Freddie deBoer encounters the moral dyad; Tanner Greer on social strife; Justin Smith on the surveillance state; Yuval Levin and Balaji on left-right paradoxes
I would love a Networked State discussion. I read Zeihan through a Balaji lens. You might have a better chance of getting Balaji to join, though time zones are brutal when he's in Singapore.
Bit late to the party, but per my generational framing I am less concerned with convincing the wokes than with the people who will become wokes for lack of better alternatives. This is a problem not just of the moment, but a generation into the future.
“[P]eople with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.
I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed. [...] The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door. [...] [T]here is massive demand for housing in [car-centric suburbia] form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.
---
Anomaly's post highlights how Network State avoids discussing hard issues and focuses on such exciting but relatively unimportant stuff as SSO for network-government services, blockchains, and branding. In Balaj's own words, "it’s an open question as to how to deal with crime in a network state"! Indeed. I might add that so is dealing with predation from outside criminals and with competition and coercion from nation-states. For example, schools are a very important issue, but whereas USA allows home schooling, many European countries don't, and there isn't much a network state going to be able to do about it, it will simply have to advise members to move out of Germany.
I would be very interested in doing a zoom discussion on Balaji’s book. Both for many of the items you’ve excerpted here over the last week, and his very pro-crypto viewpoint. His thinking on these topics is usually very coherent even if he may turn out to be wrong in some of the details.
Greer reaching back to the past for continuity with mob dynamics speaks well to a better diagnosis of the present than complaints about new technology. This seems to be the Martin Gurri world of the present, the mob plus the new tech. There is an aspect that may be missing that you have been talking towards a lot lately with talk of personality disorders and psychology. This is where I would like to think Haidt as a psychologist is trying to speak towards. Christopher Lasch died before social media and his work The Culture of Narcissism, despite being laid atop an outdated bed of Freudian Psychoanalysis, still seems highly relevant here. What is social media in all its forms, but an incentive for more narcissism. The performative image cultivation and dopamine hits from validation from outside oneself are an incentive for more narcissistic behavior from everyone, even if we are not actually creating more narcissists.
‘They may argue that poor Black children cannot escape the influence of their environment, but they teach their own kids that they are the guarantors of their own fate.’
I wonder.
Because the parents of Black children slavishly (I know) vote Democrat and those Black children will grow up to do the same, whereas the parents of White children wisely vote Republican (go DeSantis) and those White children will grow up to do likewise?
No, it's not that. Indeed, there is no real hypocritical contradiction of the sort that Freddie imagines himself to be pointing out (ironic in a way since he identifies unironically as a 'Communist' and this was one of the circular reasoning paradoxes that was a criticism of Marxist theory - who decides and acts vs who is socially and historically determined and thus acted upon - and which early Marxists had to counter).
The way progressives have squared this circle and rationalized moral dyad thinking forever is the same old panacea technique of using 'privilege' as the critical distinguishing factor. Those with 'privilege', being unburdened by oppression which suppress their innate potential, have the socially special ability to experience the full spectrum of their humanity and express and use all the higher human faculties such as free will, independent judgment, and in general the degree of autonomy that makes it appropriate to apply concepts like personal responsibility, culpability, liability, and so forth. So, if you are privileged and have a privileged child, society allows them to be fully human, so of course it makes sense to teach them the patterns of thought appropriate to that higher form of human development and maturity.
On the other hand, those without privilege are oppressed victims who cannot be expected under such disability to transcend the kind of behaviors that are all excusable from the perspective of sympathy or empathy as being the best any of us would do to get by under such unjustly limiting circumstances. It's not reasonable to hold such people to the essential normative foundations of ordered liberty, because they are not free, and not capable, on their own, of responsible exercise of freedom. Just like 'incompetence to stand trial' - as with children or the senile - is a general defense against liability.
It depends. It seems to me to be about half true, and different categories of attitudes range on the spectrum from "practically set in stone as a teenager" to staying quite flexible and plastic into old age (though, an additional wrinkle, so to speak, is that when older people change their minds on something they often also deceive themselves into thinking they always thought that way.)
What seems to determine the current flexibility of one's views is how uncorrelated they are from one's personal interests. The less something really 'matters' and potentially interferes with one's welfare later on, the more stubborn about it people become. The more it still matters, the more one starts to bend in the wind.
Pressure on then lifted means the views of youth. Pressure off then on means "growing up", or what often happens to many social views when young and single women and men become moms and dads and start seeing the world through the very different lens of the best interests of their children, or as another example: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
For example, take a look in the difference in political views and party supported for women who are otherwise similarly situated except for being single and childless on the one hand, or married moms on the other. It's quite stark! It's impossible to reconcile such big gaps with the "fixed at youth" claim, unless one tries to assume a reversal of the direction of causation, which is objectively false. What this implies as regards policies designed to support "strategic shaping of the electorate" I leave as an exercise for the reader.
So, when you are a teenager, your tastes in popular music are to a large degree influenced by what you perceive to be popular and preferred by the higher status people in your reference social group. That's because as a teenager, signaling that one has these tastes in music is one of the classic ways to socialize as fodder for conversation, build bonds, and win the favor of members of the group. And those considerations are felt to have extremely critical importance at that age.
But then one gets older and established in one's relationships and the role of music preferences in this regard is profoundly diminished. Since a change in your music preferences is unlikely to benefit you in any way, you will stick to your guns until your dying day.
That's "Pressure On then Pressure Off = Fixed"
On the other hand, consider the everyday observation that teenagers will pick up on which political views are elite and high status (i.e., progressive, i.e., childish, utopian, insane) on things like housing, family, schooling, taxation, the merits of regulation by expert bureaucrats, crime, the workability of public transportation in America, etc. and then, once they grow up, get married, have kids, have to earn a living, tend to the best interests of their kids, maybe try to manage people or run a business, many of them magically experience very profound changes of heart. True, this is not often in their stated opinions or how they would vote or answer polls (and beware those studies which rely on such answers), but revealed by their often contradictory personal behaviors.
When they were teens, preferences in political ideas about, say, crime and punishment, were no more consequential than preference in tastes about music. And they were influenced to adopt those fashionable opinions for more or less the same social reasons, because there was no real opportunity to conform one's real-world choices and behaviors to those idealistic tenets because there was no risk of negative personal consequences that would mitigate the pressure of the social incentive.
But when they grew up, suddenly they were faced with the actual responsibility of making high-stakes decisions correctly, that is, in line with their other interests, not just the regard and esteem of their what their peers thought a decade prior. And to the extent those ideas conflict with reality in a way they can't paper over with their affluence, they bend quite often. The transition is of course eased to large degree by the fact that one's reference social group is (or, perhaps more accurately, was) transitioning at more or less that same time, and that more than a few of them will hint and signal that they have come to some new realizations about what's important in life, yadda yadda, or signal-boost Socially Acceptable Excuses rationalizing behaviors that are flatly inconsistent with their professed ideals.
This is "Pressure Off then Pressure On = Flexibility".
Now, I think what Greer is getting at is, to put it kind of crudely, "The Struggle Is Real", in the particular way experience and felt by currently young and recently young Americans. And he should know, he's pretty young. To be clear, I'm not ribbing him there: I have a lot of esteem and admiration for Greer who is wise, read, and accomplished well beyond his years. And being young means he hears about and knows from personal experience the kind of problems and chronic, seemingly insurmountable difficulties that young people face.
And, one way or another, common sources of intense stress, despair, hopelessness, and disillusionment have a way of coming to fore and taking over democratic politics, especially after a few cycles of, ahem, "demographic turnover".
But here we get into trouble. It's not actually all that hard for non-progressive politicians and intellectuals to speak to these interests and concerns and come up with purported 'solutions' to them as part of some political platform or program. The problem is that there are a million bogus 'solutions' that get the whole diagnosis and prescription wrong, some of the cures are much worse than the disease or even fatal (see: real communism everywhere it is tried), and that there is no correlation between the democratic allure and electoral viability of proposed political solutions and the likelihood of any of them actually doing more good than harm about the targeted problems.
Twitter and other social media is pretty bad stuff, but one thing it is good for is a cure for anyone suffering from excessive democratic optimism. Don't even get me started on the New York Times comment section. For example, if one looks at the most popular views about any particular contemporary economic issue, one is practically always left with low single digits of comments that reflect any semblance whatsoever of literacy of basic economic concepts, and one will always find a whole lot of "the evil rich are responsible for this, so take from them and give to me, er, I mean, us good folks."
So the trouble is that one can always speak to the problems of the youth by going full Hugo Chavez, "Expropriate this! Expropriate that!", and to the extent on concedes the principle then the question of who wins is who promises more, that is, whose solution is the worst, not the best.
Likewise, one can speak to the problems of the 'under-represented' or 'outsourcing fallout' through the bland and uninspiring language of safety net problems and social insurance transfer payments, but those 'centrist moderate' old leftists are going to get crushed by demagogues feeding people the lines they really want to hear, which is that their struggle isn't due to bad luck but due to the *bad people* who did this to them on purpose, and from whom it is only right and just to snatch their ill-gotten wealth and positions.
My read of history is that every society that has not figured out how to sustainably put some moves out of bounds and off limits eventually succumbs to the people getting what they want, good and hard.
I would love a Networked State discussion. I read Zeihan through a Balaji lens. You might have a better chance of getting Balaji to join, though time zones are brutal when he's in Singapore.
Bit late to the party, but per my generational framing I am less concerned with convincing the wokes than with the people who will become wokes for lack of better alternatives. This is a problem not just of the moment, but a generation into the future.
Re Network State, AnomalyUK wrote a good post this month (https://blog.anomalyuk.party/2022/07/cars-or-police/) on the virtual nation of car owners:
---
“[P]eople with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.
I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed. [...] The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door. [...] [T]here is massive demand for housing in [car-centric suburbia] form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.
---
Anomaly's post highlights how Network State avoids discussing hard issues and focuses on such exciting but relatively unimportant stuff as SSO for network-government services, blockchains, and branding. In Balaj's own words, "it’s an open question as to how to deal with crime in a network state"! Indeed. I might add that so is dealing with predation from outside criminals and with competition and coercion from nation-states. For example, schools are a very important issue, but whereas USA allows home schooling, many European countries don't, and there isn't much a network state going to be able to do about it, it will simply have to advise members to move out of Germany.
+1 for Network State discussion
I would be very interested in doing a zoom discussion on Balaji’s book. Both for many of the items you’ve excerpted here over the last week, and his very pro-crypto viewpoint. His thinking on these topics is usually very coherent even if he may turn out to be wrong in some of the details.
Greer reaching back to the past for continuity with mob dynamics speaks well to a better diagnosis of the present than complaints about new technology. This seems to be the Martin Gurri world of the present, the mob plus the new tech. There is an aspect that may be missing that you have been talking towards a lot lately with talk of personality disorders and psychology. This is where I would like to think Haidt as a psychologist is trying to speak towards. Christopher Lasch died before social media and his work The Culture of Narcissism, despite being laid atop an outdated bed of Freudian Psychoanalysis, still seems highly relevant here. What is social media in all its forms, but an incentive for more narcissism. The performative image cultivation and dopamine hits from validation from outside oneself are an incentive for more narcissistic behavior from everyone, even if we are not actually creating more narcissists.
‘They may argue that poor Black children cannot escape the influence of their environment, but they teach their own kids that they are the guarantors of their own fate.’
I wonder.
Because the parents of Black children slavishly (I know) vote Democrat and those Black children will grow up to do the same, whereas the parents of White children wisely vote Republican (go DeSantis) and those White children will grow up to do likewise?
No, it's not that. Indeed, there is no real hypocritical contradiction of the sort that Freddie imagines himself to be pointing out (ironic in a way since he identifies unironically as a 'Communist' and this was one of the circular reasoning paradoxes that was a criticism of Marxist theory - who decides and acts vs who is socially and historically determined and thus acted upon - and which early Marxists had to counter).
The way progressives have squared this circle and rationalized moral dyad thinking forever is the same old panacea technique of using 'privilege' as the critical distinguishing factor. Those with 'privilege', being unburdened by oppression which suppress their innate potential, have the socially special ability to experience the full spectrum of their humanity and express and use all the higher human faculties such as free will, independent judgment, and in general the degree of autonomy that makes it appropriate to apply concepts like personal responsibility, culpability, liability, and so forth. So, if you are privileged and have a privileged child, society allows them to be fully human, so of course it makes sense to teach them the patterns of thought appropriate to that higher form of human development and maturity.
On the other hand, those without privilege are oppressed victims who cannot be expected under such disability to transcend the kind of behaviors that are all excusable from the perspective of sympathy or empathy as being the best any of us would do to get by under such unjustly limiting circumstances. It's not reasonable to hold such people to the essential normative foundations of ordered liberty, because they are not free, and not capable, on their own, of responsible exercise of freedom. Just like 'incompetence to stand trial' - as with children or the senile - is a general defense against liability.
Excellent Steelman
It depends. It seems to me to be about half true, and different categories of attitudes range on the spectrum from "practically set in stone as a teenager" to staying quite flexible and plastic into old age (though, an additional wrinkle, so to speak, is that when older people change their minds on something they often also deceive themselves into thinking they always thought that way.)
What seems to determine the current flexibility of one's views is how uncorrelated they are from one's personal interests. The less something really 'matters' and potentially interferes with one's welfare later on, the more stubborn about it people become. The more it still matters, the more one starts to bend in the wind.
Pressure on then lifted means the views of youth. Pressure off then on means "growing up", or what often happens to many social views when young and single women and men become moms and dads and start seeing the world through the very different lens of the best interests of their children, or as another example: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
For example, take a look in the difference in political views and party supported for women who are otherwise similarly situated except for being single and childless on the one hand, or married moms on the other. It's quite stark! It's impossible to reconcile such big gaps with the "fixed at youth" claim, unless one tries to assume a reversal of the direction of causation, which is objectively false. What this implies as regards policies designed to support "strategic shaping of the electorate" I leave as an exercise for the reader.
So, when you are a teenager, your tastes in popular music are to a large degree influenced by what you perceive to be popular and preferred by the higher status people in your reference social group. That's because as a teenager, signaling that one has these tastes in music is one of the classic ways to socialize as fodder for conversation, build bonds, and win the favor of members of the group. And those considerations are felt to have extremely critical importance at that age.
But then one gets older and established in one's relationships and the role of music preferences in this regard is profoundly diminished. Since a change in your music preferences is unlikely to benefit you in any way, you will stick to your guns until your dying day.
That's "Pressure On then Pressure Off = Fixed"
On the other hand, consider the everyday observation that teenagers will pick up on which political views are elite and high status (i.e., progressive, i.e., childish, utopian, insane) on things like housing, family, schooling, taxation, the merits of regulation by expert bureaucrats, crime, the workability of public transportation in America, etc. and then, once they grow up, get married, have kids, have to earn a living, tend to the best interests of their kids, maybe try to manage people or run a business, many of them magically experience very profound changes of heart. True, this is not often in their stated opinions or how they would vote or answer polls (and beware those studies which rely on such answers), but revealed by their often contradictory personal behaviors.
When they were teens, preferences in political ideas about, say, crime and punishment, were no more consequential than preference in tastes about music. And they were influenced to adopt those fashionable opinions for more or less the same social reasons, because there was no real opportunity to conform one's real-world choices and behaviors to those idealistic tenets because there was no risk of negative personal consequences that would mitigate the pressure of the social incentive.
But when they grew up, suddenly they were faced with the actual responsibility of making high-stakes decisions correctly, that is, in line with their other interests, not just the regard and esteem of their what their peers thought a decade prior. And to the extent those ideas conflict with reality in a way they can't paper over with their affluence, they bend quite often. The transition is of course eased to large degree by the fact that one's reference social group is (or, perhaps more accurately, was) transitioning at more or less that same time, and that more than a few of them will hint and signal that they have come to some new realizations about what's important in life, yadda yadda, or signal-boost Socially Acceptable Excuses rationalizing behaviors that are flatly inconsistent with their professed ideals.
This is "Pressure Off then Pressure On = Flexibility".
Now, I think what Greer is getting at is, to put it kind of crudely, "The Struggle Is Real", in the particular way experience and felt by currently young and recently young Americans. And he should know, he's pretty young. To be clear, I'm not ribbing him there: I have a lot of esteem and admiration for Greer who is wise, read, and accomplished well beyond his years. And being young means he hears about and knows from personal experience the kind of problems and chronic, seemingly insurmountable difficulties that young people face.
And, one way or another, common sources of intense stress, despair, hopelessness, and disillusionment have a way of coming to fore and taking over democratic politics, especially after a few cycles of, ahem, "demographic turnover".
But here we get into trouble. It's not actually all that hard for non-progressive politicians and intellectuals to speak to these interests and concerns and come up with purported 'solutions' to them as part of some political platform or program. The problem is that there are a million bogus 'solutions' that get the whole diagnosis and prescription wrong, some of the cures are much worse than the disease or even fatal (see: real communism everywhere it is tried), and that there is no correlation between the democratic allure and electoral viability of proposed political solutions and the likelihood of any of them actually doing more good than harm about the targeted problems.
Twitter and other social media is pretty bad stuff, but one thing it is good for is a cure for anyone suffering from excessive democratic optimism. Don't even get me started on the New York Times comment section. For example, if one looks at the most popular views about any particular contemporary economic issue, one is practically always left with low single digits of comments that reflect any semblance whatsoever of literacy of basic economic concepts, and one will always find a whole lot of "the evil rich are responsible for this, so take from them and give to me, er, I mean, us good folks."
So the trouble is that one can always speak to the problems of the youth by going full Hugo Chavez, "Expropriate this! Expropriate that!", and to the extent on concedes the principle then the question of who wins is who promises more, that is, whose solution is the worst, not the best.
Likewise, one can speak to the problems of the 'under-represented' or 'outsourcing fallout' through the bland and uninspiring language of safety net problems and social insurance transfer payments, but those 'centrist moderate' old leftists are going to get crushed by demagogues feeding people the lines they really want to hear, which is that their struggle isn't due to bad luck but due to the *bad people* who did this to them on purpose, and from whom it is only right and just to snatch their ill-gotten wealth and positions.
My read of history is that every society that has not figured out how to sustainably put some moves out of bounds and off limits eventually succumbs to the people getting what they want, good and hard.