they can't, and anyway, just want to criticize.)
Do they not appreciate the irony of criticizing people for adopting cognitive and linguistic patterns for social reasons without sufficient basis when the very thing these people are trying to do is use a simple metaphorical name to communicate that VERY critique! Are metaphors no longer allowed? Is social contagion out the window because not contagious in exactly the same manner as a contagious respiratory infection, or what?
"But to use this term is to accuse people of believing in ideas while not having rigorously rational reasons and logical arguments well-supported by credible evidence, but, in fact, several intellectual academics have provided these explanations and ... " Yeah, just like their analogous predecessors have always provided bad word-salad rationalizations for every previous bogus mind-virus, often with the consequence of catastrophic levels of social fallout. We can both simultaneously argue the validity of those rationales, accepting certain claims merely provisionally for the sake of argument, while not having to actually play dumb and accept commonly parroted cover stories as the equivalent to "having good reasons one has independently scrutinized" instead of, you know, "contracting the mind virus by swallowing everything my friends say because it is said by my friends."
Remember some of that crowd going on in similarly Ackhtualllllly!-meme fashion about how Rufo's use of "CRT" or "intersectionality" wasn't exactly and precisely mapped to how some academic attempted to define it 40 years ago ... or even of "woke" before that?
Ordinary people need words and phrases to describe complicated - but real and directly observed and experiences - phenomenon of modern political social psychology. Every time one is found in a process for rhetoric akin to artistic discovery that hits the mark particularly well, here come the right-leaning scolds to wag their fingers.
Look, I get it, it's terrible tough and lonely to be an intellectual on the right. The temptation to get "strange new respect" and punch down on the non-intellectuals on one's own side - even when they are just manifesting a particular instance of a general problem in political communication that applies to every group and transcends party or ideology - is obviously just overwhelming.
"Strange new respect" - the giving of it and the incentive structure such possibilities create for influential writers - is, itself, shorthand for a real complicated phenomenon that everyone easily observes and for which there is no better term. The term is only used by the right because the people who pretend to give the new respect have always been all on the left. But like "mind virus", the linguistic pointer maps to something true and real, and criticizing the pointer is literally to miss the point.
*One might guess that slur and slander have a common etymological origin, but they don't, almost like false-cognates within the same language, but then again, English is a hybrid language, so these are like false cognates in the separate language legacies that came to be combined. Slur is apparently more Germanic, from 'slurry', the metaphor being like dirtying something with a splash of watery clay or mud. Slander is more Latin, derives from a relation to 'scandal'.
Still, I suspect that when words with similar sounds and relatable meanings exist in a hybrid language for long, the speakers of the language with tend to use and understand them in a semantically fused way, -as if- they had a common origin. I am unaware of any term in linguistics to describe this state of affairs, and I want to use "virtual common derivation" in the manner of particle physics jargon to describe the ahistorical origin one would intuitively infer as a consequent of subsequent shifts in usage.
I admit to being pretty lazy when it comes to reading most of Dan’s previous posts, but if Arnold links to it, there’s a very good chance I’ll read it. I thought Dan’s post was fantastic. I’m amazed by his assortment of links, the clarity of his writing and his discipline for respectful dialogue. But I do think that Dan can learn to be a more effective intellectual and writer by studying Arnold’s posts. Dan should continue in his own style for most of his posts, influencing other intellectuals, but perhaps he should consider mimicking the brevity and simplicity of Arnold’s posts—for a small fraction of his posts—in order to reach a wider audience. And perhaps label these posts so we don’t have to sort through his longer pieces? This would help the lazy, busy and less philosophically knowledgeable readers in the world gain access to his ideas.
Despite its caustic handling, I really liked the phrase “mind virus” the moment I heard it because it does a lot of work.
Of course, It’s not a real “virus” but fascinating work, hypothesis, and linguistic coinage happened in the mid-1970’s by Richard Dawkins following up on other ideas suggested as early (at least) as Darwin, Huxley, et al.
Of course, later work by Blackmore et al, are particularly notable but I won’t digress anymore here but to say “thanks” for your work in more widely spreading this particular meme regarding “mind viruses”.
Motivated belief-formation is a real thing, a psychological mechanism.
See literature from Homer through Shakespeare to Kazuo Ishiguro. See also histories of wildfires of rumors in collective-belief formation; for example, George Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789). A related phenomenon is the revenge rumor. See P. Bordia et al., “Rumor as revenge in the workplace,” Group & Organization Management 39 (2014), 363–88.
Is some process that always fails, with some process subjects and some people, hopeless?
No. The process works for some people, sometimes.
Both for rational arguments, scams, and rationalizations of not-true arguments.
For those people for whom true rational arguments fail to change their arguably false beliefs, calling such True Believing folk victims of being infected with a mind virus is mostly an alternate way of saying rational arguments with this person on this subject will fail to change beliefs.
It’s a good metaphor, tho not as strong as the new word “meme”, idea / idea fragment.
I’m a Trump supporter who disagrees with Trump about ending the Ukraine war quickly, but I also don’t like Kamala’s forever war, no limits on fraud & corruption to support Ukraine (oligarchs). Political policy and goals are far more important than personal characteristics.
For both Williams and our own AS Kling, it’s not clear that any rational arguments will change their opposition to Trump. That doesn’t mean making the argument is hopeless—in public, there is also the effect on the others hearing the arguments. Even alone with a mind virus infected argument opponent (arguer), the argument can help you organize your own arguments to be more successful with those not so strongly infected.
Believing that men can get pregnant seems like a mind virus to me, and the (too) long screed against that label was interesting but unconvincing.
Classical education included 'rhetoric' as an essential element. Are we just debating and trying to relearn things that have already been known rather than learning genuinely new things?
i be confused. re. ukraine, on one hand holmodor soviets stinky. on other is u.s. gov sticking nose into places it might be more circumspect. boundry buffer etc.. then we got azovs nazi or maybe not. then we get churches being banned a well as elections. (lincoln survived) so i get abit confoozicated.
but will note that putin held back when trump was in.
What works (some times) in an e. e. cummings poem doesn't work in a comment that's supposed to explain something. But then I'm a fan of the clear "classical" style that Steven Pinker advocates in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
oh goodness e dot e dot, i am not worthy of such a compliment. and as to style i had e.b.white ground into my soul such that any coming after could not be compared. although before ' g. orwell' had produced a bit of style guidance. (and how could i be thought a Thinking Person as i IDENTIFY as a troglodyte?)
I think it's worth adding that not people don't always move closer. Groups have recently been taking new positions in opposition to what the opposing group states as their position.
Thomas Hill Green (“widely regarded as the founding and most influential figure in the tradition of British idealism” - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/green/ ) and after Dr. Kling’s post today wondered if it might be possible to cast the debate today as perhaps an extension of tensions extending at least as far back as the reformation? How might Williams’ observation in part 3 of his essay that “cancel culture dynamics characterize ideological communities across the political spectrum and diverse religious groups throughout history” be fleshed out and understood in the light of the reformation? And might it reflect a general tension the contours of which are fluid rather than a fixed set of oppositions between the irrational and the rational?
Let’s start first with what seems to be something of a contradiction in Williams’ claims. “When it comes to popular belief systems people treat as mind viruses, they do not spread via mere contact or ‘exposure’ among hapless victims.” states Williams who then seems to contradict this by then laying out a process by which believers are transformed into fanatics by their social group that, implying that such people are indeed hapless victims of in-group social processes that prevent members from achieving rationality. The solution to this problem, the Lippmann acolyte Williams suggests is that the wise and the good ought to attempt to correct the wrong-thinkers through “rational intervention. For example, you might try to change those features of society that make destructive belief systems highly attractive to people.” We might want to call this ideological framework “Lippmannism” and the people with whom it is concerned in correcting, borrowing from Green for lack of a better label, “the unruly.”
Green’s initial essay covers much the same ground in a different context. In brief, “How was this new consciousness of spiritual freedom and right to be reconciled with submission to institutions which seemed to rest on selfish interest or the acquiescence of the animal nature? How was the dominion of God in the believer’s soul to be adjusted to his dominion in a church which restrained the operations of his spirit, and in a state which only honoured him with the lips? Such was the practical question which the Reformation offered to European society.”
At this point it may be tempting to analogize to historical oppositions and lump Lippmannism in on the side, of Catholic jesuitry versus unruly Protestant individualism, the episcopacy of the Church of England versus the unruly congregationalism of the separatist and independent Puritan sects, with Louis XIV’s dragonnades versus the unruly Hugenot’s personal worship, or with the royalist cavaliers versus the unruly roundhead parliamentarians. But the ever perceptive Green sees a circular dynamism at work:
“A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action; whatever is of other origin is no law for the society whose head is Christ. An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old. Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old, and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s people.
Such a system soon builds again the bondage which it began with destroying. Originating, as we have seen, in the consciousness of a spiritual life which no outward ordinances could adequately express, it hardens this consciousness into an absolute antithesis, false because regarded as absolute, between the law of Christ and the law of the world. The law of Christ, however, must be realised in the world, and thus from this false antithesis there follows by an inexorable affiliation of ideas, a new authority, calling itself spiritual, but binding the soul with ‘secular chains,’ which from the very fact of its sincerity and logical completeness, from its allowing no compromise between the saints and the world, is more heavy than the old. It behoves us to note well these conflicting tendencies to freedom and bondage, often almost inextricably convolved, which puritanism contained within itself. It was the temporary triumph of the one tendency that made the commonwealth a possibility, and the interference of the other that stopped its expansion into permanent life. The one gave puritanism its nobility during its period of weakness while it struggled to dominion; the other made its dominion, once attained, a contradiction in fact which no individual greatness could maintain.”
Might this cycle of recurring bondage be found in Lippmannism as well? One way we might interpret the Lippmannite Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ imposition of collective punishment upon the Brazilian people who use Twitter (which in war would be a violation of Article 33 of Geneva IV) as perhaps an example of the realization of the internal contradictions of Lippmannism.
The great Guizot was a master scholar and expositor of the dynamics of such tensions and he perhaps summed it up best, “Progress, with resistance.” As with other tensions, at some points in times and circumstances Lippmannism will be a force of progress, and other times the unruly will be the ones to advance it.
(1) I often find that applying logic, especially identifying logical fallacies, to political discussions helps in arguing against nonsensical points of view. Or at least it tends to end debate, I'd like to hope because the other person realizes they've gone down a rabbit hole. The most common logical fallacy I see is "tu quoque," commonly called "what-aboutism." As a generic example, "Trump violated the law," to which the counterargument is often "What about Biden and the laptop," or some similar irrelevance. That person A did something wrong is no excuse for person B to behave badly in some other way. Other common fallacies are ad hominem arguments (usually the fallback position when someone really has lost the debate), red herrings, false dichotomies, and fallacies of composition. This toolkit comes in quite handy when in a discussion with someone infected with a mental virus.
(2) In particular situations, mental viruses can be very costly, so maintaining rational views can be the opposite - quite profitable. Trading in financial markets comes to mind, although I'd caution with the old adage that markets can remain irrational longer than your capital can finance a contrarian trade. The other is poker. Playing poker against someone who has wishful thinking about the odds of filling their hand is very profitable although, again, luck can overrule logic for many hands in a row. Poker players with mental viruses are few and far between; they tend not to last very long as players.
one might note that whataboutisim involves the sitting president being in the pay of foreign governments, leading to policies not so helpful to the national interest. and allowing his bagman son to keep records unsecured.
The problem demonstrated by the Ukraine example is that the polarized positions of political tribes begin with a priori assumptions about issues that make critical analysis futile for many. For these people, it is not a question of whether or not supporting Ukraine is worth it for the U.S. for X or Y reasons, which is how students present policy resolutions in high school and college debate teams. Instead, both tribes view one side or the other as axiomatically evil, so supporting aid for one side or negotiations with the other is considered an evil action by extension. There are probably some issues that are not as emotionally charged. Williams is right that people can be reasonably convinced about issues not related to the culture war, which Ukraine has become by proxy. When reading a Twitter thread about a hot-button issue, however, it seems implausible that any reasonable person could expect to persuade the tribal politics addicts who spend their time engulfed in their bubbles.
William’s arguments struck me as unconvincing when I first read them a few days ago, and even less convincing on rereading. It seems like he is almost intentionally misunderstanding the use of “mind virus”, ignoring the fact it’s use in “appealing yet ultimately deleterious modes or thinking or ideologies” vs “misinformation “ is different, for instance. The notion that certain types of ideas keep reappearing or are nearly impossible to shake despite evidence due to the idea’s tendency to fit exactly the kind of motivated reasoning/internal biases humans tend to have seems… obviously true. It doesn’t rely on truth being accessible, but rather that certain forms of error are really easy to fall into, humans have tendencies to do so, and those can all be present in certain idea sets in such a way as to be nearly impossible to shake off if one accepts them, and reasoning out of it is extremely difficult no matter how much evidence is presented.
That isn’t to say that how one deals with such viruses is obvious; we have screwed up dealing with literal viruses many different times. That does not change the fact that they exist as a useful category to understand things.
The best man at my wedding and lifelong friend was a very normal and successful person.
The other day I was talking to him and invited him to meet us halfway between our two families at one of those indoor water parks that the kids like.
"Sorry, we don't do anything indoors."
The reason for this is that they are still masking and isolating over COVID. The wife drives this more than he, but he's on board enough. They won't take the child to any indoor activities, still, as of a month ago.
I don't know how to characterize this other than a "mind virus". My friend has heard the *arguements* for why what he's doing is insane, including from me. But they don't work. Nor can I write it off as his being "mentally ill" like some blue haired Palestinian protestor. He was perfectly normal before this. And he definitely didn't have a "victim mentality" in his personal life, he was an optimistic go getter.
The Palestinian stuff actually is useful here. He's very worried, being a Jew. But when I tried to link Palestinian support to BLM and how Jews had become "white", he just crimestopped. BLM was a noble and pure attempt to help the victim, but Jews are the victims, not the Palestinians. He just doesn't "get it." Like his brain just bugs out and he can't understand what's going on, but he knows it shouldn't change his believes in any way. It's just some weird thing he hasn't figured out yet, maybe it will just go away if BiBi goes or something.
I could list another similar situation with a close friend from Vietnam who now lives in LA and whose wife went to Harvard. Again, nothing like the kind of warped personality you would expect. No previous signs of insanity before 2020. Then all of a sudden, boom!
Hell, I could list my own mother. She's not masking at least, but she was for two years and doesn't appear to have leaned anything (still an intense news watcher who believes what she's told).
I just don't think argument works. I think when people publish op-eds they are maybe trying to nudge and re-direct their own side. "This is what we believe now, we have always been at war with East Asia." It's how you let people know one day to hug someone in Chinatown and another to hide in their homes. But its not meant to argue, its meant to instruct and coordinate.
Very interesting comment.
I probably about 90% agree with you. I just think that when you write “I just don't think argument works.”, you’re being too extreme in the other direction.
It’s the old “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time”.
But it’s also that for most people, there is a time delay before the argument “works” even for the some of the people some of the time.
Perhaps not unlike why advertising works best when the message is repeated many times.
There are very few of us who are willing to change our opinions on a dime. I was politically left of center (and uninterested in politics) when I graduated college, and still into my early 30s. Took me about 7 years to go from there to full-fledged conservative-leaning libertarian (or libertarian-leaning comservative, idk). It took 9/11 to move me from being moderately on the right politically to being fully on the right (imperfect though the political right is, the political left was noticeably inferior even in late 2001, and of course has gotten *much* worse in the 23 years since).
Impact = Time * Severity
Four years of isolating your child from living life is a pretty big combination of time and severity. These aren't abstract political opinions that don't matter, they are how he's living his life. The guy has his own sky diving license and he won't let his kid be a kid over the flu.
Just last week I tried to talk a friend into finally doing IVF. He's held out seven years of infertility because "the church says it's wrong." Now his wife is almost 40. Times up. Still couldn't get through to him.
I’m not denying your claims re: “most of the people most of the time”; I *endorse* them.
I object only when you go to the other extreme of “all of the people, all of the time, permanently”.
*Most* people are neither that dumb nor that smart.
Most people don’t change most of their opinions quickly (no doubt some, especially these days on the left, will change specific opinions when signaled - mind-virus-like - to do so by the elites at the top of their coalition).
Although I don't buy everything that Gad Saad is selling, one thing I admire about Gad is that he is among the minority of prominent Jews whose views represent a refreshing change from those of knee-jerk liberal Ashkenazi (?) American Jews like your friend and his neurotic Jewish (?) wife. Of course, it helps that Gad is a Jew of Lebanese/Syrian descent who fled Lebanon with his family due to the Lebanese civil war, and he has firsthand experience with Islamic Jew hatred. Sounds like your friend is a lost cause. I agree that continued support for black causes by liberal Jews is mystifying given the lack of reciprocity, and indeed, the apparent antisemitism of a significant segment of the targets of their compassion.
I wonder if people just don't have quite enough to occupy their minds/time. I know they have places to be, stuff to buy, plans to make - everybody's driving around all the time - so I don't mean in that sense of having nothing on the calendar - but nothing truly demanding?
For both limited time and a lot of other very important factors, it's simply impossible to independently scrutinize and verify all but a tiny fraction of beliefs, even the subset of ones the proper application of which have a direct and significant impact on one's personal welfare. There is no alternative to loads of epistemic shortcuts, heuristics, and having to simply trust certain makers of certain claims and hope that you can rely on various cultural mechanisms and social institutions to possess an "epistemic security system" resistant to hacking and which tends to weed out a little error and bias things in the direction of better accuracy over time. In the case of major live disputes, it's hard to blame people from making their best guess and following the implied course, though often there is a common psychological tendency to forget that initial uncertainty and subjectivity and unjustifiably jump into overconfident insistence on universal objective truth.
McCloskey has argued that a shift in cultural attitude that assigned higher social status to merchants, businessmen, and entrepreneurs was a key development that enabled the economic takeoff of certain European countries in the late Renaissance and then period of early Industrial Revolution. Putting aside the question if whether that claim is accurate, what we need today is a similar attitude shift with regards to claims, which lowers the status of claims made by those without conspicuously observable skin in the game - that they are living those beliefs and stand to win or lose big if those beliefs are true or false respectively.
As far as I can tell, lawyers run everything and have categorically given themselves skin in every game.
You're joking. There are no greater examples of the lawyers who run things reducing their skin in the game to zero than the prosecutors and judges who let criminals run free in neighborhoods they'll never live in. If they were forced to live in the violent crime hot spots, then they would have their skin in the game, and obviously run things a lot differently.
No, they've made the maintenance of lawlessness and disorder their livelihood and bailiwick.
I think "skin in the game" in the sense Handle is using it means "has something to lose". You are using it to mean "has something to gain".
Kind of the entire problem is that both of you are right.
And perhaps relatedly, it causes their brains to atrophy? Can't underestimate that people may be getting dumber.
I was once very struck by a video clip I watched - this was back when Bernie Sanders was briefly a force in politics. Ezra Klein. Now I think Ezra Klein was a fairly young man at that point. Just a few years beyond whatever Ivy League school or schools he attended. He was doing pretty successfully, though, to land an interview with Bernie at his peak.
Bernie said something or other about mass immigration being a "Koch Brothers conspiracy". Or "what the Koch Brothers want", or something. Which obviously aligns with my view lol, but that's not important.
What struck me was that Klein was shocked - wait, wut? What do you mean by that?!
I thought that was so strange. I mean, I went to a state school so I have never had much interaction with the brightest-and-best-in-class but it astonished me that someone who had gotten to that media position (interviewing a presidential candidate, or soon-to-be candidate) would not have heard that talking point before, and even if not - would not have been able to think quickly enough on his feet to understand it nonetheless. I mean, it wasn't subtle.
"Now I think Ezra Klein was a fairly young man at that point. Just a few years beyond whatever Ivy League school or schools he attended."
Ezra Klein (in)famously attended UC Santa Barbara to start, transferred to UCLA where he graduated, and has never attended any prestige/elite schools.
In the early blogging days I had an extremely minor blog but on a couple of occasions got links/notice from Matthew Yglesias when I'd point out how incredibly dumb, naive, or ill educated Ezra Klein was compared to Yglesias among the annoying leftist set. Matt was subtle enough that he never called out those parts of what he was linking, but that was the only common element. I was highly amused.
Klein has always seemed strong evidence for looks preference helping a career, Yglesias for someone overcoming it with greater talent.
Gotcha.
When it comes to persuasion in US politics, many of the dynamics we see are because the people have no direct role or stake in either the process or the outcome. You opened the "Three Languages" book with a comparison of your experience on a jury with your experience with larger political discourse. The major difference here is that the jury deliberates on an unmediated exercise of power. Only in unusual circumstances will a court set aside a jury's verdict. Usually, when normal citizens (and even individual politicians) discuss politics, they are not doing something much different from yelling at the TV. The actual exercise of power over an issue with the Ukraine war is highly mediated, and the news media is often not the most important medium, but rather money and relationships are.
So e.g. the decision to go to war in Ukraine was made in secret, pushed this way and that way by secret diplomacy, secret spying, secret transmissions of money, and the very occasional barely-perceived news media article. At no time was this issue sent to the people in an unmediated fashion as it was in Thucydidean Athens when the assembly had to decide whether or not to send the military to Syracuse. By the time the issue went to Congress, it was accompanied by a high pressure money campaign, of which the most important part of the campaign was likely money and not the medium of persuasion through words. There are other ways to persuade people than by words, such as by paying them off. Even in the Thucydides example, the author notes that many of the Athenians in the assembly voted for the doomed expedition because they expected to make a lot of money doing it and heavily discounted the words of the opposing orator because of it. So too in our world.
The most popular single polling issue in this election is government prices of prescription drugs. Its in every single democratic campaign ad spend.
I work in the industry. My takeaway is:
1) The government negotiated higher, not lower, net prices for the whole basket.
2) The IRA changes dramatically increased, rather then decreased, cost to the government.
To cover these facts up the IRA contained "premium stabilization" to increase the direct subsidy to cover up any increase in bids. The original CBO score was based on an assumption about what the direct subsidy would be. Now that it's higher it is going to cost a lot more then the CBO said, but the member will never see that and the media will never talk about it. Further, CMS came in with a "demo" that lowered premiums $15+ essentially by fiat at taxpayer expense, including a lot of other sweeteners for the insurance companies. Some Republicans protested that this was an illegal bribe to cover up the IRAs fuck up before the election, but nothing will come of it. Do they want to be "responsible" for premiums increasing?
So tell me, how would "the people" rationally debate the merits of this legislation? What odds do they have? What odds does "elite human capital" have? Tyler Cowan has spoken a lot of this issue, most of it stupid and full of lies.
The people's representatives ostensibly "debated" it with the aid of their staffers (who are paid like fruit pickers) and industry lobbyists (paid well). The well paid ones instructed the people's representatives to dump government money on their clients. The honor paid to the people was to call it the "Inflation Reduction Act" to show that everyone involved was taking public concerns seriously and respectfully.
Elite human capital got what it wanted, which is to externalize their costs onto the government and ordinary employees.
Certainly lobbyists got what they wanted.
But if you polled the other 99.9% of EHC that didn't have a direct stake* in the outcome, they did not get what they wanted. Like I don't think your average prog wonk, let alone their readers, would be happy to learn the the IRA was a scam that did the opposite of what they were celebrating.
It might be fair to say they don't care, they only care about the dopamine rush of "doing something". But that simply makes them the same as the plebs, and means that nobody looking out for truth is at the wheel.
*Hell I'm directly benefiting from this big time and I don't even want it. Most people I work with are disgusted and would gladly have preferred a different outcome.
Imagine the reaction of a very smart but also naive lover of high-literature upon hearing that, after having lobbied for such an outcome for many years, "they" had finally given the green light to the project of adapting one of their favorite novels into a film. "Wonderful!" The reaction should be "Terrible! They'll ruin it, like they have ruined every other similar attempt at cinematic adaptation of high literature." They should have known better to even have tried to lobby for it in the first place, but probably they don't even watch movies, they only felt it would be cool for there to -be- a movie, maybe on a subconscious level they think it would raise the status of of people with their tastes in authors and literature - but consciously they didn't think it through.
So it's "wonderful" news only because they don't know better, aren't even aware of their problem because they don't realize the depth of their obliviousness and ignorance about "the industry".
Now imagine their crushing disappointment and even sense of betrayal when they watch the crap that comes out of the end of our contemporary entertainment industry's digestive system when it tries to eat a high-brow book. It can barely eat -comic- books. And what comes out of an adaptation is not an attempt to be true to the author's vision and intensions but to include the unmolested only to extent optimal to achieve the industry's business purpose, which trumps all other purposes. Moral: If you place your innocent daughter in the care of a pimp, don't act so shocked at what happens next.
Dan Williams offers up a straw man for the term mind virus, by sharing that people can be persuaded by rational arguments. The term mind virus in the contexts I understand is that someone is using a proxy for rationalization, based on a mosaic of feelings. Yes, people can be persuaded rationally, but logical fallacies and misrepresenting data/reality do not fit in the rational box.
I mentioned this in his post, but it seems worth mentioning here for consideration. A few of his rhetorical flourishes did give the impression that he was throwing out social contagion along with "mind virus," but other, more specific claims imply keeping the former and dispatching of the latter. This relates to his other posts about epistemic vigilance. It's not that we can expect (what we consider to be) rational argument to be effective, but rather we can expect what is effective to be more rational than we think it is from a distance.
It's worse than that; he missed the point at the very start but just kept writing.
Really, all he does is help to better -define- "mind virus" by offering a more complete and technically mechanistic description of the phenomenon of social psychology of which "mind virus" is - duh - merely convenient shorthand for ease of communication especially across tiers of intellectual sophistication.
It's deployed in a derogatory manner because accepting false, irrational claims without scrutiny for bad social (i.e., 'tribal', 'status-imitating') reasons and which, when implemented individually and politically, have terrible personal and anti-social consequences is -worthy- of disparagement! He says 'slur', but this is misleading, because he means "unjustified, empty slur", as if it were actionable slander* which it is not, in the sense of truth being an absolute defense. "Luxury Believer" is the same idea as "infected with the mind virus", but not a 'slur' in circulation because no one uses it: it sounds clumsy and makes you wince just trying to say it.
What are we to make of right-of-center intellectuals who like to spend their time attacking -mere shorthand- the few times some novel political coinage actually starts to get some traction? "But the low-brows who hear it will think crudely and won't consistently use the term in a hedged, verbose manner displaying a full appreciation of the subtleties and ... blah blah blah." Ok, propose some better shorthand (narrator: they can't, and anyway, just want to criticize.)
Do they not appreciate the irony of criticizing people for adopting cognitive and linguistic patterns for social reasons without sufficient basis when the very thing these people are trying to do is use a simple metaphorical name to communicate that VERY critique! Are metaphors no longer allowed? Is social contagion out the window because not contagious in exactly the same manner as a contagious respiratory infection, or what?
"But to use this term is to accuse people of believing in ideas while not having rigorously rational reasons and logical arguments well-supported by credible evidence, but, in fact, several intellectual academics have provided these explanations and ... " Yeah, just like their analogous predecessors have always provided bad word-salad rationalizations for every previous bogus mind-virus, often with the consequence of catastrophic levels of social fallout. We can both simultaneously argue the validity of those rationales, accepting certain claims merely provisionally for the sake of argument, while not having to actually play dumb and accept commonly parroted cover stories as the equivalent to "having good reasons one has independently scrutinized" instead of, you know, "contracting the mind virus by swallowing everything my friends say because it is said by my friends."
Remember some of that crowd going on in similarly Ackhtualllllly!-meme fashion about how Rufo's use of "CRT" or "intersectionality" wasn't exactly and precisely mapped to how some academic attempted to define it 40 years ago ... or even of "woke" before that?
Ordinary people need words and phrases to describe complicated - but real and directly observed and experiences - phenomenon of modern political social psychology. Every time one is found in a process for rhetoric akin to artistic discovery that hits the mark particularly well, here come the right-leaning scolds to wag their fingers.
Look, I get it, it's terrible tough and lonely to be an intellectual on the right. The temptation to get "strange new respect" and punch down on the non-intellectuals on one's own side - even when they are just manifesting a particular instance of a general problem in political communication that applies to every group and transcends party or ideology - is obviously just overwhelming.
"Strange new respect" - the giving of it and the incentive structure such possibilities create for influential writers - is, itself, shorthand for a real complicated phenomenon that everyone easily observes and for which there is no better term. The term is only used by the right because the people who pretend to give the new respect have always been all on the left. But like "mind virus", the linguistic pointer maps to something true and real, and criticizing the pointer is literally to miss the point.
*One might guess that slur and slander have a common etymological origin, but they don't, almost like false-cognates within the same language, but then again, English is a hybrid language, so these are like false cognates in the separate language legacies that came to be combined. Slur is apparently more Germanic, from 'slurry', the metaphor being like dirtying something with a splash of watery clay or mud. Slander is more Latin, derives from a relation to 'scandal'.
Still, I suspect that when words with similar sounds and relatable meanings exist in a hybrid language for long, the speakers of the language with tend to use and understand them in a semantically fused way, -as if- they had a common origin. I am unaware of any term in linguistics to describe this state of affairs, and I want to use "virtual common derivation" in the manner of particle physics jargon to describe the ahistorical origin one would intuitively infer as a consequent of subsequent shifts in usage.
I admit to being pretty lazy when it comes to reading most of Dan’s previous posts, but if Arnold links to it, there’s a very good chance I’ll read it. I thought Dan’s post was fantastic. I’m amazed by his assortment of links, the clarity of his writing and his discipline for respectful dialogue. But I do think that Dan can learn to be a more effective intellectual and writer by studying Arnold’s posts. Dan should continue in his own style for most of his posts, influencing other intellectuals, but perhaps he should consider mimicking the brevity and simplicity of Arnold’s posts—for a small fraction of his posts—in order to reach a wider audience. And perhaps label these posts so we don’t have to sort through his longer pieces? This would help the lazy, busy and less philosophically knowledgeable readers in the world gain access to his ideas.
Despite its caustic handling, I really liked the phrase “mind virus” the moment I heard it because it does a lot of work.
Of course, It’s not a real “virus” but fascinating work, hypothesis, and linguistic coinage happened in the mid-1970’s by Richard Dawkins following up on other ideas suggested as early (at least) as Darwin, Huxley, et al.
Of course, later work by Blackmore et al, are particularly notable but I won’t digress anymore here but to say “thanks” for your work in more widely spreading this particular meme regarding “mind viruses”.
I would love to have a group. I can only imagine how great that would be.
At least we have a virtual one. Not as good as one in the physical world but it's something.
When I see smart people writing rational arguments criticising outcomes that are motivated by emotional reasons, I think what a a waste of talent.
Motivated belief-formation is a real thing, a psychological mechanism.
See literature from Homer through Shakespeare to Kazuo Ishiguro. See also histories of wildfires of rumors in collective-belief formation; for example, George Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789). A related phenomenon is the revenge rumor. See P. Bordia et al., “Rumor as revenge in the workplace,” Group & Organization Management 39 (2014), 363–88.
Is some process that always fails, with some process subjects and some people, hopeless?
No. The process works for some people, sometimes.
Both for rational arguments, scams, and rationalizations of not-true arguments.
For those people for whom true rational arguments fail to change their arguably false beliefs, calling such True Believing folk victims of being infected with a mind virus is mostly an alternate way of saying rational arguments with this person on this subject will fail to change beliefs.
It’s a good metaphor, tho not as strong as the new word “meme”, idea / idea fragment.
I’m a Trump supporter who disagrees with Trump about ending the Ukraine war quickly, but I also don’t like Kamala’s forever war, no limits on fraud & corruption to support Ukraine (oligarchs). Political policy and goals are far more important than personal characteristics.
For both Williams and our own AS Kling, it’s not clear that any rational arguments will change their opposition to Trump. That doesn’t mean making the argument is hopeless—in public, there is also the effect on the others hearing the arguments. Even alone with a mind virus infected argument opponent (arguer), the argument can help you organize your own arguments to be more successful with those not so strongly infected.
Believing that men can get pregnant seems like a mind virus to me, and the (too) long screed against that label was interesting but unconvincing.
Classical education included 'rhetoric' as an essential element. Are we just debating and trying to relearn things that have already been known rather than learning genuinely new things?
i be confused. re. ukraine, on one hand holmodor soviets stinky. on other is u.s. gov sticking nose into places it might be more circumspect. boundry buffer etc.. then we got azovs nazi or maybe not. then we get churches being banned a well as elections. (lincoln survived) so i get abit confoozicated.
but will note that putin held back when trump was in.
What works (some times) in an e. e. cummings poem doesn't work in a comment that's supposed to explain something. But then I'm a fan of the clear "classical" style that Steven Pinker advocates in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
oh goodness e dot e dot, i am not worthy of such a compliment. and as to style i had e.b.white ground into my soul such that any coming after could not be compared. although before ' g. orwell' had produced a bit of style guidance. (and how could i be thought a Thinking Person as i IDENTIFY as a troglodyte?)
you nailed it.
I think it's worth adding that not people don't always move closer. Groups have recently been taking new positions in opposition to what the opposing group states as their position.
Happened to be reading Four Lectures on the English Revolution (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/63280/pg63280-images.html ) last night by
Thomas Hill Green (“widely regarded as the founding and most influential figure in the tradition of British idealism” - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/green/ ) and after Dr. Kling’s post today wondered if it might be possible to cast the debate today as perhaps an extension of tensions extending at least as far back as the reformation? How might Williams’ observation in part 3 of his essay that “cancel culture dynamics characterize ideological communities across the political spectrum and diverse religious groups throughout history” be fleshed out and understood in the light of the reformation? And might it reflect a general tension the contours of which are fluid rather than a fixed set of oppositions between the irrational and the rational?
Let’s start first with what seems to be something of a contradiction in Williams’ claims. “When it comes to popular belief systems people treat as mind viruses, they do not spread via mere contact or ‘exposure’ among hapless victims.” states Williams who then seems to contradict this by then laying out a process by which believers are transformed into fanatics by their social group that, implying that such people are indeed hapless victims of in-group social processes that prevent members from achieving rationality. The solution to this problem, the Lippmann acolyte Williams suggests is that the wise and the good ought to attempt to correct the wrong-thinkers through “rational intervention. For example, you might try to change those features of society that make destructive belief systems highly attractive to people.” We might want to call this ideological framework “Lippmannism” and the people with whom it is concerned in correcting, borrowing from Green for lack of a better label, “the unruly.”
Green’s initial essay covers much the same ground in a different context. In brief, “How was this new consciousness of spiritual freedom and right to be reconciled with submission to institutions which seemed to rest on selfish interest or the acquiescence of the animal nature? How was the dominion of God in the believer’s soul to be adjusted to his dominion in a church which restrained the operations of his spirit, and in a state which only honoured him with the lips? Such was the practical question which the Reformation offered to European society.”
At this point it may be tempting to analogize to historical oppositions and lump Lippmannism in on the side, of Catholic jesuitry versus unruly Protestant individualism, the episcopacy of the Church of England versus the unruly congregationalism of the separatist and independent Puritan sects, with Louis XIV’s dragonnades versus the unruly Hugenot’s personal worship, or with the royalist cavaliers versus the unruly roundhead parliamentarians. But the ever perceptive Green sees a circular dynamism at work:
“A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action; whatever is of other origin is no law for the society whose head is Christ. An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old. Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old, and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s people.
Such a system soon builds again the bondage which it began with destroying. Originating, as we have seen, in the consciousness of a spiritual life which no outward ordinances could adequately express, it hardens this consciousness into an absolute antithesis, false because regarded as absolute, between the law of Christ and the law of the world. The law of Christ, however, must be realised in the world, and thus from this false antithesis there follows by an inexorable affiliation of ideas, a new authority, calling itself spiritual, but binding the soul with ‘secular chains,’ which from the very fact of its sincerity and logical completeness, from its allowing no compromise between the saints and the world, is more heavy than the old. It behoves us to note well these conflicting tendencies to freedom and bondage, often almost inextricably convolved, which puritanism contained within itself. It was the temporary triumph of the one tendency that made the commonwealth a possibility, and the interference of the other that stopped its expansion into permanent life. The one gave puritanism its nobility during its period of weakness while it struggled to dominion; the other made its dominion, once attained, a contradiction in fact which no individual greatness could maintain.”
Might this cycle of recurring bondage be found in Lippmannism as well? One way we might interpret the Lippmannite Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ imposition of collective punishment upon the Brazilian people who use Twitter (which in war would be a violation of Article 33 of Geneva IV) as perhaps an example of the realization of the internal contradictions of Lippmannism.
The great Guizot was a master scholar and expositor of the dynamics of such tensions and he perhaps summed it up best, “Progress, with resistance.” As with other tensions, at some points in times and circumstances Lippmannism will be a force of progress, and other times the unruly will be the ones to advance it.
Two comments.
(1) I often find that applying logic, especially identifying logical fallacies, to political discussions helps in arguing against nonsensical points of view. Or at least it tends to end debate, I'd like to hope because the other person realizes they've gone down a rabbit hole. The most common logical fallacy I see is "tu quoque," commonly called "what-aboutism." As a generic example, "Trump violated the law," to which the counterargument is often "What about Biden and the laptop," or some similar irrelevance. That person A did something wrong is no excuse for person B to behave badly in some other way. Other common fallacies are ad hominem arguments (usually the fallback position when someone really has lost the debate), red herrings, false dichotomies, and fallacies of composition. This toolkit comes in quite handy when in a discussion with someone infected with a mental virus.
(2) In particular situations, mental viruses can be very costly, so maintaining rational views can be the opposite - quite profitable. Trading in financial markets comes to mind, although I'd caution with the old adage that markets can remain irrational longer than your capital can finance a contrarian trade. The other is poker. Playing poker against someone who has wishful thinking about the odds of filling their hand is very profitable although, again, luck can overrule logic for many hands in a row. Poker players with mental viruses are few and far between; they tend not to last very long as players.
one might note that whataboutisim involves the sitting president being in the pay of foreign governments, leading to policies not so helpful to the national interest. and allowing his bagman son to keep records unsecured.
The problem demonstrated by the Ukraine example is that the polarized positions of political tribes begin with a priori assumptions about issues that make critical analysis futile for many. For these people, it is not a question of whether or not supporting Ukraine is worth it for the U.S. for X or Y reasons, which is how students present policy resolutions in high school and college debate teams. Instead, both tribes view one side or the other as axiomatically evil, so supporting aid for one side or negotiations with the other is considered an evil action by extension. There are probably some issues that are not as emotionally charged. Williams is right that people can be reasonably convinced about issues not related to the culture war, which Ukraine has become by proxy. When reading a Twitter thread about a hot-button issue, however, it seems implausible that any reasonable person could expect to persuade the tribal politics addicts who spend their time engulfed in their bubbles.
William’s arguments struck me as unconvincing when I first read them a few days ago, and even less convincing on rereading. It seems like he is almost intentionally misunderstanding the use of “mind virus”, ignoring the fact it’s use in “appealing yet ultimately deleterious modes or thinking or ideologies” vs “misinformation “ is different, for instance. The notion that certain types of ideas keep reappearing or are nearly impossible to shake despite evidence due to the idea’s tendency to fit exactly the kind of motivated reasoning/internal biases humans tend to have seems… obviously true. It doesn’t rely on truth being accessible, but rather that certain forms of error are really easy to fall into, humans have tendencies to do so, and those can all be present in certain idea sets in such a way as to be nearly impossible to shake off if one accepts them, and reasoning out of it is extremely difficult no matter how much evidence is presented.
That isn’t to say that how one deals with such viruses is obvious; we have screwed up dealing with literal viruses many different times. That does not change the fact that they exist as a useful category to understand things.