Barbara Tuchman […] said something about medieval nobles once, to the effect of “the reason some of their decisions seems so childish to us is that a lot of them were children”. I don’t think she’s right about that — kids grew up pretty damn fast in the Middle Ages — but if you expand it a bit to “rookies make rookie mistakes”, she’s got a big, important point. No account of the reign of Henry VIII, for instance, can really be complete without considering that when he took the throne he was only 17, and had only been heir apparent for a few years before that. He was most definitely the “spare” in the old “heir and a spare” formula for medieval dynastic success; it’s likely that his father was preparing him for a Church career when his elder brother Arthur died suddenly in 1502, when Henry was 11. What Arthur had been in training his whole life to do, Henry got at most six frantic years of, under an increasingly feeble father.
Leaving all of Henry’s personal quirks aside — and his was a very strong, distinctive personality — that’s got to affect you.
So many of the changes in Henry’s reign, then, must have been driven in part by the fact that it was the same man, reflecting on a lifetime’s experience in a job he was never expected to have, wasn’t really prepared for, and didn’t seem to want (aside from the lifestyle). There’s been lots of pop-historical theorizing about what was “wrong” with the later Henry — senility, syphilis, the madness of power — but more naturalistic explanations of his later actions must take into account simple age. A man nearing the end of his life, knowing that his succession was very much in doubt and fearing for the state of his soul, will do things differently than a young man in the prime of life.
[…]
Life was hard back then, and cheap. When every other child dies before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 35, I imagine, you live your life cranked to 11 every waking moment. Accounts of grown men weeping like little girls at the theater aren’t an exaggeration; the whole age was given to extreme outbursts. And that’s just the baseline! Now consider that a guy like Henry never had a moment to himself, and I do mean never — not once, in his entire life. He even had a guy with him on the crapper, who would wipe his ass for him. The relationship between Henry and a guy like Wolsey, then — to say nothing of his relationship with the Groom of the Stool — must’ve been intimate in a way we can’t possibly grasp. Compared to that, you and your wife are barely on speaking terms. If Henry seemed sometimes to set policy just because he was pissed at Wolsey, we must consider the possibility that that’s exactly what happened.
The best you can do, then, is imagine yourself back there as best you can, and make your interpretations in that light, acknowledging your biases as best you can (I’m not a medievalist, obviously, but I’m a much better read amateur than most, and though Henry VIII is a very hard guy to like, he’s equally hard not to admire). Most of all — and this, I think, is the hardest thing for academic historians, more even than recognizing their presentist biases — you have to keep your humility. Perhaps Henry’s decision about ___ was part of a gay little frenemies spat with Wolsey. That’s sure what it seems like, knowing the man, and having no contrary evidence …
… but contrary evidence might always emerge. It might not have been the optimal decision, but it might’ve been a much better one than you thought, because Henry had information you didn’t, but now do. It makes for some restless nights, knowing that your life’s work could be overturned by some grad student finding some old paper at a yard sale somewhere, but … there it is.
Severian, “Writing Real History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-18.
October 26, 2024
QotD: Henry VIII
October 15, 2024
QotD: The Mandela Effect
Your memories may be different from mine, but not as different as Fiona Broome’s. I remember watching the live TV footage of Nelson Mandela walking to freedom after 27 years in captivity, while Broome, an author and paranormal researcher, remembers Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
When Broome discovered that she was not the only person to remember an alternative version of events, she started a website about what she dubbed “the Mandela Effect”. On it, she collected shared memories that seemed to contradict the historical record. (The site is no longer online but, never fear, Broome has published a 15-volume anthology of these curious recollections.)
Mandela, of course, did not die in prison. On a recent trip to South Africa, I visited Robben Island, where he and many others were incarcerated in harsh conditions, to speak to former prisoners and former prison guards, and to wander around a city emblazoned with images of the smiling, genial, elderly statesman. How could it be that anyone remembers differently?
The truth is that our memories are less reliable than we tend to think. The cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser vividly remembered where he was when he heard that the Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. He was listening to a baseball game on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by the breaking news, and he rushed upstairs to tell his mother. Only later did Neisser realise that his memory, no matter how vivid, must be wrong. There are no radio broadcasts of baseball in December.
On January 28 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch; a spectacular and highly memorable tragedy. The morning after, Neisser and his colleague Nicole Harsch asked a group of students to write down an account of how they learnt the news. A few years later, Neisser and Harsch went back to the same people and made the same requests. The memories were complete, vivid and, for a substantial minority of people, completely different from what they had written down a few hours after the event.
What’s stunning about these results is not that we forget. It’s that we remember, clearly, in detail and with great confidence, things that simply did not happen.
Tim Harford, “The detours on memory lane”, Tim Harford, 2024-06-20.
October 8, 2024
QotD: The competitive instinct
One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are … or, at least, how guys used to be.
[…]
When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports”. Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.
Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender”. I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.
In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition”, such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.
Severian, “On Competition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-02.
October 1, 2024
TikTok’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community
The more we experience the joys of widespread social media, the more people seem to discover ways to bring attention to themselves for genuine or dishonest reasons. Freddie deBoer looks at the DID-sufferers on TikTok and assesses the chance that such a rare disorder can have had so many newly discovered sufferers:
Let me turn back to the TikTok “systems”, the strange, maybe-shrinking world of adolescent women on social media who pretend to have an incredibly rare and debilitating mental illness and treat it as a fun and quirky alternative lifestyle.
This piece from The Verge, though a little misguided, is a good jumping off point for this topic. The basic story is pretty simple. Dissociative identity disorder (DID), long referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a remarkably controversial diagnosis that has long captured the public imagination. It’s not hard to see why; the idea of someone who switches from one personality to the other is lurid and dramatic, making it easy fodder for television. (The number of episodes of legal dramas about DID is immense.) The condition also invites a particularly stark consideration of the question of individual agency and culpability for bad deeds. As you can imagine, pretending to have “alters” can be very convenient; a notorious case involved an embezzler whose only defense for his crimes was that he had multiple personalities and one of them stole the money. There have long been researchers and clinicians in psychiatry who doubt the very existence of DID, and even among those who are friendlier to the concept, the disorder is known to be incredibly rare. Many prominent cases of DID have proven in time to be fraudulent. The most famous American case, that of “Sybil“, was particularly tragic. The woman who supposedly suffered from the disorder, who faced a childhood of abuse and neglect, would go on to admit to her psychiatrist that she had made the alternate personalities up. (We know because we have the letters.) But the doctor, who had been made wealthy and famous thanks to her work with Sybil, threatened to withdrawn her financial support if Sybil did not recant that confession. Having no other choice, she did.
What DID TikTok asks us to believe is that, in the span of maybe half a decade, tens of thousands of adolescent women developed DID, an exceedingly rare disorder marked by symptoms entirely unlike those on your For You page. The Verge article, written by Jessica Lucas, is typical of the media’s take on this issue, to the degree that they’ve written about it at all: relentlessly sympathetic to the DID TikTok adolescents even when grudgingly admitting that there’s a lot of fakery. And admit that she does, as it would be essentially impossible to pretend otherwise. Even the wokest wokie couldn’t help but look at this shit and conclude that a lot of it is bullshit.
The cases of DID that are considered to be particularly valid or believable are very few, and the people who have suffered in them have been people living absolutely wasted lives, lives filled with abuse and instability and addiction and misery; the overwhelming majority of DID TikTokers appear to be living perfectly stable and successful adolescent lives. Those with DID have almost never professed to be able to switch from one alter to another on command; many DID TikTokers playact that exact behavior for their viewers. Alters are notoriously uncooperative towards each other; TikTok DID videos routinely feature alters happily participating in “roll calls” in which they switch from one identity to the next, conveniently timed for the creation of #content. (The DID people claim that really they’re just opportunistically capturing organic switches, but a) it’s very clear that many of these videos are filmed in one day and b) that would still require alters to willingly turn the camera on and get into the costume etc, which is not at all how alters have traditionally acted.) In the DID literature alters are almost never aware of what’s happening when another alter is “fronting”; on DID TikTok they almost universally are, justified with the convenient idea of “co-consciousness,” which is one of many evolutions of DID these people have implemented to allow their little pageant to continue. Most people with DID diagnosis, historically, have not been photogenic women with an interest in getting more followers. I could go on.
Lucas’s piece is particularly useful for the remarkable, remarkably depressing story of Dr. Matthew Robinson, a clinician and researcher from Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital. (The site of Girl, Interrupted, among other things.) Like a lot of people in psychiatry, Robinson noted with alarm that his hospital had “been inundated with referrals and requests from schools, parents, and our own adolescent treatment and testing services to assess for symptoms of what [patients] call DID.” He proceeded to discuss the difficulties this sort of situation provokes in an already-overtaxed mental health system, and spoke frankly about the fact that a considerable number of the people presenting with this disorder obviously do not in fact have it. He stated plainly that which many are too circumspect to say, which is that these TikTokers are faking. The consequence, of saying this in a lecture with his professional peers, was review-bombing of the hospital online, threats, a call to have Robinson’s medical license revoked, and sufficient harassment that McLean pulled online videos of the lecture. The online mob engaged in the typical social justice-vocabulary freakout campaign, McLean folded, and as stated in the piece, most researchers are now too scared to publicly comment on this absurd situation. If someone tells you that there is no such thing as a social justice-inflected cancellation campaign, you can point to this exact scenario and to the vicious and vengeful disability rights movement in general.
To be clear, I think that probably literally zero of the people who perform DID on TikTok have the disorder. Zero. I imagine that a significant portion of them have deluded themselves into thinking they do. But I’m quite confident that most of them are very well aware that they’re faking.
September 30, 2024
British and Australian schools are teaching boys to hate themselves
Janice Fiamengo discusses the sort of things British and Australian boys are being taught about themselves and their role in society:
For years, feminists in the English-speaking school systems have done everything they can to psychologically destroy a generation of boys, calling their masculinity “problematic”, “hegemonic” and “toxic”.
At their least malign, feminist teachers have made it clear to boys that their perspectives and experiences aren’t as important as those of girls. Many businesses and organizations support programs aimed at girls’ academic success; there are no equivalent programs for boys. When study after study shows boys lagging behind girls in school, many feminists don’t even pretend to care, blaming the boys, as did Australian feminist Jane Caro, for their alleged privilege. Such ideologues continue to call for more feminist teaching, and moreover take direct aim at schoolboys’ maleness in what scholar Paul Nathanson has identified as a form of identity harassment, a pervasive psychological assault that creates doubt, shame, and alienation.
Under the feminist model, boys learn from a young age that their sex is responsible for violence and other serious harms, and that they must take personal responsibility for it. A few years ago, it came to light that the female principal of an Australian school thought it a good idea to hold an assembly in which the boys were to apologize for male misbehavior to the girl next to them. Naturally, no girls are ever expected to apologize to boys for the misdeeds of the female sex.
Calls regularly circulate, as in the West Australian‘s “How We Stop This Kid Becoming a Monster“, for teaching to address the problem of predatory masculinity. Unless the feminist deprogrammers can get to work in the early years, we’re told, the boys will succumb to their inner monster. Boys learn that they can hurt girls and women even without meaning to, just by looking at them or holding traditional views. As we’ll see, any boy who objects to his own vilification will learn that objecting itself is a technique of domination.
Teaching Toxic Masculinity
A recent report on UK schools provided a glimpse into what feminist instruction looks like, revealing that terms such as “hegemonic masculinity” and “toxic masculinity”, until a decade ago part of the radical feminist fringe, are now in the mainstream of pedagogy even in the lower grades.
The Family Education Trust surveyed materials used by UK schools in their sex education classes. Out of 197 schools that responded to a request for information (more than 100 did not respond), 62 schools confirmed that they were teaching about toxic masculinity. 10 schools even admitted to teaching that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society“. (One would be relieved to hear that the principals of such schools and all participating teachers were immediately sanctioned, or at least told to stop such claptrap — but of course such has not occurred.)
One slide from a lesson on toxic masculinity stated that while “masculinity in and of itself is not necessarily a harmful thing […] the way that masculinity is traditionally defined in society can be problematic”. Some of the materials don’t even make sense, as for example the statement that traditional masculine traits “can be limiting for women, girls and other people who don’t identify as men, who are not expected to display these traits”.
September 27, 2024
QotD: Nietzsche – a gamma male incel?
If you aren’t familiar with Vox Day’s sociosexual hierarchy [SSH], you can find the definition of its categories at his Sigma Game Substack here. Briefly, the SSH classifies men (and only men) according to the ways they relate to one another, and therefore (since women are exquisitely socially sensitive), to women. It divides men into the following categories: alphas, the natural leaders who get most of the female attention; betas or bravos, who are not Pyjama Boy, but rather the alpha’s lieutenants and capos, enforcing the alpha’s rule and getting some of the female attention that spills out of his penumbra; gammas, who are essentially low-t nerds with poor social skills that scare the hoes; deltas, who are basically the workers, the ordinary joes who keep everything running, and are sometimes after much struggle successful in landing a waifu; omegas, who are at the bottom of the hierarchy, neither receiving much from it nor contributing anything to it, and never leave their dirty basements; sigmas, who are essentially lone wolves with an ambivalent relationship to the hierarchy, which they don’t really care about (they have their own, more interesting thing they’re doing, which they’re happy to do alone if necessary), but nevertheless do quite well within it, often challenging the alpha’s authority without intending to; and lambdas, who exist outside of the sociosexual hierarchy because they are literally gay.
If you want an image of the SSH, consider your typical American high-school in the 1980s. The alpha is the captain of the football team; the betas are the other football team players; the gammas are the chess club nerds; the deltas are the normal kids with nothing much remarkable about them; the sigma is the kid in the metal shirt who cuts class because it bores him and then shows up at the party with a hot girl from a different school that no one has met before; the omegas are the dropout welfare trash kids; and the lambdas are the theatre kids.
So, was Nietzsche a gamma male incel? Was he a loser and a nerd?
Of course he was. Vox is absolutely correct about this.
Christians will usually follow up the gamma male incel attack by noting the absurd contrast between Nietzsche’s lived reality, as a frail neurasthenic with a terminal case of oneitis who could be sent into days of migraines by a chance encounter with a caffeinated beverage, and the concept of the Ubermensch he preached in his writings, most notably in his very strange novel? prose poem? mental breakdown? Thus Spake Zarathustra. By the same token we might note that Virgil was no Aeneas. The character created by the artist is not the artist; if the artist was the character, he’d be too busy running around doing heroic character things, not hunched over in his scriptorium scribbling away with ink-stained fingers.
And make no mistake about it – Nietzsche was as much the poet as the philosopher, indeed, probably more poet than philosopher. One of the most common complaints you’ll hear about Nietzsche is that it’s not at all clear, much of the time, what he’s getting at. What is the actual argument here? people will ask. They’re used to philosophers whose turgid prose is a loose string of logical syllogisms, composed with all the charm of a mathematical derivation. The wild electricity of Nietzsche’s divine madness is an entirely different genre.
We call Nietzsche a philosopher because that’s the closest category we have to throw him in, but this is a poor categorization. Nietzsche’s mind – and yes, this may well be because it was broken by syphilis – did not proceed according to the narrow rails enforced by a rigid adherence to logic and reason. It was not weighed down by the gravity of methodological rigour. That is not to say that he did not apply reason, simply that he was not limited to it. He made use of revelation, of inspiration, just as much. He felt as much as he thought when he wrote, inhabiting the ideas he developed with his passion as much as his intellect. He thought with his whole brain, using both his left hemisphere and his right – in Nietzsche’s language, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Being aware that philosophy specifically, and Western thought more generally, was to an extraordinary and even pathological degree locked into the left-hemisphere mode, into the Apollonian realm of rational dialectic, he went out of his way to cultivate the Dionysian instead, to get into touch with his intuitive, subconscious, “irrational” mind. As much as Nietzsche was a philosopher, he was also an artist, a poet1, a mystic, and even, dare I say it, a prophet.
None of which is to say that he was not also a giant loser.
But then, most philosophers are nerds who are bad with the ladies. There are exceptions, of course. There is no record of Plato being bad with the ladies; Plato’s tastes are reputed to have run in different directions.
John Carter, “The Prophet of the Twentieth Century”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-06-25.
1. He published a volume of actual poetry, which wasn’t very good; he also dabbled in musical composition, which was even worse.
September 26, 2024
QotD: The Asshole License, First Class
Passive-aggressive behavior is characterized by a pattern of passive hostility and an avoidance of direct communication. Inaction where some action is socially customary is a typical passive-aggressive strategy (showing up late for functions, staying silent when a response is expected). Such behavior is sometimes protested by associates, evoking exasperation or confusion. People who are recipients of passive-aggressive behavior may experience anxiety due to the discordance between what they perceive and what the perpetrator is saying.
There’s definitely a lot of that going around, but it doesn’t describe the behavior of the apple polishers, or the people who have issued themselves the Asshole License. You know the ones I mean: SJWs, of course, but also CrossFitters, vegans, cyclists … basically, anyone who takes up a certain cause or lifestyle seemingly for the sole purpose of being an enormous douchebag about it in every possible social situation. Neither I nor anyone else would have a problem with vegans, say, if they really were doing it for their health, as they so often claim, because if they really were doing it for their health, they’d bring it up once, and then forever shut the fuck up about it.
But they don’t. Similarly, nobody would have a problem with bike riders if they’d just follow the goddamn rules of the road. But they don’t, and the more “cyclist” shit they own — the racing bikes made out of space station parts, the lycra bodysuits, the helmets that look like cranial jockstraps — the less the rules of the road apply to them. Spot one of those fuckers in full kit, and you’re guaranteed to see him weaving in and out of four lanes, turning abruptly without signaling, and blowing through stop signs at full speed, with nary a glance at cross traffic. They’re possessors of the Asshole License First Class, you see, so obviously the rules don’t apply when they’re doing their Official Asshole Thing.
See what I mean? That’s not “passive-aggressive”. But it’s not “active-aggressive” either. They’re not trying to pick a fight. It’s like virtue-signaling, in that you, the audience, are absolutely necessary, but unlike the standard virtue-signal, which is strictly an intra-Leftist competition, this one entails hostility towards the rest of the world, not just toward fellow Leftists …
Severian, “The Passive-Aggressive Society”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-24.
September 18, 2024
Sexual objectification … is it okay when you do it to yourself?
On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo talks about the “Curious Case of the Self-Objectifying Feminist”:
Not long ago, a British campaign for affirmative consent legislation featured images of women paired with the slogan “I’m asking for it“. The whole point, of course, is that they’re not asking for “it”. The phrase is meant to evoke men who justify their sexual assaults of women by claiming that the victim wanted to be raped. What the women are asking for is legislation to make it a criminal offence for a man to have a sexual encounter with a woman without eliciting an explicit “Yes” from her at every stage (how far we have moved from the relatively simple “No means no”).
The most striking of the ads features the face of Charlotte Proudman, the well-known feminist barrister and zealous anti-male advocate who once denounced a fellow lawyer for complimenting her LinkedIn photo. In the picture, Proudman confronts the viewer with a sexy, smoldering look and a slight half-smile. Her face is carefully made up to accentuate her feminine sexuality, with dark-tinted eyelashes and gleaming red lips outlined in vivid lip gloss. In order to object to men’s sexualization of women, Proudman has sexualized herself.
We are told that the campaign was “deliberately bold and intentionally provocative”. It was designed to “stop viewers in their tracks“, so that we would think about how women are mistreated under the law. Male viewers whose minds stray to sex are, one can only assume, to be brought up short, ashamed and convicted of sin.
The double messaging is deliberate — but confusing. Most people looking at Charlotte Proudman’s sex-kitten face will not, in my opinion, contemplate misogynistic attitudes or the scourge of sexual violence. On the contrary, most viewers will be “stopped in their tracks” by the overtness of Proudman’s sensual self-display. It seems odd that an ad claiming that women should not be seen to invite sexual advances features a woman who seems to be inviting sexual advances.
Feminists have for decades claimed that such sexualization has been forced on women to their detriment. In the fashion industry, in movies, and in daily life, according to feminist philosophers like Sandra Lee Bartky, men compel women to advertise their sexuality as their primary power, to redden their lips, assume sexual poses and flatter the voracious male gaze, becoming “object and prey for the man“.
For centuries, we’re told, patriarchal societies denied women the opportunity to do anything with their lives but live out male sexual fantasies, whether as virgin or whore, Madonna or muse. A male-defined culture made the woman accentuate her youth, shave her legs, remain svelte, and present herself for visual consumption, “living her body as seen by another, an anonymous patriarchal Other“: a degrading spectacle from which all women would be better off free.
Yet here is a campaign designed by feminists to support alleged rape victims, with the same (objectionable) self-presentation by the ad’s primary subject, who is obviously not posing against her will and obviously has many choices about how to present herself. The only difference, it seems, is that in this case, the woman’s self-display is entirely of her own defiant volition.
One wouldn’t think that would be sufficient for a diehard feminist like Proudman, or for any equality-minded modern woman with a thousand choices about what to do with her life.
When I was a little girl in the early 1970s, I took it for granted that self-respecting women wanted to be appreciated for the qualities of their minds and characters. One of the first slogans I remember was the somewhat puzzling “Love me for my mind, not my body”. At the time, around six or seven years old, I thought it would be nice to be loved for any reason. Only later did I understand the implication: to be loved for one’s body was not truly to be loved at all, for the body was a superficial, mutable aspect of the self, destined to deteriorate with time. Moreover, according to the general feminist perspective, the body was all that sexist men cared about, especially the sexual parts. This was objectification, the reduction of the whole woman with all she had to offer (her kindness, her wit, her unique thoughts) to a thing. It was shameful and degrading.
September 16, 2024
Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”
Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):
It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.
What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.
The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.
According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.
Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.
Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.
In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.
Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.
In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.
September 13, 2024
QotD: Cargo cult thinking and status seeking
Flashing actual stacks of money is the crudest possible status display, and I can 99.9% guarantee you that anyone who does something like this on social media is engaged in some kind of criminal behavior. People who obtain wealth by honest means are not prone to such shameless ostentation, and this kind of cargo-cult behavior exhibits a level of stupidity that is not usually compatible with economic success.
Robert Stacy McCain, “The Cargo Cult Mentality”, The Other McCain, 2019-12-20.
September 9, 2024
QotD: Clothing
James Lileks, Screedblog, 2005-07-25.
August 30, 2024
The urge to power
At Mindset Shifts, Barry Brownstein explains why the urge to gain power over other people is particularly strong in those who don’t have meaningful lives of their own:
King Louis XIV, the “Sun King”.
Portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743) sometime in 1700 or 1701 from the Louvre via Wikimedia Commons.
One of my more memorable exchanges with a student came in a principles of economics class. Part of the assignment for that week was chapters from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Ridley compared the living standards of an average worker today with those of The Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1700. Some of my more ahistorical students were incredulous at Ridley’s description of the grinding poverty of the average person just a few centuries ago.
The King had an opulent lifestyle compared to others. Louis had an astonishing 498 workers preparing each of his meals. Yet his standard of living was still a fraction of what we experience today.
Ridley outlined the miracles of specialization and exchange in our time — an everyday cornucopia at the supermarket, modern communications and transportation, clothing to suit every taste. If we remove our blinders and see how many individuals provide services to us, Ridley concludes we have “far more than 498 servants at [our] immediate beck and call”.
Then, the memorable exchange occurred. One student shared that he would prefer to live in 1700, if he had more money than others and power over them. My first reaction was amusement; I thought the student was practicing his deadpan humor skills. He wasn’t. For him, having power was an attribute of a meaningful life.
If only my student’s mindset were an aberration.
During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”. Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.
Pascal asks us to imagine a king with “all the blessings with which you could be endowed”. A king, Pascal told us, if he has no “diversions” from his thinking, will “ponder and reflect on what he is”. Pascal’s hypothetical king will be miserable because he “is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease”.
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition.” That is why “war and high office are so popular”, Pascal argued.
Pascal argues individuals seek to be “diverted from thinking of what they are”. I would argue a better choice of words is what they have made of themselves.
I’ll let the reader decide how many modern politicians Pascal’s ideas apply to. With Pascal’s insight, we understand why conflict is a feature of politics and not a bug.
Pascal spares no one’s feelings. Some “seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness”. For them, “rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. [They] must get away from it and crave excitement.”
Let that sink in. A person able to exercise coercive power can use their morally undeveloped “wretched” mind to create endless misery for others merely because exercising power distracts them from their failures as human beings.
August 26, 2024
David Friedman – “my fargroup … are being attacked by my outgroup. My enemy’s enemy …”
I’m much of David Friedman‘s opinion on the candidates for both the Democratic and Republican parties in the current US presidential election … and I also find myself leaning more toward Trump even though his re-election would almost certainly be worse for Canada:
Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.
My opinion of the election is “a plague on both your houses”. Kamala Harris is an extreme representative of an ideology I have opposed for most of my life. Donald Trump has three major positions on two of which, immigration and trade, he manages to be even worse than his opponent. While I have some sympathy for his views on the third — I have been arguing against an interventionist foreign policy for something over fifty years now — I do not trust him to execute a consistent and competent alternative. His disinterest in whether what he says is true, extreme even for a politician, I find offensive.
That is my intellectual view of the matter. It is not my emotional view. Reading news stories and observing the effect on my feelings, I note that I am reacting like a Trump partisan. Poll results that look good for him make me happy, poll results that look bad for him make me sad. Accounts of outrageous statements by Trump or Vance I ignore — I don’t expect them to tell the truth. Accounts of demagoguery by Harris or Waltz arouse feelings of indignation. If Harris wins I will feel disappointed. If Trump wins I will feel relieved, at least until the first outrageous thing he does.
The explanation of my inconsistent reaction is provided by Scott Alexander in “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup“, one of the best of his many good essays. In it he points out that someone’s outgroup, the group for whom he feels and expresses strongly negative views, is typically made up not of people distant from him, geographically and intellectually, but of people close. The outgroup of the Nazis was not their Japanese allies or the Chinese the Japanese were fighting, it was German Jews, people with the same language and, in most respects, the same appearance and culture. The outgroup of American leftists is not Muslim fundamentalists but American conservatives.
Conservatives have doubts about gay marriage. Muslim fundamentalists view homosexual intercourse as a capital offense.1 American conservatives would like their schools to be more tolerant of creationism. Muslim fundamentalists want their schools to teach the truth of Islam. And yet, when conservatives criticize Muslims, leftists defend them. When Muslims kill Jews and Jews respond by killing Muslims, it is the Muslims that the American leftists support, the Jews that they blame — although Israelis have much more in common, ideologically as well as culturally, with American leftists than Palestinians do.
We think of groups close to us in Near Mode, judging them on their merits as useful allies or dangerous enemies. We think of more distant groups in Far Mode – usually, we exoticize them. Sometimes it’s positive exoticization of the Noble Savage variety (understood so broadly that our treatment of Tibetans counts as an example of the trope). Other times it’s negative exoticization, treating them as cartoonish stereotypes of evil who are more funny or fascinating than repulsive. Take Genghis Khan – objectively he was one of the most evil people of all time, killing millions of victims, but since we think of him in Far Mode he becomes fascinating or even perversely admirable – “wow, that was one impressively bloodthirsty warlord”. (Scott Alexander, “Post-Partisanship Is Hyper-Partisanship“)
Conservatives are the leftists’ outgroup, Muslims their far group. The far group can be ignored; large parts of the world are more sexist and more racist than any part of America but invisible to progressives campaigning against sexism and racism. The far group can even be supported, at least if the outgroup is attacking it. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Muslim fundamentalists. Hamas.
Kamala Harris is an American leftist. American leftists are my outgroup. Trump and Vance are American populists. I disagree with their views, in some cases more than I disagree with the views of American leftists, but I have nothing against them, just as I have nothing against believing Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Black Muslims or believers in Christian Science.
Trump and his movement are my fargroup. They are being attacked by my outgroup. My enemy’s enemy …
1. In some times and places Muslim culture has been tolerant of homosexuality; there are two famous medieval essays on the relative attractions of homosexual and heterosexual intercourse and quite a lot of poetry celebrating homosexual love. But the religious doctrine, which fundamentalists take seriously, holds homosexuality to be forbidden.
August 12, 2024
QotD: The key attraction of video games to young men
That would explain video game escapism/addiction amongst men. It’s a little world where there are predictable rules and outcomes and one can succeed much easier than in the unpredictable real world with ever-changing rules.
I think this is a really important point deserving of more attention.
Yes. Video games are a drug aimed straight at the receptor that is male need for agency. They’re a superstimulus for it in exactly the same way that pornography is a superstimulus for desire.
I don’t have a policy prescription about this or anything. But it’s a connection that matters.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-05-06.
August 11, 2024
Tears are still a powerful weapon for female politicians
Janice Fiamengo on the tactic available to — and resorted to frequently — only females in politics, turning on the waterworks to generate sympathy and support:
Recently, a friend sent me a news article that illustrates, in small, the world of Anglophone politics, in which notions of what is owed to women, who are understood to be far more sensitive and fragile than men, operate alongside stern interdictions against stating that women are in any manner unsuited for strenuous, high stress roles.
Last week, an ABC News report detailed years-old allegations against a former aide to Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania who was, at the time of the article, one of Kamala Harris’s touted VP possibilities (she has since chosen Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota). Shapiro’s former staffer, Mike Vereb, who resigned in 2023 over a sexual harassment allegation, is said to have brought a woman to tears in 2018 with threats made over the phone (“You will be less than nothing by the time Josh and I get done with you”, he is alleged to have said).
The woman, who runs an advocacy group, was left “weeping and in shock standing alone in a parking lot”. She did not report the alleged incident until she heard about the aide’s resignation five years later.
[…]
With the staffer long gone from Shapiro’s administration, the story had legs only because it was about a man who made a woman cry.
The problem is that women do cry rather frequently in politics. And complain. And perform their sensitivity to criticisms, monikers, crude jokes, the faux terror of J6, and bantering innuendo. Far too often such women make politics about them as women and about the trouble men allegedly cause them.
Such was the case with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who earned plaudits from feminists in 2012 for a fury-filled speech in the House of Representatives about sexism, in which she accused the opposition leader of misogyny for a number of statements he’d made that were not at all misogynistic, including that women were likely under-represented in Australian institutions of power because men were “more adapted to exercise authority”. Gillard also said she was “personally offended” (a more serious state of affairs, one assumes, than simply being “offended”) by the opposition leader’s contention that abortion was “the easy way out”. (The text of her speech is here.) “Julia Gillard’s Attack on Sexism Hailed as Turning Point for Australian Women” ran one enthusiastic headline. And perhaps it was, signaling the point at which women in politics stopped thinking they should accommodate themselves to the rigors of public life, and decided that politicians must instead accommodate themselves to the rigors of women’s demands.
Even seemingly tough-as-nails Hillary Clinton has been allowed to go from interview to interview revisiting the now years-old indignity of her election loss in 2016, like a once-popular debutante who can’t believe she didn’t make the cheerleading squad. No man would ever be given such a prolonged pity party. Having contended for years that it was misogyny that prevented her from beating Donald Trump, she more recently pointed her finger at female voters’ failures of confidence: “They left me [in the final days of the campaign] because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect“, she explained in May, 2024. No one seems to have informed Clinton that nothing reveals her crippling unsuitability for leadership than her embarrassing refusal to stop feeling sorry for herself.
And she is, alas, far from unique. Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, sat and sobbed at last winter’s Covid-19 Inquiry in Edinburgh, deflecting critical questions about her government’s actions during the pandemic by proclaiming that she would carry the impact of them for as long as she lived. Forget the thousands of Scots who suffered or even died because of those decisions: the woman in charge was the one in need of compassion. Sturgeon had previously made a career of complaining about the sexism that allegedly put obstacles in the way of female politicians. Her focus on her own emotional discomfort at the Covid inquiry did more than any naysayers to indict the feminine style. How refreshing if either of these women could simply accept responsibility for their failures.
