Links to Consider
Rod Dreher on Viktor Orban's vision; Rob Henderson on the Light Triad; Allison Schrager on Yale Law School Economics; Yuval Levin talks his book on a constitutional republic
Rod Dreher summarizes Viktor Orban, including
J. Now we know that the individual can only be great and free as a member of a community. The West has discarded all bonds that tie individuals together: metaphysical bonds (they’ve gotten rid of God), national bonds, and family bonds. The West has become shrunken.
K. Greatness vs. Grandiosity: If you want to be great, you have to serve something greater than yourself: God, your country, your family. If you don’t do that, if instead you focus on your own interests, what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity.
1) This is why today, when we negotiate with Western Europeans, we feel the spiritual emptiness of them, the moral smallness. They come across as “aggressive dwarfs.”
2) Therefore, we need to understand that Central Europe vs. Western Europe is not about differences of opinion, but about two different worldviews.
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2) Elites think the people are drifting into extremism (including homophobia, isolationism, nationalism, and so forth)
3) Peoples think the elites don’t care about them, only “some kind of deranged globalism”
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Putin’s strongest tactical weapon on the world stage is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and the rest of the world’s resistance to it. What used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.
In a 2019 study titled “The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting Two Very Different Profiles of Human Nature,” researchers asked people how much they agreed with statements like:
“I tend to applaud the successes of other people” and “I enjoy listening to people from all walks of life” (Humanism)
“I prefer honesty over charm” and “When I talk to people, I am rarely thinking about what I want from them” (Kantianism)
“I tend to see the best in people” and “I tend to trust that other people will deal fairly with me” (Faith in humanity)
Among the many findings he cites, there is
The Big Five personality trait most closely [negatively] linked to the Dark Triad is agreeableness. Effect sizes typically range of r = -.4 to r = -.6.
And the Light Triad is positively correlated with agreeableness (r = .68).
I believe that I am low in agreeableness, so watch out! On the other hand, I did grow up in a stable family.
Instability in childhood was negatively associated with Light Triad traits (r = -.21). In other words, the more unstable a person’s childhood, the lower their scores on the Light Triad.
Henderson cites many interesting findings, but I’d bet that some of them will not hold up. Personality psychology relies a great deal on dodgy survey instruments and concepts that are not tightly defined. You should not totally discount it, but you should not treat it as gospel, either.
Our economic policymakers are increasingly Yale Law grads rather than business leaders or economists. On the Biden/Harris team: Jake Sullivan, Jennifer Harris, Mike Pyle, and Lisa Kahn. On the right, the big proponent is JD Vance.
The tenets of the Yale Law School of economics are a skepticism of free trade, markets, and large corporations and the belief that the decline in manufacturing jobs was a policy error that needs to be remedied rather than the result of an evolving economy.
As academic economists took the road to sociology, they ceded the debates on economic policy to non-economists.
In a podcast with James Patterson, Yuval Levin says,
we tend to think that the point of political engagement is to get my way and I get my way by winning the election. If I won the election, then I’d be in charge. The American constitution actually doesn’t work that way. What you win when you win an election in our politics is you win a seat at the table and what happens at the table is committee work and negotiation and bargaining. And this isn’t how every democracy works.
The conversation is difficult to excerpt. Patterson does a good job of drawing out Levin’s views.
In Myers-Briggs terms, I would say that Levin thinks that politics under the American Constitution is for the P’s, that is people who can tolerate ambiguity and issues that never get fully resolved. But today’s political culture is rife with J’s, meaning that people want closure and finality. “The most important election of our lives.”
I used to say that the way to torture a P at a meeting is for the chairperson to run rapidly through a series of decisions, checking off each one along the way. The way to torture a J is to get close to the end of a meeting and have the chairperson agree to revisit a decision that was supposedly settled early on.
Of course, my caveats about personal psychology apply to Myers-Briggs typology.
substacks referenced above:
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"Instability in childhood was negatively associated with Light Triad traits (r = -.21). In other words, the more unstable a person’s childhood, the lower their scores on the Light Triad."
Yes, and the more books in your childhood home, the more likely you are to become a reader. But the books have almost nothing to do with it! The people whose genes predispose them to become readers transmit those genes to their children who also become readers.
Parents with a paucity of Light Triad traits have unstable home lives. They transmit those traits to their children who also score lower on Light Triad traits.
Paul Bloom told Russ Roberts people should read more novels rather than psychology studies. He also told Tyler Cowen that the Big 5 personality psychology is underrated:
COWEN: Big Five personality theory.
BLOOM: Underrated. Stood the test of time. Often, when people complain about the replication crisis, they throw away all of psychology, but personality psychology has proven surprisingly robust, and I think there’s a lot of sense in the idea. I know you actually were somewhat critical of this in your book Talent — the idea of the Big Five, the idea that you could characterize somebody in terms of five numbers, determining their openness and their conscientiousness and so on. What do you think on that?
COWEN: I think it’s overrated by people who use it in hiring, but I still think, in general, it’s somewhat underrated, so we’re maybe not far apart. People who don’t know about the categories at all would do well to learn them. That’s how I would put it.
BLOOM: Yes. Once you know about them, you should be flexible and not take them too, too seriously.