Why is stigmatization in the case of drug addicts so wrong, according to Dr. Volkow? Because addiction is a disease, and nothing else. According to Dr. Volkow people resist this idea, and falsely believe “that willpower should be sufficient to stop drug abuse”. After all, if you give drugs to rats until they are addicted, they will pursue them to the exclusion of all else, to their own detriment and even to the point of death. Moreover, you can show that there are changes in their brains by comparison with non-addicted rats.
Thus an addict has roughly the same metaphysical status as an addicted rat. He does what he does because, like Luther, he cannot do otherwise. He is a slave of his biochemistry, he is a Zombie whose master is his habit. To blame him for his behaviour is like blaming a leper for his leprosy.
This is all the most lamentable bilge, of course. When you consider what heroin addicts actually have to do to become heroin addicts it is clear that, at least to begin with, they want to be heroin addicts, it is not something that just happens to them or creeps up on them unawares. For example, they have to learn where to get their heroin, how to prepare it, and how to inject it (most people have an aversion to sticking needles into themselves and have to overcome it). They have to learn to disregard or overcome such side-effects as nausea, which is normally extremely aversive. Most of us would go a long way to avoid nausea. As a matter of fact, most addicts take heroin intermittently for some time before taking it regularly. The expression “hooked” is implicitly a lie; the addict has hooked heroin, not the other way round.
Still, it might be argued that, having become addicted, the addict loses all powers of control, but this too is not so. The experience (among many others) of American soldiers returning from Vietnam, who addicted themselves to heroin while there, proves it. They swiftly ceased to be addicts on their return to the US, notwithstanding all of Dr. Volkow’s neurocircuitous and neurochemical blather.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.
June 23, 2026
QotD: Addiction
June 21, 2026
QotD: Wishful thinking
There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.
May 15, 2026
Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”
Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:
“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.
Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.
The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”
Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”
I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.
Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.
At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.
“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.
Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)
High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.
The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.
But it’s not just the Swedes.
Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.
How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.
Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.
When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.
And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.
The good news: kids are drinking a lot less! But there’s also bad news …
The good news seemed to be that teenage drinking was dropping fast. Fewer underage drinkers, happier teenagers, right? Not so fast …
⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear.
It migrated inward.
Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.
That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.
So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.
The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.
The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.
The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.
That is the trade.
A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.
This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.
The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.
It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation.
The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.
April 21, 2026
QotD: “Bibliophiles are massive losers, why can’t we just admit that?”
I don’t buy it. I bet billionaires don’t read at all. Not only because they don’t have the time, but because every big reader I know is broke. Without exception, books have overloaded their minds, and their lives are in total disarray. When they’re not consumed by tortuous examinations of Socialist Realism in the shallower subsections of the Baltic Canal between late October 1933 and early March 1934, they’re deconstructing turgid translations of 9th Century Glagolitic poetry from the White Carpathian territories of Great Moravia. On weekends, for light relief, they dip into obscure anthologies of critically-acclaimed feminist speculative fiction championing unsung writers born in the shadow of the Chappal Waddi in the Mambilla Plateau. What should have been their office hours are spent haggling with elderly volunteers in Oxfam bookshops over worthless, dogeared volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early letters or needlessly exhaustive histories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. They own vast stacks of surplus, dust-magnet books, but they never own art, or cars, or houses. Bibliophiles are massive losers — why can’t we just admit that? There’s a clear correlation between reading and underachievement. There’s a reason homeless vagabonds line their coat pockets with paperbacks and newspapers. Our children must be warned, before it happens to them.
Reading is even less helpful to writers. If you write, you are incurably influenced by whatever garbage you happen to be reading at the time. For example, if I’m reading Hemingway, I finish this sentence here. Whereas, in the rare, transcending moments that I am reading, say, Henry James, I find, to my eternal chagrin, that I write — if, indeed, “write” is the morpheme, or mot juste, for which I rightly delve — in my lasting endeavours — my contention, if you will, against the ordained — in a spirit of refined demonstration, or braggadocio, as the case may be, that … Where was I?
Then, of course, there’s the snobbery associated with reading. “Read a book!” command the enlightened few, should you dare disagree with them on any trendy subject. It’s ridiculous, but if you read — or, better still, opine pretentiously about what you read — the chattering classes will clamber to pressgang you into their fanatical ranks. Nobody cares if you write anything, so long as you describe the latest high-status books as “vital”, “necessary”, “required”, or “essential”. Trust me, you can get away for years with pretending that you are “working on something big that I’d rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it” while freely enjoying all the wine and canapes you can stomach. But suggest you don’t read, and people quickly get suspicious.
Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.
February 15, 2026
The smartphone as a tool to create a real-life Idiocracy
Not being much of a film fan, I’d never seen the movie Idiocracy, but based on the description in Christopher Gage’s rant against the smartphone, I might not need to watch it as it’s happening all around us:
Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.
The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us — her captive audience — that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.
Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths — one thousand of them, in fact.
Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.
Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.
TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.
I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.
Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.
This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.
After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.
The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called “Ow! My Balls!” That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.
They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.
Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.
Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.
How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.
One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.
Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.
December 5, 2025
“I can stop [buying books] anytime. It’s not an addiction!”
In The Freeman, Nichole James resists the notion that her bookbuying habit is an addiction (because she could stop anytime she wants, unlike addicts who clearly can’t ever stop):
A small portion of my own book hoard. These shelves at least have a bit of commonality to them, unlike a lot of other shelves I could share.
There are people who collect sensible things, like pensions or matching dining chairs. Then there are people like me, who collect books and then build new shelves to hold the books, then buy more books to fill the shelves, then realize the house is now 70% paper.
I have always loved books. The magical lands they open up, the lives you try on for a few hundred pages. Places you cannot reach with a passport and an airline ticket. Narnia, Hogwarts, Mordor, and the parts of Sydney where even Google Maps looks nervous. The whole lot. Some people fall in love with the smell. Others with the weight of someone’s thoughts in their hands. I fall in love with all of that and then apparently forget that my house has finite wall space.
Which is why, as I call the carpenter for “just one more bookshelf”, a tiny voice in my head wonders if this is still charming or if I now qualify for some kind of diagnosis.
As it turns out, I might. The diagnosis even has a very fancy Greek name: bibliomania.
Back in the 19th century, an English cleric called Thomas Frognall Dibdin wrote a whole book called Bibliomania, or, Book Madness. He gleefully catalogued the symptoms of the afflicted: obsession with first editions, uncut pages, vellum, rare bindings, and the sort of Moroccan leather that smells faintly of money and self-satisfaction. It was a time when collectors bid like lunatics at auctions, paid “fancy prices”, and were generally regarded as slightly cracked.
That was then. Now, we call it a “TBR pile” — To-Be-Read.
Today, psychologists define bibliomania as a type of compulsive buying disorder. The warning signs are sobering. You buy more books than you can possibly read. You feel out of control. You get into financial trouble. You feel guilty. Your loved ones begin sentences with “Do you really need …?” and gesture helplessly at the tottering stack of paperbacks by the bed.
I recognize a few of these symptoms. I have definitely skipped a meal to afford a hardback. I have walked into a bookshop to “just browse” and come out clutching a small tower and a freshly re-mortgaged soul. There are hardbacks I have moved house with three times that I haven’t yet opened. They look at me accusingly whenever I walk past, like neglected gym memberships in dust jackets.
But here is where I part ways with the diagnosticians and join the Church of Umberto Eco.
Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotician with the beard of a wizard and the library of a dragon, reportedly owned around 50,000 books. He did not consider this a problem. He considered it a system. He said it was foolish to think you have to read every book you buy, just as it would be foolish to insist you must use every screwdriver before you are allowed to own another one.
Books, in his view, are like medicine. You keep a lot in the cabinet. Most of the time they sit there harmlessly. Then one day, in some dark night of the soul or slow Wednesday in July, you need the exact one that will fix you. So you reach into your “medicine cupboard” and pull out the right book for that moment. Which, he argued, is exactly why you should always have more than you need.
This is the philosophy I am choosing to live by, rather than the one that suggests I should be monitored by a spending app and gently reintroduced to the public library.
November 29, 2025
QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?
The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.
My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.
The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.
Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.
I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.
Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.
While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.
Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.
My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?
I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.
I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.
What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?
If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.
September 29, 2025
Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”
Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:
Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.
So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.
That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.
Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.
But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.
He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.
We ignore his warnings at great risk.
(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […](2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […](3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […](4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […](5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […](6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […](7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […](8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]
April 16, 2025
QotD: Coffee
Not that I know anyone who does that.
[…]
One of the commenters asked “Canned coffee?”, to which Steve made the obvious response: “I am not a coffee connoisseur. After all, we are talking about medicine, not a beverage.”
Steve H., “Caffeine and Socialism”, Hog On Ice, 2005-08-05.
March 24, 2025
Postcards from academia’s zombie apocalypse
Ted Gioia points out exactly why them there kids ain’t learnin’ no more:
[High school students] just care about the next fix — because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.
They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.
How bad is it for educators right now?
Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.
This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:
I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021 … I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn’t comprehended the material before, but hadn’t faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn’t care …
Since 2021 I’ve been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn’t performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.
I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.
I’ve made a similar claim in this article — where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.
Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing — and at an accelerated pace.
Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis — and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists — shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.
This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.
Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.
Below are more ugly numbers from another in-depth study — which looks at how children spend their day. It reveals that children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens.
YouTube usage for this group has more than doubled in just four years.
Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles.
Source: 2025 study by Common Sense
In other words, these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system.
This is why teachers are speaking out. They see the fallout every day in their classrooms.
January 20, 2025
QotD: Brainwashing
Like Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (another must-read), I read Meerloo years ago, so my recall of the details is fuzzy, but the upshot is obvious: The techniques of “brainwashing” have been known since at least the Middle Ages, and they’re still the same. Suspected witches in the Early Modern period, for instance, got Der Prozess, and though the witch hunters also had recourse to the rack and thumbscrews and all the rest, none of it was really necessary — isolation, starvation, and sleep deprivation work even better, provided you hit that sweet spot when they’re just starting to go insane …
I’m being deliberately flip about a horrible thing, comrades, because as no doubt distasteful as that is to read, the fact is, we’re doing it to ourselves, everywhere, all the time. Not the starvation part, obviously, but we eat such horribly unnatural diets that our minds are indeed grossly affected. Want proof? Go hardcore keto for a week and watch what happens. Or if that’s too much, you can simulate the experience by going cold turkey off caffeine. I promise you, by the end of day two you’d give the NKVD the worst dirt on your own mother if they sat a steaming hot cup of java in front of you.
Severian, “Kickin’ It Old Skool”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-04.
August 17, 2024
Twit/X – Hellsite or online Hotel California?
Ed West on the odd phenomenon of people loudly claiming they’ve had it with “this hellsite” and that they’re decamping to social-media-site-of-the-minute, yet in many, many cases they’re back on “this hellsite” not very long afterwards:
There was something of a trend in the late 2000s for former hell-raising journalists to start more sedate publications because they felt that society was changing, and people didn’t want to drink and party as much as they used to. It was heralded as the end of the “new lad” and the rise of a more mature outlook among men, largely by culture journalists whose job it is to invent societal trends.
And I remember reading these articles and always thinking “isn’t this just you getting old?” None of my friends go out and get pissed four times a week anymore — what does this say about British society?
I’ve long felt the same about Twitter, that while it’s immensely useful as a resource for news and information, and interacting with friends, I’ve got to the stage where it’s not fun. But that’s probably just middle age, and at a certain point people should avoid too much time joking around on social media, lest they become Facebook boomer memes. (Or, in Britain, go to jail.)
This week I was on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following my recent post on how he had changed the nature of the place. (I promise this is the last time I write about every journalist’s favourite social media site for at least two weeks.)
Everyone claims to hate Twitter, I pointed out, but they never leave. I actually started writing this piece a few months back, and noted that many people have bailed out from “X”, as no one calls it, among them academic Kathleen Stock, satirist Andrew Doyle and Labour politician Dawn Butler.
I’ve had to rewrite this because I think they’re all back now. In fact almost everyone who leaves the Hellsite soon returns; it’s a running joke, because we’re all addicted. I checked in on Threads the other day and it was full of people expressing their relief about breaking their Twitter habit and finding a new home. We shall see.
Others, like Alastair Campbell, have set up accounts on Bluesky but still proclaim their intention to stay on Twitter to fight the far-Right. Okay, sure.
Stock and Doyle seemed to be leaving in part because of the toxicity of their own side, in their case gender-critical feminists, and this kind of unpleasantness can indeed feel worse than when it comes from opponents. Watching online debates about immigration, for instance, I’m often reminded of GK Chesterton’s famous quote about pity and truth:
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
On one side will be vaguely establishment figures repeating arguments that feel warm-hearted and kind but also untrue, and on the other, mostly anonymous users citing a wealth of studies to show that the situation is actually much worse than that, and clearly having better arguments, while often being incredibly unpleasant and personal to the journalists involved. The fact that anonymous users are often the most informed and insightful accounts adds to the Chestertonian feel.
July 23, 2024
QotD: Coffee
Steve H., “I’m Going to Kill Myself: It’s as Simple as That”, Hog On Ice, 2005-03-18.
April 20, 2024
QotD: Cyber-addiction
This, of course, cannot really be a surprise. It is a great hallmark of modern life that over-indulgence in practically anything can be turned into pathology given enough time and clinical studies.
Jeff A. Taylor, Reason Express, 2005-04-26.
