What about the personal relationships that are formed in the context of conflict? Surely, the “band of brothers” is a truly universal experience, right (but note on the complexities of Shakespeare’s Henry V)? Surely the social bonds that held Easy Company together in 1944 and 1945 are the same as those from 1415? Or 415?
Well, no. Not quite.
We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion. [W]e discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined “mechanical” soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.
Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. It was only really after the Second World War that systematic study began to be made of unit cohesion (e.g. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947), though subsequent literature on the topic is voluminous and Marshal’s work has its problems, but its conclusions are broadly accepted having been confirmed in subsequent studies) [NR: Some discussion on Marshall and his theories here]. What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t “the cause” or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.
And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).
And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in “toughening” boot camp and to say, “aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!” Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare. We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).
Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities). That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
By contrast, “warrior” classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion. Of course exactly what “good generalship” or “good officership” looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the “brain” of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.
One of the things I find most striking about the “warrior ethos” advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically. Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
March 7, 2025
March 1, 2025
“There were always scapegoats … and they were always driven out one way or another”
The second part of Nigel Biggar‘s look at the culture war in Britain includes a look at how the professional approach to young peoples’ gender issues became monomaniacal because nobody involved stopped to think for fear of being ostracized (or fired):
On the gender front, there’s plenty of reason to doubt the intellectual coherence of transgender-self-identification. When a biological male believes that his inner, authentic self is female, what exactly does he think being ‘female’ is? I’m still waiting for someone to persuade me that this doesn’t trade on gender stereotypes that feminists rightly taught us to throw overboard decades ago.
Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers.
There’s even more reason to doubt that the well-being of young people is well served by taking their asserted genders at face value and allowing them to align their bodies by making irrevocable physical changes. According to Hannan Barnes’ shocking chronicle of the scandal at the Gender Identity Development Service (or GIDS) at the Tavistock Institute here in London, there was widespread doubt among clinicians about young people’s claims of “an inborn ‘trans’ nature”, awareness that these were sometimes correlated with eating disorders and self-harm, and suspicion that they might be caused by abuse or trauma. Furthermore, the long-term effects of using puberty-blockers were “largely unknown”, there was considerable uncertainty about which patients would benefit from them, and the health of some young patients actually seemed to worsen while on them.
Notwithstanding all this, “the clinical team … never discussed as a group what it even understood by the word ‘transgender'”, clinicians “never dream[t] of telling a young person that they weren’t trans”, and they always prescribed puberty-blockers unless the patient actively refused them. What’s more, expressions of doubt by staff were discouraged. “Someone would raise concerns, and someone else would move in to shut it down”, writes Barnes. “Those who persisted in asking difficult questions were not received well … those who spoke out were labelled troublemakers. [According to one witness,] ‘There were always scapegoats … and they were always driven out one way or another'”. “Junior staff looked on and learnt”.
Note the chilling effect.
The Tavistock Institute in London
Barnes’ book bears the title, Time to Think, because she identifies the general problem at GIDS as that of “not stopping to think”. That, of course, raises the question, Why? Barnes gives several reasons. One was the fact that the GIDS was propping up the Tavistock financially and that senior managers had a material interest in not disturbing its assumptions. Another was the unwillingness to offend transgender lobby groups such as Mermaids for “fear of a backlash”. But, most important of all was concern for the ‘progressive’ reputation of the management. According to David Bell, consultant adult psychiatrist at the Trust and whistleblower, “The senior management regarded [GIDS] as a star in our crown, because they saw it as a way of showing that we weren’t crusty old conservatives; that we were up with the game and cutting-edge. That was very important to the management to show we were like that”. Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers. Not for the first time, the basic narcissism of progressive virtue-signaling is exposed.
Update: Added missing URL.
February 19, 2025
QotD: The inborn bias of all mankind
Why was I on a panel with a priest and a revolutionary communist? Long story — not very interesting: we were debating the future of ethics with special attention to the role of religion. The interesting part, however, is that at some point, after we all shook hands like adults and I was on my way home, I realized that I meant it — I would choke them all. Well, of course, one can’t be entirely sure that one’s actions will follow one’s intentions. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. But, given some weird Twilight Zone scenario wherein all their deaths somehow saved my son’s life, I was at least hypothetically committed. The caveman intentions were definitely there.
The utilitarian demand — that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number — had seemed reasonable to me in my 20s but made me laugh after my son was born. And my draconian bias is not just the testosterone-fueled excesses of the male psyche. Mothers can be aggressive lionesses when it comes to their offspring. While they are frequently held up as icons of selfless nurturing love, that’s mostly because we offspring — the ones holding them up as icons — are the lucky recipients of that biased love. Try getting between a mammal mother and her kid, and you will see natural bias at its brutal finest.
Stephen T. Asma, “Confucius Got It Right: Giving in to ‘Bias’ is Part of Living an Ethical Life”, Quillette, 2020-02-01.
February 18, 2025
QotD: The soft sexism of low expectations
- She’s been told she’s great — fabulous! — just the way she is.
- She’s been taught to dismiss all push-back as misogynistic.
- She’s been assured that she’s entitled to success — and that any failures to achieve said success are the fault of men.
- She’s been trained to demand that these dastardly men — who are totes holding her back — kindly step aside and let her take the trophy — whether she’s actually earned it or not.
You might think I’m being unfair here, but frankly? I don’t agree. Given all the stuff I’ve read in the news for the past decade plus, I believe I’m right on the money.
Everywhere I look, I see illustrations of all four of the above bullet points. I hate to keep harping on the fat acceptance movement, but really: isn’t that a textbook example of point number one? Go ahead, ladies: eff those unrealistic beauty standards and rock on with your 300 pound selves. Yas, queen, slay! (And don’t worry that you can’t make it up a single flight of stairs without getting winded. The negative impacts of extreme obesity are way over-stated, amirite?)
Then there are all the times leftists of the distaff persuasion have thrown down the poor-me-I’m-being-harassed-by-meanie-sexist-men card each time they start losing an online argument. To be sure, in the absolute dumpster fire that is internet discourse, such women probably do get burned with the occasional “die, bitch!” PM or email. But as I noted on my fan blog, men get that crap too — and oddly, I don’t see them whining about it nearly as often. (Probably because crying doesn’t work for men. Only women get picked up by the waaaaaambulance.)
And just to hit on bullets three and four: everywhere I look, I see leftists justifying moves to ease standards to give vag a hand up. Just last month, for example, it was reported that Oxford is considering removing Homer and Virgil from a foundational classics course due to “attainment gaps between male and female candidates”. Don’t buckle down and study your Latin and Greek, dears. We’ll remove that pesky obstacle for you. And oh my great and fluffy Lord, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard feminists complain about the academic weeding that goes on in engineering or computer science — because apparently, advanced math is oppressive and patriarchal. As a woman who numbers pretty good — indeed, I even teach that stuff for a living! — I headdesk so hard whenever I hear this BS that I’m surprised my skull is still intact.
Where does all this anal-smoke-blowing lead? When you’re told constantly that you should get prizes simply for being a good little girl — as leftist women are — the result is predictable: you stop developing. If you’re already Ms. Polly Perfect, well — that obviates the need for critical self-examination and the consequent moves towards self-improvement. If your naysayers are all dismissible as “women-hating men bitter over the loss of their privilege” (or as women suffering from “internalized misogyny”), then your arguments are almost certainly untested and malformed. And if people have always been clearing the road for you and shielding you from any real challenges, you’re no doubt much stupider than your competition — and much weaker.
Stephanie S., “Prizes for Good Little Girls Syndrome”, Conservative Thoughts, 2020-03-07.
February 15, 2025
“Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century”
At The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons suggests that the arrival of Donald Trump, version 2.0, may finally end the era we’ve been living in since immediately after the end of WW2:
The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century”. The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.
R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century”. His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.
The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.
Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society”. Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies”.
Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist”. For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.
The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.
As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.
[…]
The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.
That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.
Update, 17 February: Welcome Instapundit readers! Thanks for dropping by. Please do look around at some of my other posts! I think the last time I got linked by Instapundit was back in 2008/9 just before I moved to the current location. Please do read the entire N.S. Lyons post, as this is just a taster of the full essay!
February 11, 2025
Many young white men are choosing to “own the insult” when accused of being a fascist
Lorenzo Warby points out that some — even many — young white men are reacting to repeatedly being called “Nazi” or “fascist” by embracing the slur:
Still from Pink Floyd: The Wall
For the fuel of the contemporary networked authoritarians are angry young men. Angry young men who have a great deal to be angry about.
In so many modern schools, universities, and much of social media, if you are a low melanin count, heterosexual male you are absolutely at the bottom of the “woke” oppression-bingo hierarchy. You will be implicitly, or explicitly, held to be somehow tarred with every bad thing any person “like” you has done in history, no matter how long — even how many generations — before you were born that it happened, nor how dubious an historical characterisation it might be. There is no identity open to you that you can celebrate, or feel positively attached to, without potential or actual denigration.
If you do any reading, you can quickly work out that this is a ludicrously one-sided — and deeply unfair — way to look at history. Even in its own terms, it is nonsense, as “folk like you” — i.e., low melanin count heterosexual males — voted for every single legal advance any of the celebrated-as-oppressed groups made. “Folk like you” built the Scientific Revolution, Parliamentary Government, mass prosperity.
Of course, this was a matter of culture, institutions, the happenstance of history, not melanin content. The trouble with the racialisation of history and identity is that it is, indeed, the racialisation of history and identity. As Jews are currently (re)discovering.
Nor can many of these angry young men take much refuge in the good life, work or entertainment. Online dating has turned into a hypergamous nightmare that excludes most guys, in-person connections are fraying and migration-plus-restrictive-land-regulation has shot rents up and made home-owning unattainable.
In entertainment, masculine heroes are being replaced and degraded. Online games are being systematically “wokified”. There are systematic attacks on their heritage. Sport and advertising is also being wokified, is “bending the knee”. Where to go?
If folk systematically tar or denigrate someone’s identity, a natural response is to say “no, my identity is great, it is wonderful”. There will be certainly a market for such a response. The natural response to systematic denigration is some form of “fuck you!” and the politics of “fuck you!“.
In the contemporary world, what is the most dramatic way of saying “fuck you!“? To take the racist!, fascist! abuse and go “right on!“. Even more so if you take the ideas they invoke and turn them back against them.
Of course, if you just reverse what left-progressivism — in its “woke” iteration — stands for, you are still dancing to their tune. But rage can easily work like that.
So, these angry young men look at the folk who treat them with such continual, institutionalised, contempt — who stack everything they can against them — and decide “we hate you”. If you are going to abuse us anyway no matter what we do — the seductive logic goes — then why not simply embrace the identity you impose on us if we put our heads up? There is, after all, no more in-your-face way to shriek their anger and rejection back at those who are abusing, denigrating and excluding them than to embrace racism and fascism.
They look at ordinary conservatives, at ordinary liberals, they look at Boomers, and think “you did not stop it, you did nothing to protect people like me”, so they — and their politics — get no respect.
Instead, they go to the politics of using the operational tactics used against them — the operational politics of “wokery” — in support of politics that most completely expresses their rage. This is the updated version of what happened with 1920s Fascism in Italy and 1930s Nazism in Germany. Like the original versions, they are using — and so helping to legitimate — the operational methods of the left-progressivism.
Not that left-progressives, the “woke”, will see it. They are way too full of the stupidity of arrogance, of the blindness of moral narcissism, to pick what is happening, still less take any responsibility for it. They utterly fail to see themselves; to understand how much they come across as smug, arrogant, condescending, self-righteous, shits whose politics again and again ends up favouring people like them and whose recurrent response to disagreement is to de-legitimise, denounce and censor. Their entire view of themselves is they are the oh-so-clever, oh-so-moral people. Nothing they do is ever seriously counter-productive or fundamentally mistaken.
Faced with the rise of actual racism and actual fascism, they will shriek racist! and fascist! even harder. But they are in the situation of the boy who cried wolf! Except worse, as the boy in the story neither created, nor trained, the wolf.
They have so debased that currency, so debased historical analogy, that fascism has lost its rhetorical, or even its warning, power.
Besides, how many people will say: these folk against whom you are shrieking the same terms of abuse you have shrieked at people for decades. Are they making excuses for the mass sexual predation on young girls by migrants we did not want? Are they supporting the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors? Are they teaching folk to despise their own countries and heritage? Are they pushing the narrative lies of the moment? Have they proved to be incompetent at elementary things, such as fighting crime and managing fire risk?
No? Then they sound good to me.
Left-progressives: so good at finding new ways to make the same mistakes. It is almost as if they have a pathological relationship with information. Oh, wait, they do.
QotD: Scientists, in their natural habitat
Hector Drummond, “Soap-opera science”, Hector Drummond, 2020-03-29.
February 10, 2025
Immortality, ancient versus modern
Immortality used to be something you only got in the eyes of others, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing”, but modern tech bros want the other kind of immortality … the one where you don’t actually die:
In ancient times, you attained immortality by doing great deeds.
Today you attain immortality by getting blood transfusions from teenagers, and freezing your body for later revival.
Needless to say, there’s a huge difference between these two strategies.
In the first case, you serve others by your great deeds — eternal renown is your reward for this. But folks seeking immortality today are the exact opposite. They have reached peak narcissism — other people are, for them, literally just a source of fresh blood (or stem cells).
Until recently, I thought those Dracula movies were just a story to scare little kids. I now know that they’re an actual playbook for Silicon Valley elites.
With a better business plan, our Transylvanian count could have raised some serious VC money.
Nowadays he would be running a medical rejuvenation startup with a billion dollar market cap
Not long ago, I would have thought that the tweet below was a joke. But not in the current moment.
By the way, don’t miss the motto on his shirt.
I’m tempted to make some joke about this — but we’ve now arrived at a point where reality itself morphs into dark comedy. No punchline is necessary
And here’s another similarity between tech billionaires and the monsters in old horror movies. Somebody recently sent me a link to a website that sells bunkers to tech elites, and they remind me of dungeons in a Frankenstein film.
Go ahead, click on the link. Don’t let me stop you.
In both instances, horror is the right term.
Just looking at these things and imagining some delusional transhumanist getting on the table in his dungeon for a rejuvenation procedure is very creepy.
But there are some similarities between ancient heroes doing great deeds, and today’s Silicon Valley transhumanist. They both want to be like the gods (only their methods are different). Also, they are both admired leaders in their respective societies.
That’s the part that troubles me most. If the dude slurping up stem cells in a bunker was just another crazy person, I wouldn’t worry about it. But, unfortunately, these unhinged narcissists include some of the most powerful people on the planet.
February 9, 2025
When your sports team doesn’t win … which for most fans is every year
As a long-term fan of a highly successful sports team that has never won the biggest prize — the Minnesota Vikings have been to four Super Bowl games and lost all of them — I thought Charlotte Wilder’s take was worth considering:
Here’s the thing: The Chiefs are in the Super Bowl again (duh). And a lot of people seem to hate the Chiefs.
I get it. When you watch a team win for seven years straight, and you are not a fan of said team, it gets old. You’re angry. It’s unfair. It feels like watching billionaires get richer. If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan — a team that has lost to Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes & Company at least thirty thousand times in the past seven years, most recently last Sunday — you are probably apoplectic.
But hear me out: Sports dynasties are good.
Seeing as I am a fan of Boston sports teams with recent histories of victory, you might be inclined to shove me in a locker when I present my argument, but I hope you’ll hear me out. I even drew a couple graphs and stuff to try to convince you.
[…]
Being a fan of a losing team is, at its core, romantic. You love this thing that doesn’t really know you exist, will never love you back, is capable of bringing you intense joy and misery, and is usually loaded with nostalgia. The longer your team goes without winning a championship, the more romantic your fandom. Extra romance points if your team has recently gotten close and lost (Bills, Lions) or has just totally sucked for a very long time now (Jets).
I actually did some math here to illustrate my concept. I call it the Fandom Romance Index (FRI).
You might be thinking, right about now, “Hey, Charlotte, I thought this post was about dynasties?” We’re getting there. Before we do, however, I have to familiarize you with the Fandom Hatred Index (FHI), which is the inverse of the FRI.
Simply put, the longer a team wins, the more intense other fans’ hatred. Think the Patriots post-Deflategate, when the rest of the country would rather have eaten seventeen bowls of clam chowder in one sitting than watch Tom Brady hoist another trophy.
Which brings me to the Chiefs. While their fans are riding high right now, their fandom is no longer romantic. The romance of fandom matters because, at its apex, it is the most pure form of loving a team, of being a fan. You’re hanging in there without much reason for doing so. You’re allowing yourself to hope despite all the evidence telling you not to — I think it’s beautiful and resilient.
And the higher the romance index, the more gratifying it is when that team finally wins.
February 7, 2025
QotD: The Chump Ratio
That’s what you might call the Chump Ratio. In any given crowd, Barnum (or whomever) said, one person in five is a born chump. He’s ready, willing, and able to believe anything you put in front of him, and so long as it’s not skull-fornicatingly obvious fakery — an extremely low bar, as you might imagine — he’s all in. The best part is, chumps don’t know they’re chumps, and they never, ever wise up (poker players have a similar adage: “After a half hour at the table, if you can’t spot the sucker, then you’re the sucker”; it has the same impact on behavior, namely: none whatsoever). You don’t have to do anything to sell the chumps; they’re practically begging you to take their money.
Barnum didn’t say much about these guys, but there’s another ratio that applies to a given crowd, also about one in five: The born skeptic, the killjoy, call them what you will. This is the guy completely unaffected by the lights, the music, the smells of popcorn and cotton candy, the children’s laughter … all he can see at the carny is the tattooed meth head who put everything together overnight with an Allen wrench. He might well show up at your carny — the wife and kids wanted to go — but you’ll never make a dime off him. No show in the world is ever going to sell him, so you don’t need to worry about him.
It’s those other three guys in any given crowd that make you some serious money … or bring the whole thing crashing down on your head. They’re who the show is really for.
It’s pretty easy to sell these folks. After all, they want to be sold. They’re at the carnival, aren’t they? And yet, it’s also pretty easy to screw it up. They’re willing to suspend disbelief — they want to — but the line between “necessary suspension of disbelief” and “an insult to one’s intelligence” is thinner than you think, and lethally easy to cross.
Severian, “Carny World”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-24.
January 31, 2025
QotD: “Did you know the government faked the moon landings?”
Today I am compelled to much more sympathy with people who have come to believe that. It’s still objectively stupid, but I understand how they got there. It’s an interaction between a low-trust, polluted information environment and the cheater-detection module wired into human brains.
If you pose people a logic problem phrased in two different ways, one of which is “spot the cheater” and one of which is not, they’ll do substantially better on the first version. We are social animals who survived by forming trust networks, and for millions of years spotting the cheater was a life or death matter.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a person of average intelligence — not very good at following complex arguments or extracting generative patterns from large masses of evidence. This person has gradually become aware over the last quarter century that public information sources are saturated with lies. The media is corrupt and partisan, corporations deceive to boost their profits, education is ideologically captured, and governments constantly peddle vast falsehoods to gain compliance.
In this environment, and given the capacity limitations of the average human, the cheater-detection module goes into overdrive. The least bad strategy is to try to spot the worst liars and then believe the opposite of everything they say.
“The moon landings were faked” has to be understood as a symptom not of individual insanity, but of governing institutions and elite classes who have repeatedly burned up their long-term credibility for short-term gains.
This trend had been building for a long time, but undoubtedly culminated with the series of colossal lies, blunders, and “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” reversals around COVID.
I wish I knew a way back from this. I’m not sure anything less than the abolition of secrecy could do it.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-27.
January 27, 2025
If you’ve ever thought society is run by psychopaths … you may be right (but you’re not entitled to compensation)
Spaceman Spiff discusses normal people, the mimics who pretend to be normal and often seem to work their way into positions of power and influence (not every mimic is a psychopath, but all psychopaths are mimics), and those who resist the mimics (and therefore also the psychopaths):
There are different types of people we can observe around us. Normals are the great mass of humanity. They don’t think too hard. They just get on with it. This is the majority.
Most Normals seek some confirmation from outside themselves, typically opinions and views from trusted sources. Many seem averse to thinking at all and almost none are independent thinkers in any meaningful sense.
This includes social mores. The majority look towards others for their cues on how to act which makes them easy to manipulate.
Social validation in differing forms is the controlling mechanism. What is the other fellow doing? That is what I must do.
Those doing the controlling are different. Many leadership positions are populated by people who display abnormal traits.
Cluster B disorders in particular are everywhere. Narcissistic, antisocial and histrionic behaviours are visible in many senior levels of society from politics to major charities.
These disordered people largely copy normal human emotions and behaviours. They are acting because they don’t experience life as the rest do.
Everything is a performance which provides enormous advantages to them as they climb their way up, but has the drawback of being fake.
We can call these people Mimics for convenience.
Today’s societies largely reflect the ascendency of Mimics as they seem to run many institutions we rely on, a situation referred to as a pathocracy.
The extreme version of the type is a psychopath, someone lacking conscience or empathy and therefore unable to enjoy the full human experience. Psychopaths are damaged people unencumbered by concerns with morality or social convention, so able to quickly get on in life.
Cluster B types have similar deficiencies that aid them in a myriad of ways and are more common than psychopaths. The end result is the same, leadership positions dominated by those with distorted thought patterns who quickly learn the majority of people prefer to be led and told what to do.
Some can resist
Both Normals and Mimics swim in the same waters. Normals because they are shaped by society and seek its approval. Mimics because they are faking it. They must scan the horizon at all times to ensure they are making it work. Their act is designed to reflect normality and the trophies it can bring so it must be calibrated to what works with an audience.
A need to seek approval draws these groups together. An external dependence they assume is universal if they even bother to think about it at all.
They are forever locked into a world dictated by the views and whims of others.
But there are individuals who can be defined by the fact they are much more self-sufficient. They do not seek external approval and are not subject to the judgment of others.
Everyone who resisted the Covid propaganda would be an example. This includes anyone who initially succumbed to the pressure but quickly worked out something was amiss.
The chief characteristic of this group is resistance to social pressure because they reject the need for external cues to guide behaviour.
The most extreme example of this phenomenon in society are schizoids, those indifferent to praise or criticism, largely motivated by inner drives and impervious to many forms of social stress.
As with the psychopaths, schizoids represent the extreme end of the insulated spectrum, but everyone resistant to today’s aggressive social controls share some schizoid traits to a greater or lesser degree.
We can call these the Resistant, individuals not dependent on external validation and naturally averse to being controlled. Independent thinkers who instinctively insulate themselves from the unthinking Normals who make up the bulk of humanity.
Because of their mental distance from the herd this group are often unmoved by the narratives controlling much of society.
Unlike the Mimics, the Resistant do not seek to control others and it is control that defines the West today, especially the ruling classes who fear the Normals waking up. They must be relentlessly managed via approved narratives lest they make the wrong decisions in life.
Mimics are naturally drawn to control since they are faking it. They run the constant risk of being discovered as fakes. Imposter syndrome rules their actions which drives the vigilance we commonly observe in their sensitivity to criticism and their enraged responses to being challenged. All this to stave off scrutiny.
It is the most broken who can be persuaded their fractured view of life is some grand vision that escapes the rest of us. Such people are everywhere and they are comically easy to control by appealing to their need for superiority which is why control is so attractive to them in turn. They assume it is a universal phenomenon.
Those who shun control are then a threat to their identity, hence the aggressiveness with which the independently minded are pursued. They cannot be left in peace, a very striking observation of today, the zeal with which nonconformists are targeted even when minding their own business.
January 20, 2025
“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”
Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:
There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.
“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.
Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.
But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
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.
January 14, 2025
QotD: Ritual in medieval daily life
First, n.b. that “private” is in quotation marks up there. Medieval men didn’t have private lives as we’d understand them. Indeed, I’ve heard it argued by cultural anthropology types that medieval men didn’t think of themselves as individuals at all, and while I’m in no position to judge all the evidence, it seems to accord with some of the most baffling-to-us aspects of medieval behavior. Consider a world in which a tag like “red-haired John” was sufficient to name a man for all practical purposes, and in which even literate men didn’t spell their own names the same way twice in the same letter. Perhaps this indicates a rock-solid sense of individuality, but I’d argue the opposite — it doesn’t matter what the marks on the paper are, or that there’s another guy named John in the same village with red hair. That person is so enmeshed in the life of his community — family, clan, parish, the Sacred Confraternity of the Holy Whatever — that “he” doesn’t really exist without them.
Should he find himself away from his village — maybe he’s the lone survivor of the Black Death — then he’d happily become someone completely different. The new community in which he found himself might start out as “a valley full of solitary cowboys”, as the old Stephen Leacock joke went — they were all lone survivors of the Plague — but pretty soon they’d enmesh themselves into a real community, and red-haired John would cease to be red-haired John. He’d probably literally forget it, because it doesn’t matter — now he’s “John the Blacksmith” or whatever. Since so many of our problems stem from aggressive, indeed overweening, assertions of individuality, a return to public ritual life would go a long way to fixing them.
The second huge advantage, tied to the first, is that community ritual life is objective. Maybe there was such a thing as “private life” in a medieval village, and maybe “red-haired John” really was a reprobate in his, but nonetheless, red-haired John performed all his communal functions — the ones that kept the community vital, and often quite literally alive — perfectly. You know exactly who is failing to hold up his end in a medieval village, and can censure him for it, objectively — either you’re at mass or you’re not; either you paid your tithe or you didn’t; and since the sacrament of “confession” took place in the open air — Cardinal Borromeo’s confessional box being an integral part of the Counter-Reformation — everyone knew how well you performed, or didn’t, in whatever “private” life you had.
Take all that away, and you’ve got process guys who feel it’s their sacred duty — as in, necessary for their own souls’ sake — to infer what’s going on in yours. Strip away the public ritual, and now you have to find some other way to make everyone’s private business public … I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Calvinism is really Karen-ism, and if it IS unfair, I don’t care, because fuck Calvin, the world would’ve been a much better place had he been strangled in his crib.
A man is only as good as the public performance of his public duties. And, crucially, he’s no worse than that, either. Since process guys will always pervert the process in the name of more efficiently reaching the outcome, process guys must always be kept on the shortest leash. Send them down to the countryside periodically to reconnect with the laboring masses …
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
