Don’t even get me started on supposedly-adult men of voting age who are infatuated with My Little Pony (a.k.a. “Bronies”). Great Napoleon’s bleeding ulcers, it actually turns my stomach to read about these fucking losers.
At the risk of sounding all White Christian Male and stuff [irony alert], allow me to remind everyone of this excellent precept from Corinthians:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Except that men aren’t doing any of that. Instead, they’re clinging to the artifacts of their childhood, hoping that Mommy will be there to keep the Big Bad Wolf/Zombies away.
What will inevitably happen is calamity. As Charles Norman puts it: “The world is running out of grown-ups. It will probably take tragedies and a prolonged era of diminished affluence for people to grow up.”
Like I said: calamity.
Kim du Toit, “Kiddies”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-08-22.
December 15, 2023
QotD: Delayed onset adulthood
December 14, 2023
Whatever it is, it sure ain’t Stoicism …
Freddie deBoer doesn’t have a catchy name for this, but you’ll recognize it instantly from the description:
For years now, I’ve written once or twice annually about a phenomenon that I’ve struggled to name but which everyone understands. It’s a particular kind of social and aesthetic culture, not exclusive to Instagram but very heavily associated with it, that merges girlboss feminism with the contemporary therapeutic imperative, a strange syncretic mysticism involving horoscopes and “manifesting”, and a blanket excuse for narcissism and selfishness dressed up in quasi-political and self-help terms. You know what I mean.
Some of these memes are comically ridiculous, most of them are fairly innocuous, and a few of them make me deeply sad. But they all reveal a tangle of conflicting attitudes and ideas that are quite confused. You would never assemble these various impulses into a life philosophy on purpose; they’ve been grafted together mostly thanks to the weird rhythms and path dependence of social media. Either way, I’ve argued that they present an essential problem with any kind of “I can have it all” philosophy — millions of people absorb this stuff, and because many of the things we want in life are zero sum, not all of them in fact can have it all. Almost all of them, in fact, will get very much less than it all. You have this absurd manifesting/The Secret stuff, where grown adults genuinely convince themselves that they can will what they want into being simply through wanting it. Well, alright: what if two people want the same promotion at work, and they’re both manifesting it? The clod philosophy this is all attached to says that whoever wins wanted it more, and since wanting can’t be quantified, no one can ever prove that isn’t true. (Convenient!) Regardless, in the case of the singular promotion and two people manifesting for it, only one of the people who has read endless memes like these actually ends up being self-actualized by success. This is OK; life can be full of contentment and disappointment at the same time. Part of what makes this kind of messaging pernicious, though, is that it suggests that not getting everything you want is always a personal failure you shouldn’t accept.
It is not possible that God promised the whole garden to everyone. (That’s not how fractions work, even for God.) It is not socially responsible to believe that you are entitled to the whole garden. And setting yourself up to see anything short of the whole garden as failure is a recipe for making yourself miserable.
That’s related to another point I’ve made, which is that these memes create an unachievable expectation that healthy, successful women aren’t in possession of ordinary confidence but of lunatic confidence, a kind of confidence rarely seen outside of Michael Jordan or bipolar mania. In a particularly perverse irony of the sort that seems to usually afflict women, this demand for outrageous self-confidence becomes just another bar that women feel like they can’t meet. A whole affirmational culture that ostensibly exists to help and affirm and praise women ends up being just one more on the long list of expectations that our society heaps on them: hard-charging and career-oriented but always putting family first, well put-together but always effortless, sexy but not slutty, Madonna and whore, you know the whole deal. I’m sorry that this stuff is so gendered, but it is, and I’m sorry that I’m the wrong messenger on this topic, but no one else is making these arguments, so I must. Yes, I concede that for most people who indulge in this stuff, it’s a harmless hobby that maybe pushes them to be a little better to themselves. But as time goes on, the messaging has grown more and more deranged, and young people are very susceptible to this sort of thing. And my job is to worry.
Pervasive disrespect for the human form in art (and everything else) is a leading indicator of collapse
My headline isn’t exactly what Ted Gioia says here (although this is only the beginning of his article, as the rest is behind a paywall) but it’s definitely an aspect of what he’s seeing:
For thousands of years, flourishing societies treated the human form with love and respect.
The connection is hard to describe with precision. But, it seems, you can’t make much progress promoting human rights if you don’t start with some degree of reverence for the embodied individual.
Even neanderthals knew about ornamentation and figurative art, but paintings of actual people, created by communities along the Nile River, some 8,000 years ago, signaled the rise of more advanced, stable institutions. It’s no coincidence that democracy and personal autonomy in Greece and Rome happened in conjunction with obsessively realistic renderings of the human body.
Much of this was lost in the post-classical world, but Renaissance artists rediscovered this passion for the human figure — which was embedded in its nurturing of science, art, and free inquiry
But something very different is happening in our own time.
I won’t offer any theories today. I’ll just share the facts — in the form of news stories, all about different subjects.
None of these stories have any direct connection with the others. Yet they fit together like the pieces of a strange puzzle. The picture they make is ominous.
Maybe you have some explanations. In the meantime, let’s just plunge in …
1. You can’t hear people talking in movies — because directors prefer to share background sounds.
“I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I’ve noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it’s not due to hearing loss on my end. It’s gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I’ve defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don’t miss anything crucial to the plot.”2. Lead vocalists are getting quieter while the sound of the instruments become louder.
“Lead vocalists have gotten quieter over the decades, compared with the rest of the band. That’s the conclusion of a new study that analyzes chart-topping pop tunes from 1946 to 2020 …”3. Anthropophobia — the fear of other people — is on the rise.
“Anthropophobia, or the fear of people, has so far been America’s most searched-for phobia this year. In that study, anthropophobia accounted for 22% of all phobias that people searched for online, a five-fold increase over 2019. And the state-by-state results affirm common stereotypes. New York’s most-searched phobia in 2020, for example, has been “philophobia.” That’s a big word for the fear of intimacy.”4. Time spent alone is rising for all demographic groups.
“According to data from the American Time Use Survey, the amount of time people spent with their friends, family and other companions was mostly unchanged between 1970 and 2013. Then, after decades of stability, the numbers began falling. By 2019, on average people were spending almost three hours less with their friends than only six years earlier, and four hours less with their family, neighbors and other companions.
“None of that time was transferred to more time with partners, children or others. All of it was swallowed up by time spent alone … Strikingly, the average American teenager today spends 11 hours fewer with their friends than they did only eight years ago, and 12 hours more time alone.”
5. Clothing retailers replace realistic mannequins with abstract forms.
“There were a ton of used mannequins sitting in retailers’ attics and storerooms. Every time they re-merchandised or remodeled, they were bringing in new mannequins to replace the old, increasingly replacing realistics with abstracts. And it wasn’t just full mannequins, it was head forms, leg forms, maternity mannequins, swimwear mannequins and all kinds of props, as well. Retailers would throw these items in the trash.”6. Social media causes children to dislike their own bodies.
“Three out of four children as young as 12 dislike their bodies and are embarrassed by the way they look, increasing to eight in 10 young people aged 18 to 21 … Nearly half of all children and young people aged from 12 to 21 questioned said they have become withdrawn, started exercising excessively, stopped socialising completely or self-harmed because they are regularly bullied or trolled online about their physical appearance.
December 13, 2023
QotD: Woke psychiatry
No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.
Here are some of the most relevant presentations listed in my Guidebook:
Saturday, May 18
- Climate Psychiatry 101: What Every Psychiatrist Should Know
- Women’s Health In The US: Disruption And Exclusion In The Time Of Trump
- Gender Bias In Academic Psychiatry In The Era Of the #MeToo Movement
- Revitalizing Psychiatry – And Our World – With A Social Lens
- Hip-Hop: Cultural Touchstone, Social Commentary, Therapeutic Expression, And Poetic Intervention
- Lost Boys Of Sudan: Immigration As An Escape Route For Survival
- Treating Muslim Patients After The Travel Ban: Best Practices In Using The APA Muslim Mental Health Toolkit
- Making The Invisible Visible: Using Art To Explore Bias And Hierarchy In Medicine
- Navigating Racism: Addressing The Pervasive Role Of Racial Bias In Mental Health
Sunday, May 20
- Addressing Microaggressions Toward Sexual And Gender Minorities: Caring For LGBTQ+ Patients And Providers
- Latino Undocumented Children And Families: Crisis At The Border And Beyond
- Racism And Psychiatry: Growing A Diverse Psychiatric Workforce And Developing Structurally Competent Psychiatric Providers
- Sex, Drugs, And Culturally Responsive Treatment: Addressing Substance Use Disorders In The Context Of Sexual And Gender Diversity
- Grabbing The Third Rail: Race And Racism In Clinical Documentation
- Racism And The War On Terror: Implications For Mental Health Providers In The United States
- The Multiple Faces Of Deportation: Being A Solution To The Challenges Faced By Asylum Seekers, Mixed Status Families, And Dreamers
- What Should The APA Do About Climate Change?
- Intersectionality 2.0: How The Film Moonlight Can Teach Us About Inclusion And Therapeutic Alliance In Minority LGBTQ Populations
- Transgender Care: How Psychiatrists Can Decrease Barriers And Provide Gender-Affirming Care
- Gun Violence Is A Serious Public Health Problem Among America’s Adolescents And Emerging Adults: What Should Psychiatrists Know And Do About It?
- Working Clinically With Eco-Anxiety In The Age Of Climate Change: What Do We Know And What Can We Do?
- Are There Structural Determinants Of African-American Child Mental Health? Child Welfare – A System Psychiatrists Should Scrutinize
Monday, May 21
- Community Activism Narratives In Organized Medicine: Homosexuality, Mental Health, Social Justice, and the American Psychiatric Association
- Disrupting The Status Quo: Addressing Racism In Medical Education And Residency Training
- Ecological Grief, Eco-Anxiety, And Transformational Resilience: A Public health Perspective On Addressing Mental Health Impacts Of Climate Change
- Immigration Status As A Social Determinant Of Mental Health: What Can Psychiatrists Do To Support Patients And Communities? A Call To Action
- Psychiatry In The City Of Quartz: Notes On The Clinical Ethnography Of Severe Mental Illness And Social Inequality
- Racism And Psychiatry: Understanding Context And Developing Policies For Undoing Structural Racism
- Trauma Inflicted To Immigrant Children And Parents Through Policy Of Forced Family Separation
- Deportation And Detention: Addressing The Psychosocial Impact On Migrant Children And Families
- How Private Insurance Fails Those With Mental Illness: The Case For Single-Payer Health Care
- Imams In Mental Health: Caring For Themselves While Caring For Others
- Misogynist Ideology And Involuntary Celibacy: Prescription For Violence?
- Advocacy: A Hallmark Of Psychiatrists Serving Minorities
- Inequity By Structural Design: Psychiatrists’ Responsibility To Be Informed Advocates For Systemic Education And Criminal Justice Reform
- Treating Black Children And Families: What Are We Overlooking?
- Blindspotting: An Exploration Of Implicit Bias, Race-Based Trauma, And Empathy
- But I’m Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry
- No Blacks, Fats, or Femmes: Stereotyping In The Gay Community And Issues Of Racism, Body Image, And Masculinity
- Silence Is Not Always Golden: Interrupting Offensive Remarks And Microaggressions
- Black Minds Matter: The Impact Of #BlackLivesMatter On Psychiatry
… you get the idea, please don’t make me keep writing these.
Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.
I’m reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.
Scott Alexander, “The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-22.
December 12, 2023
On Machiavelli
Rob Henderson dips into the works of Niccolo Macchiavelli, not so you don’t have to, but perhaps in hopes you’ll do so as well:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
This is an overview of Niccolò Machiavelli — his backstory, his personal views, a summary of Machiavellian thought, and an explanation for why his ideas have been so despised throughout history.
Throughout his books, Machiavelli seems to take delight in demonstrating — much to his reader’s discomfort — the distance between our lofty intentions and the actual consequences of our deeds.
Writing in the sixteenth century, Machiavelli anticipated Nietzsche’s conception of master and slave morality by some three hundred years.
In Ch. 15 of The Prince he wrote:
Since it is my intent to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of things than to the imagination of it … many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth … he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
This passage is often viewed as the essence of Machiavellianism. He had no intentions of disguising unpleasant realities. He wanted to describe the world as it is, and not as people wish it to be.
[…]
Machiavelli rejected the dominant utopian ideas of his day, including Platonic or Augustinian cities of God and the concept of Christian universalism (or its modern variant of Humanism).
Machiavelli warns rulers to be on guard against those who do not see men as they are, and see them through spectacles colored by their hopes and wishes, their loves and hatreds, in terms of an idealized image that they want men to be, and not as they are.
Some pieces of advice Machiavelli offers to rulers:
- Employ brutality or kindness, as the case requires. Brutality is usually more effective, but kindness, in some situations, bears more fruit
- It’s better to be feared than loved. Love is fickle, but fear is predictable. The worst is to be hated. Hatred will lead your subjects to destroy you
- It’s a good idea to keep your people in a state of poverty and always prepared for war. This helps to reduce both ambition and boredom — two qualities that can undermine obedience
- Fierce competition in a society is desirable, for it generates energy and ambition
- Religion must be promoted regardless of how truthful it is, because it supplies social solidarity
- When you confer benefits to the people, make sure to do so yourself. But let minions do the dirty work of inflicting punishments because then they, not you, will be blamed, and you can then gain the people’s favor by cutting off your minions’ heads
- Men prefer vengeance and security to liberty
- If you have to commit a crime, don’t advertise it beforehand. Otherwise your enemies may destroy you before you destroy them
- Punishment should be delivered in a swift and brutal manner, while rewards should be dispersed in small amounts over time
- Be wary of powerful advisors and servants — victorious generals should be purged after they have served their purpose, otherwise they may attempt to usurp you
- You can be violent and use your power to command obedience, but if you break your own laws you will undermine societal stability
- Men should either be caressed or annihilated; appeasement and neutralism always lead to ruin. Your adversaries can recover from minor injuries and setbacks to seek revenge. But if you crush them totally, you neutralize any threat.
- Rulers must live in the constant expectation of war
- Success inspires more devotion than friendliness and affability
- Men will lie to you unless you compel them to be truthful by creating circumstances in which deception will not pay
This list could continue but I’ll stop here.
QotD: “Natural hierarchies” don’t work in distributed systems
Politics, being a distributed system, doesn’t work like that. Neither does the corporate world, which is why both invariably end up dominated by sociopathic, sexually deviant shitweasels. Whereas the social interaction in a bar, in a pickup basketball game, in a church group, whatever, naturally bends towards a baboon troop, “social” interaction in a distributed power structure bends towards whoever has the time, energy, and sheer Wille zur Macht, as our friend above would put it, to dominate it.
Example: Even at the height of his power, when he really could have liquidated everyone in the room with a wave of his hand, Joe Stalin didn’t win arguments with his nomenklatura by threatening to have them all shot. Rather, he outworked them. Even when he exercised the most raw power any one human being is capable of wielding, Stalin’s work ethic was legendary – he spent a minimum of fifteen hours a day at his desk, every day, 365 days a year. He simply ground down all lesser men with the sheer force of his leather ass and cast-iron bladder … and compared to Stalin, when it came to paperwork, all men were lesser men.
That’s a cast of mind, reinforced by the habits of a lifetime. Stalin was also a dominant personality by the end, of course, but he certainly didn’t start that way – he was cringingly servile to Lenin, for instance, and even once to Trotsky, which is probably the main reason Trotsky had to die when you come right down to it.
Hitler was the same way, in his own special, bizarre way. While no one would ever accuse Hitler of an overactive work ethic when it comes to government – those who study these things still can’t get their heads around it, the fact that for long, critical periods the Third Reich basically didn’t have a government – but he could wear you down with the best of them when it came to party speeches, organizing, propaganda. No one worked harder at that stuff than Corporal Hitler … and no one knuckled under to authority faster, which is why he remained Corporal Hitler despite four years on the Western Front.
Combine them, and you get the Big Man On Campus thoroughly dominated by the deviant sociopathic shitweasels. The BMOC dominates every personal interaction; therefore, he thinks it’s the rules which get him where he is. Society is set up, he thinks, to produce people such as himself. And since that society is also set up such that the deviant sociopathic shitweasels (we should probably acronymize that; hereafter, DSS) do the boring shit like student government, when the DSS pass some bizarre law the BMOC just rolls with it …
Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.
December 5, 2023
Vanity does apparently have a limit (for most of us) – it’s about 25%
Rob Henderson explains why so many people — not down-to-earth sensible folks like my readers, of course — seem to have an inflated view of their own attractiveness:
A few years ago, a study on online dating found that people tend to reach up the hierarchy toward potential partners who are more desirable than themselves. On average, people pursued partners who are 25% more desirable than they themselves are.
This is consistent with what the psychologist Roy Baumeister has described as the “optimal margin of illusion”. Generally, people believe they themselves are 10-20% better than they really are.
Thus, people might not knowingly pursue individuals who are more desirable than themselves. Rather, they genuinely believe those individuals are in their league. They think they’re aiming for someone of equal attractiveness to themselves.
Consistent with this idea, a study looked at how people inflate their perceptions of themselves. The researchers brought people into their lab to have their photos taken. The researchers then digitally modified these images to varying degrees by making them look more similar to an attractive person or a less attractive person.
So imagine they take your photo (assuming you’re male) and change the image to look just a little bit more like Brad Pitt. Or a bit more like someone much uglier than you.
A few weeks later, the researchers invited the participants back into the lab and showed them either modified or unaltered photos of themselves.
People were asked to identify their true, unaltered photo among an array of images. One image was their actual photo. Others were morphed to be more or less attractive.
Participants were most likely to guess that their true photo was the one that was modified to be 10 to 20 percent more attractive.
This probably matches your own experience. Consider how you react to candid photos of other people compared to candid photos of yourself. We hear our friends say, “Ugh, that’s a horrible photo of me” and we think “No, that photo is fine, that’s what you look like.” But then we say the same thing when we see candid photos of ourselves. So unflattering.
In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel has written, “That’s why you don’t like candid pictures of yourself: because they capture what you actually look like, not what you think you look like. You prefer the picture of yourself that caught you at just the right angle, on just the right day, and those are the ones you put up on Facebook, Tinder, or in the company directory.”
This pattern of self-enhancement extends beyond just physical attractiveness.
I’ve written before about the “better-than-average effect”. A large body of research has found that people tend to believe they are more intelligent, trustworthy, and have a better sense of humor than others. A recent study found that people believe they use ChatGPT more critically, ethically and efficiently than others. People think they are better drivers than average, students think they are better students than average, professors think they are better professors than average.
People do inflate their opinions of themselves. But this only goes so far. People in the photo study chose images that were slightly more attractive than the true photo, but only slightly.
Most people see themselves as just a bit better than they really are.
“Why should a criminal act be punished more or less severely depending on a victim’s ability to emote in public about it?”
Janice Fiamengo with a column that, had it been written by a man, would merit universal condemnation from the mainstream media (instead, if they pay any attention to it will probably dismiss it with hints of “false consciousness” or “Stockholm syndrome”):
For years, activists told us that part of the horror for sexual assault survivors was the fear of not being believed, the feeling that one was alone with an experience no one else understood or even acknowledged. Fair enough. Now, decades into the near-constant discussion of all varieties of such assault, many quite trivial yet treated with great seriousness, women don’t seem to have become any better at dealing with the ostensible horror — quite the opposite. The unending focus on sexual victimization seems only to have created more victims.
A case in point involves the infamous sexual crimes of Dr. Vincent Nadon, a now-disgraced GP at the University of Ottawa Health Clinic, who in late 2018 was sentenced to eight years in prison after he pled guilty to many dozens of counts of voyeurism and sexual assault during a 28-year medical practice. (The exact number of charges was hard to determine, seeming to change in every report). Much of what Nadon pled guilty to — mainly the recording of women via his cellphone while they were undressing or undergoing breast exams — was a type of deeply unprofessional conduct that might have gone forever unnoticed by the victims if one intrepid woman had not seen the cellphone’s recording light winking at her from a cabinet and gone to investigate. There were also allegations of sexual assault nearly indistinguishable in their details from regular medical touching — the main distinction being that the touching was “for sexual purposes”. Witnesses at Nadon’s sentencing hearing spoke of what had occurred, in some cases many years previously, as if it had been the worst possible betrayal.
A report of the sentencing hearing described women wiping away tears as they told of “feelings of powerlessness, embarrassment and even guilt”. Others said they had become distrustful of men after learning of Nadon’s actions. One woman, having been shown by police a cellphone recording made of her in Nadon’s office, claimed that she felt physically ill and “has not been able to go to another doctor, and is uncomfortable undressing, even in front of her husband”. Another woman said she felt “violated and betrayed”, and now “looks for hidden cameras everywhere, is obsessed with locking doors, and has developed a medical condition that can be caused by stress”. Many alleged that they feared seeing videos of themselves on the internet though there is no indication Nadon ever uploaded any of his recordings.
In a separate report about fallout from the charges against Nadon, some women expressed outrage at authorities they saw as complicit in their victimization, with one woman complaining that University of Ottawa Health Services failed to “help [her] tell [her] story and come forward”. This woman, who told how she had not been provided with a gown to wear during a pap smear procedure with Nadon, was also furious at the University of Ottawa for failing to more closely monitor its health service provider. Her anger was sustained and wide-ranging: “Obviously I’m super traumatized. I feel extremely violated and so sick to my stomach. It’s really, really disgusting.” “It’s even hard for me now to find a therapist I can trust.”
I can’t get inside these women’s heads, of course, but their statements seem hysterical and irrational, far in excess of the facts, and perhaps willfully exaggerated in order to garner the maximum of attention and sympathy. It was disturbing to see such statements presented as if they proved something about the severity of Dr. Nadon’s actions. They prove nothing except the climate of alleged female sexual fragility in which we are all now forced to live.
Victim impact statements are often of dubious value in criminal justice proceedings — why should a criminal act be punished more or less severely depending on a victim’s ability to emote in public about it? — but in a case like this, with damsel-in-distress melodrama having already been stoked by multiple media reports at every stage of the investigation, the victim statements took on a particularly staged, formulaic quality. One had to make an effort to remember that many of the complainants would not even have known they were harmed if police hadn’t shown them that they were. Their pain may have been real, but it was also almost entirely self-generated.
The whole story of Dr. Nadon the beloved physician turned super-predator seems to have been largely manufactured, first and foremost by police, who were so eager to find as many complainants as possible that they repeatedly put out calls through the media for more “victims” to come forward. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, with police stating publicly that they feared there were likely more victims, and issuing “a public plea for help”. What did they expect to happen?
December 1, 2023
“I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me”
Freddie deBoer on the modern phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”:
Collapse in childhood freedom – Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.
For the New York Times, Jessica Grose details how new online grading systems allow parents to track the progress of their children not from year to year, semester to semester, report card to report card, but week to week or even day by day. The results are depressingly predictable, in today’s parenting environment. There’s stress for students and teachers alike, a collapse in interest in learning in and of itself, an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers, and the rise of “hyperchecking”, where parents complain about each and every single grade that isn’t an A. The piece is about K-12, but Grose notes that parents are increasingly seeking access to college online gradebooks, which seems crazy to me; as someone who’s taught a lot of college classes, the idea of someone constantly monitoring a student’s grade with the mindset of a litigious lawyer sounds awful. But then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Here’s a piece about helicopter parenting extending into the college years to the extent that the parents are arranging social calendars. Of their college-age children.
I’ve been thinking about these issues for some time — I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me — and what I can’t stop wondering is why parents don’t stop doing this stuff for the good of their kids themselves. There are social and philosophical critiques to be made of helicopter parenting, some very good ones. But we never need to wonder why people choose to pursue selfish interests over social or philosophical ones. What consistently surprises me is that parents keep puttering along in the clouds above their kids, binoculars in hand, when there seem to be really compelling arguments against doing that for reasons that are completely aligned with the selfish interests of the kids. I get ignoring social responsibility for the sake of your kid; it’s hard to understand ignoring what’s best for your kid for the sake of your kid.
There’s the social case to be made against helicopter parenting, of course. If you wanted to define the essential moral project of human beings in the broadest terms possible, you could do worse than “put others before self”. Aggressive parenting allows people to juke this basic logic — parents who act as though their child’s best interest is the only important criterion are, in a literal sense, putting someone else before themselves. “Hey, I may be disadvantaging already-disadvantaged kids with my hyperactive parenting, but I’m doing it for a greater cause than myself.” And the intrinsic (genetic) dedication to the good of one’s child obliterates the broader social concerns once freed from the guilt of traditional for-myself selfishness. But hyper-parenting still reflects selfishness, putting your own kin above the interest of everyone else, especially in cases where the harm done to society is a lot bigger than the benefit to your child. Academic malfeasance like the Varsity Blues scandal has obvious negative social consequences, for example, while those specific kids faced only going to slightly less competitive or desirable schools had there been no fraud in their applications. Less directly illicit behavior, like grade grubbing — which, among other things, inevitably benefits the students with the parents who are the most aggressive and who hold the most social capital — are a greyer area, but ultimately do more to unbalance an already-unbalanced system. If these parents were confronted with the opportunity to do this for themselves, I genuinely think that most of them would decline, out of a sense of social obligation. But once it’s “for my kid”, it’s no holds barred.
I think absolutely all parenting contains a little narcissism, and that’s OK; it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children. Plus, the sort of second-order selfishness of parenting allows for the sidestepping of more philosophical objections to helicopter parenting. These objections are less about the social good of others and more about the content of our individual characters. These include personal values such as the notion that we just should, as human beings, be able to live with a degree of independence in youth; that we just should experience hardship and the consequences of our actions to better appreciate what it means to be alive; that we just should, as human beings, secure our own interests to whatever degree we’re able, without help from above, including in school; that we just should operate as though we are but one in a broad collection of human beings, all of whom matter as much as we do, for our own spiritual good. The thing about these personal values is that they’re only motivating if they are indeed personal — that is, these might sway an individual, but not even occur to their parents, and in our system parents have remarkable ability to obstruct the agency of their kids. They can do the dirty work the kids might not do for themselves.
November 27, 2023
QotD: The PUA (Pick-up Artist)
One one hand, I recognize techniques like kino escalation. Oh, do I ever! Adroit use of that one has gotten me into the sack more times than I can count. On the other hand, I’m basically incapable of what PUAs call the neg; I can’t insult a woman even by implication unless I think she’s done something to specifically deserve it, and the thought of flinging negs to score sex disgusts me in a very fundamental way.
On the gripping hand … I recognize a harsh truthfulness in a lot of what the PUAs are saying. Crudely put, the “game” advice for most men (the population PUAs call AFCs or “Average Frustrated Chumps”) reduces to behaving like an asshole so women will mistake you for an alpha. I really am an alpha, so I don’t have to asshole-fake it — but it is nevertheless quite clear to me that the PUAs are on to something. This is frequently a successful strategy; I’ve been outcompeted by it myself on several humiliating occasions. Furthermore, the PUAs are probably correct in asserting that for many AFCs it is the best strategy available, and never mind that the thought of running it myself turns my stomach.
In the PUA’s disturbingly persuasive analysis, I’ve had the luxury of not treating women like shit only because I have often had USPs for the brighter-than-average women I was interested in, notably in the combination of alpha-male qualities with high intelligence and expressive skills. Without those USPs, argues the PUA, my choices would have reduced to “frustrated loser” or “sexually successful douchebag” — and, looking at my own experience and that of my less successful peers, I find myself unable to refute this.
That is kind of horrifying if you think about it. Possession of USPs is rare by definition, and if you have one you’re more than averagely likely to be an alpha anyway. The PUA is telling us that human beings are designed in such a way that the most reliable way for the large majority of beta males to get sex is to behave like narcissistic, dominating, emotionally-unavailable jerks. This would be appalling enough as pure theory, but the PUA makes it worse by applying it to actually have lots of sex. “Success” one blog unsparingly observes “is defined by penis in vagina”. Never take your eye off that ball, says the PUA. Much as one might like to dismiss this as crass reductionism, evolutionary theory makes any countercase rather difficult to argue.
How did our poor species get into this hole? The PUA community gravitates to evolutionary-psychology explanations for human behavior as much as I do, it’s one of the interesting things about reading their stuff. It’s remarkable how often they manage to apply facts about human reproductive biology in a tactical way. The use they make of evo-bio concepts like hypergamy, peacocking, and sexy-son theory is, I find, sound and justified. The kind of pitiless clinical eye they turn on human mating interactions could scarcely be bettered by most scientists.
But the PUAs don’t, at least so far as I’ve yet seen, have a generative explanation for why women friend-zone nice guys and fuck bad boys. They accept this as the foundation of game without asking what circumstances in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness stuck women with apparently counterproductive wiring.
I’ve thought about this, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must have been reliable indicators of superior status. Perhaps they were much more risky to fake in a small society where beta males were almost constantly under they eye of senior alphas with hard fists.
Meanwhile, back in modernity, we’re stuck with the consequences – men who have been trained to be imitation-alpha jerks and abusers by women who are sexually fickle, manipulative and cruel towards beta males. It’s not a pretty picture, not if you’re looking in from halfway outside it like me and certainly not if you’re stuck in the middle of it as an invisible AFC or a woman wondering why she’s surrounded by douchebags.
Eric S. Raymond, “A natural contemplates game”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-03-03.
November 23, 2023
Clown world is what you get when children run things in the real world
Theophilus Chilton on the overgrown children who populate what used to be the adult world in the West:
If you’ve been around dissident Right circles for any length of time, you’re probably seen the term “clown world” used to describe the modern Western world. If you’ve paid any attention at all to the state of the world around us, you know just how apt of a description that term really is. Modernity as it is expressed today transcends the types of degeneracy and corruption that have been seen in previous decadent periods and has plumbed to nadirs of human depravity that previous generations would have literally found unspeakable because they would not have had the vocabulary to even describe them. To any rational adult observer of any previous age, no matter how dissolute, today’s western social, political, and moral situation would seem completely clownish and unserious.
That this would be the case is practically inevitable given the type of people involved within the plethora of left-wing causes and intersectionality factions. As a general rule, the political and cultural Left are very childish, not just in their behaviour, but also in their worldview, demeanor, and mindset. Any normal person who has ever dealt with them on social media (or the real world, if you’ve had the misfortune) can abundantly testify to this. Now, I’m not really talking about the “boss lefties”, the people who really run the show concerning left-wing activism. Rather, I’m describing the rank-and-file lefties who fill out the echelons of “ground level” activism – ranging from the antifa street drek to the college students whining about microaggressions to the HR representatives in multinational corporations.
I sincerely believe that to understand the psychology of those on the Left, one must approach the issue from the standpoint of juvenile behaviourism. Observing how and why children – as in actual children – act as they do will shed light on why those on the Left are the way they are. I want to emphasise that what I’m saying here isn’t meant to be the usual derogation that people on opposite sides of the political divide routinely throw at each other. I am literally saying that, for whatever reason, the stunting of the emotional and rational growth of the minds of those who are drawn to the hard core of the Left results in similarities in psyche and behaviour between the two groups.
The first and most obvious similarity revolves around the acceptance of wishful thinking as a credible alternative to verifiable reality. This manifests itself in two related ways – the willingness to believe fantasies that have no credible claims to being truth, and the concurrent unwillingness to accept legitimate evidences which disagree with those fantasies.
Anyone who has kids knows that when a small child wants to believe something, they’re going to believe it, no matter what you say or show them to the contrary. Children do this because they do not have a firm grasp on the nature of reality, since they’re still essentially learning from the world around them what reality even is. They haven’t quite learned yet “how the world works”, so to speak, hence they’re still open to “other possibilities”, and assume that if they want these possibilities to be, then they can be.
Sadly, left-wing activists and SJWs operate on essentially the same set of basic premises. Despite all evidences to the contrary, they will believe that homosexuality is normal, people can actually change their sexes, adult-child sexual relationships are healthy, large-scale third world immigration is enriching, computer simulations that predict extremes of global warming are credible reflections of actual climatological science, and so forth. Instead of accepting that arguments to the contrary can even exist, much less penetrate their self-contained fact space, leftists will attempt to mold reality to their preferences by dismissing contrary arguments with one of more “signaling phrases” (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.). In this way, they believe they have negated the very existence of those contrary arguments, thus preserving their preferred perceptions.
Another area of similarity is seen in the social dynamics of cliquishness, which both children and leftists display in social settings. We should understand that cliquishness involves much more than the mere existence of in-groups and out-groups. Everybody has groups to which they belong and do not belong, and that is a fundamental factor in human sociability. What makes cliquishness different is that it involves the purposeful engineering of social dynamics for the objective of establishing the power of and loyalty to one or a small group of actors within a set which normally would act as a broad in-group. In other words, it functions as a way of destructively dividing a body of people who you would typically find bound together by more commonalities than differences. For children, this could be classmates within a school setting. For adults, it could mean anything from an office or church environment all the way up to the national level. Ostensibly, children at a school are all there for the same purpose. In the corporation, workers are, in theory, all supporting the company’s stated goals. Within a nation, a sense of asabiyya, of social solidarity, is supposed to obtain.
The whole purpose of left-wing activism is to destroy social solidarity, and to do so in an ever-changing and unpredictable manner. Within cliques, the accepted in-group is ever-shifting and individual members can be subject to sudden changes in status among the group based on anything from personal whim to the requirements of a newly imposed ideological orthodoxy. This is seen regularly on the Left and serves to demonstrate the fragility of the Left’s intersectionality alliance.
November 21, 2023
“Self-checkouts are not quite Skynet T-800 death dealers. Sarah Connor can rest easy – for now”
I realize the problem is me, in that I hate self-checkout kiosks with a fiery passion and have been known to abandon any plans to purchase from a store if there is no human assigned to the checkout desk. I decline (with thanks) all offers to use the self-checkout — several of which are often unused — while lined up three or four deep at the one human’s work station. It must be my Luddite side showing. But, as Christopher Gage shows here, I’m not completely alone:
Self-checkout using NCR Fastlane machines at a Sainsbury’s store in the UK.
Photo by Magnus Manske via Wikimedia Commons.
“He’s got a problem with potatoes,” said the condemned, guarding the self-checkout machines. Potatoes plague them. Carrier bags flummox them. ‘Surprising item on the scale,’ it squeaked as if I were weighing up a kilo of black-tar heroin.
The retirement refusenik tapped a code on the screen for the third occasion before returning to his post. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area.’ Embarrassed, I marshalled my friend — the Hobbity, amenable man with the silver slugs for eyebrows — for the fourth time. He recanted a well-worn sop dispensed to young dotards like me: “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “He just doesn’t like you.”
Self-checkouts are not quite Skynet T-800 death dealers. Sarah Connor can rest easy — for now.
After a little while, the machine let me go. The ordeal, fractious and infinitely slower than employing the helpful man to man a till, was over. Then, the devil-device sucker-punched square in the testes.
“Lovely to see you bye for now,” read the screen. Sinister, like a Jehovah’s Witness grinning. No comma after the introductory clause?! The insolent swine. I fought the primal urge to drown the machine in Coca-Cola and watch it crackle. The clean-up would be Harold’s job. He had enough on his plate.
Mercifully, one supermarket has sacked these silly machines.
Booths, a posh retailer up north, has retired self-checkouts in all but two of their stores. The good burghers of Booths reckon humans talking to other humans is a groundbreaking idea that will catch on in future.
“We have based this not only on what we feel is the right thing to do but also from having received feedback from our customers,” they said.
“Delighting customers with our warm northern welcome is part of our DNA.”
Wearily, Booths did what British northerners must do lest they spontaneously combust — they peacocked their northernness. Apparently, to be born on a particular patch of this floating rock bestows northerners an umbilical, friendly mien.
Northerners cannot help themselves. POV: You encounter a northerner in a pub: “A malignant tumour, you say? You wanna get yourself a northern tumour. Northern tumours are far less aggressive than those bloody southern tumours. It’s a fact! Northern tumours still have a sense of community, you see. Not like southern tumours …”
I must forgive them. Booth’s “northern welcome” is a good thing. Entities imbued with DNA are a good thing. Even one fewer self-service checkout is a good thing.
From where Booth’s tread, others may follow. The numbers don’t tell fibs.
Self-checkouts mutate even the most cherubic of citizens into a degenerate thief. Stores with self-service checkouts suffer double the shrinkage (4%) — industry-speak for pilfering and thieving.
Researchers say the temptation can prove too much, provoking our inner tea leaf into a spot of half-inching. Self-checkouts goad miscreants into slapping a “Reduced to £1” sticker on a litre of Jameson.
Booths have bucked a trend. A fatuous, anti-human trend.
Update: Fixed broken URL.
November 20, 2023
“[W]hen low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie”
Rob Henderson explains some of the reasons smart people can believe dumb ideas:
Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie.
In the 1980s, the psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo developed the “Elaboration Likelihood Model” to describe how persuasion works. “Elaboration” here means the extent to which a person carefully thinks about the information. When people’s motivation and ability to engage in careful thinking is present, the “elaboration likelihood” is high. This means people are likely to pay attention to the relevant information and draw conclusions based on the merits of the arguments or the message. When elaboration likelihood is high, a person is willing to expend their cognitive resources to update their views.
Two paths to persuasion
The idea is that there are two paths, or two “routes”, to persuading others. The first type, termed the “central” route, comes from careful and thoughtful consideration of the messages we hear. When the central route is engaged, we actively evaluate the information presented, and try to discern whether or not it’s true.
When the “peripheral” route is engaged, we pay more attention to cues apart from the actual information or content or the message. For example, we might evaluate someone’s argument based on how attractive they are or where they were educated, without considering the actual merits of their message.
When we accept a message through the peripheral route, we tend to be more passive than when we accept a message through the central route. Unfortunately, the peripheral route is more prevalent because we are exposed to an increasingly large amount of information.
The renowned psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor have characterized humans as “cognitive misers”. They write, “People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can”.
We are lazy creatures who try to expend as little mental energy as possible.
And people are typically less motivated to scrutinize a message if the source is considered to be an expert. We interpret the message through the peripheral route.
This is one reason why media outlets often appoint experts who mirror their political values. These experts lend credibility to the views the outlet espouses. Interestingly, though, expertise appears to influence persuasion only if the individual is identified as an expert before they communicate their message. Research has found that when a person is told the source is an expert after listening to the message, this new information does not increase the person’s likelihood of believing the message.
It works the other way, too. If a person is told that a source is not an expert before the message, the person tends to be more skeptical of the message. If told the source is not an expert after the message, this has no effect on a person’s likelihood of believing the message.
This suggests that knowing a source is an expert reduces our motivation to engage in central processing. We let our guards down.
As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become more important for persuasion. Which might not bode well.
However, when we update our beliefs by weighing the actual merits of an argument (central route), our updated beliefs tend to endure and are more robust against counter-persuasion, compared to when we update our beliefs through peripheral processing. If we come to believe something through careful and thoughtful consideration, that belief is more resilient to change.
This means we can be more easily manipulated through the peripheral route. If we are convinced of something via the peripheral route, a manipulator will be more successful at using the peripheral route once again to alter our initial belief.
November 19, 2023
Ted Gioia wonders if we need a “new Romanticism”
He raised the question earlier this year, and it’s sticking with him to the point he’s gathering notes on the original Romantic movement and what it was reacting against:
The issues that enraged the original Luddites certainly have many modern echoes.
I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.
- Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution — and people started resisting the forces of progress.
- Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories — a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
- Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism — Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide [Wiki], the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories [Wiki], and all those gloomy Gothic novels [Wiki]. What happened to the Enlightenment?
- As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives — an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.
- Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments — embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.
That’s the world, circa 1800.
The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out.
Resemblances with the current moment are not hard to see.
“Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive. Imagine if people started resisting technology. Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance. Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.”
These considerations led me, about nine months ago, to conduct a deep dive into the history of the Romanticist movement. I wanted to see what the historical evidence told me.
I’ve devoted hours every day to this — reading stacks of books, both primary and secondary sources, on the subject. I’ve supplemented it with a music listening program and a study of visual art from the era.
What’s my goal? I’m still not entirely sure.
November 18, 2023
“René Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist”
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander reviews I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard:
The phrase “I see Satan fall like lightning” comes from Luke 10:18. I’d previously encountered it on insane right-wing conspiracy theory websites. You can rephrase it as “I see Satan descend to earth in the form of lightning”. But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists!
Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist. It’s an ambitious theory-of-everything for anthropology, mythography, and the Judeo-Christian religion. After solving all of those venerable fields, it will, sort of, loop back to Barack Obama being the Antichrist. But it’ll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that can’t even get mad.
Girard’s starting point is the similarity between Bible stories and pagan myths. You’ve heard about this before — dying-and-resurrecting gods, that sort of thing. You might expect Girard, a good Catholic, to reject these similarities. He doesn’t. He says they’re real and important. Pagan myths resemble the Bible because they’re both describing the same psychosocial process. The myths are distorted propaganda supporting the process, and the Bible is a clear-eyed description of the process which reveals it to be evil. Just as worshipful Soviet hagiographies of Stalin and sober historical analyses of Stalin will have many similarities (since they’re both describing Stalin), so there will be unavoidable resonances between myth and the Bible.
Girard calls this process “the single-victim process” or “Satan”. It goes like this:
- Most (all?) human desire is mimetic, ie based on copying other people’s desires. The Bible warns against coveting your neighbor’s stuff, because it knows people’s natural tendencies run that direction. It’s not that your neighbor has particularly good stuff. It’s that you want it because it’s your neighbor’s. Think of two children playing in a room full of toys. One child picks up Toy #368 and starts playing with it. Then the other child tries to take it, ignoring all the hundreds of other toys available. It’s valuable because someone else wants it.
- As with the two children, conflict is inevitable. As the mimetic process intensifies, everyone goes from complicated individuals with individual wants, to copies of their neighbors (ie their desires copy their neighbors’ desires, and they become the sort of people who would have those desires). Alliances form and dissipate. There is a war of all against all. The social fabric starts to collapse.
- Instead of letting the social fabric collapse, everyone suddenly turns their ire on one person, the victim. Maybe this person is a foreigner, or a contrarian, or just ugly. The transition from individuals to a mob reaches a crescendo. The mob, with one will, murders the victim (or maybe just exiles them).
- Then everything is kind of okay! The murder relieves the built-up tension. People feel like they can have their own desires again, and stop coveting their neighbors’ stuff quite so hard, at least for a while. Society does not collapse. If there was no civilization before, maybe people take advantage of this period of relative peace to found civilization.
- (Optional step 5) Seems pretty impressive that killing one victim could cause all this peace and civilization! The former mob declares their victim to be a god. Killing the god was the necessary prerequisite to civilization. Now the god probably reigns in heaven or something. Maybe they die and resurrect every year. Whatever.
- Rinse and repeat.
Girard is against this process. Not just because it involves violent mobs lynching innocent people (although it does), but because that step perpetuates the whole cycle: people greedily desiring whatever their neighbors have, people hating their neighbors, internecine war of all against all. He dubs the process Satan, based partly on the original Hebrew meaning of Satan as “prosecutor”. Satan is the force that tells people that the victim is guilty and deserves to be lynched.
(and did you know that Paraclete, the Greek word for the Holy Spirit, originally meant “defense attorney”? The Paraclete is the force that — no, we’ll get to that later).
Are all myths and Bible stories really about this process? Girard says yes. For example, consider the myth of Oedipus. Around the end, Thebes is stricken by plague (Girard says plagues should usually be interpreted metaphorically as social plagues, ie discord). Everyone goes to the oracle and asks for a solution. The oracle says that someone has killed his father and married his mother, and the plague won’t end until that person is removed. It is revealed that Oedipus is the culprit. The mob expels Oedipus from the city, and the plague ends.
Okay, that’s one myth. Are there others?
