Unless you’re an engineer, then, friction works best as a metaphor for human interaction. Creativity, for instance. Lots of very creative folks have tried to describe the creative process. Stephen King (I think) came up with the notion of grit in an oyster — something gets under your shell and irritates you until something beautiful forms around it. I like that, but being a social guy I prefer the notion of friction. You spend your days rubbing against people (not like a Japanese businessman on a crowded train, you sickos); sometimes that friction sparks something. Maybe it’s friendship, romance, whatever; or maybe it’s a story, poetry, music. Whatever the spark catches on fire depends on the interests, training, and talent of whatever pile of tinder it lands on.
On the other hand, most people aren’t artistes, so a well-ordered society is a well-lubricated society (“ah so!” yells our Japanese businessman, and look, y’all, much like my poor old high school physics teacher, we’re just going to have to ignore the obvious sexual connotations for the sake of the lesson). “Better a false ‘good morning!’ than a sincere ‘go to hell!'”, the old proverb runs, and that’s because the false “good morning!” is social lubricant; it keeps the friction of living packed cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of strangers down to a manageable level.
That’s what that mystifyingly old-timey word “manners” really means. What the frustrated artistes of the 20th century decried as stultifying conformity is actually lubricant. You don’t do that whole bourgeois thing, maaaannn, because you like being a sheep; you do it because that’s what keeps your world from catching on fire. Replace enough false good mornings with sincere go to hells, and pretty soon you’ve got Chicago, Philadelphia, Bodymore Murderland …
Alas, modern prosperity enables the sandpaper people. If normal people oil themselves up with manners before they go out into the world, these freaks wrap themselves in sandpaper. The really gritty stuff, too, the real paint-strippers you load onto big belt sanders. The kind of assholes who make up elaborate pronouns for themselves and get theatrically mad on social media when normal people can’t figure out what the hell they’re talking about, for instance.
And in an at least Alanis-level irony, the sandpaper people do some of their most abrasive work by pretending, high school physics-style, that obviously frictive situations are frictionless. […]
And so it goes … except physics is a real thing that exists. Our high school teacher instructed us to ignore things like wind resistance in order to teach us the basics. We all knew there was a lot more than F=MA to answering even so basic a question as whether or not Mickey Mantle’s line drive cleared the fence. Not only do the sandpaper people not know that, they wouldn’t care if they did, because equations be rayciss. Alas for them — and us — friction is real. Ever seen a car engine catch fire? Too much friction for the lubricant to handle, and the lubricant becomes a fire accelerant.
Severian, “The Sandpaper People”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-03.
May 21, 2025
QotD: The sandpaper people
May 15, 2025
QotD: The Donatist heresy
But like all things theological in the Christian Centuries, Donatism had important socio-political implications. Again, I’m about the furthest thing from a medievalist, but as I understand it, Jan Hus — a proto-Luther if anyone was — advanced a kind of Donatist argument against the Holy Roman Emperor (and / or the King of Bohemia, I forget which, or even if they were separate guys at that point). He was also, IIRC, echoing the English heretic John Wyclif, whose arguments had a similar political import in a similarly anarchic time. They held (again IIRC, which I might not) that since kings derive their authority from God, any king that is obviously on the outs with the Lord has lost his right to rule. A heretic or schismatic king, in other words, is no king at all.
You could call this a Christian version of the old Chinese idea of “The Mandate of Heaven”, and if you want to do that I’m not going to argue with you, but it’s considerably easier to identify a heretic. A Christian king’s most basic responsibility is to his own spiritual health; closely followed by his obligation to his realm’s spiritual health. It’s pretty easy to tell when a king’s not doing that.
Severian, “The New Donatism?”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-20.
May 9, 2025
QotD: Becoming a parent
Younger folks are no doubt shocked by that question, and if some BCG were ever to read this, she’d try to string me up, but it’s the only question that matters long term. The BCG would start sputtering some question about “what about her happiness?” — the only answer to which, if you want to maintain a stable society, must be: “Category error”. It’s like “staying together for the kids”, another phrase we oldsters recognize, but the younger generation can’t grok. But … but … but … whaddabout your feeeeeelings?
What about them?
Seriously: Who gives a shit? Viddy well, oh my brothers: When you decided to have kids, you didn’t hit the pause button on some video game RPG called “Your Career”; you ejected the disk, snapped that fucker in half, and smashed the Xbox Office Space-style for good measure. What’s good for you, personally, just got sent to the back of the line. Permanently. Yeah yeah, I know, you can’t fulfill your parental obligations if you’re completely miserable all the time, but you can find lots of joy and meaning and yes, even fulfillment (that most insidious of modern weasel words) doing stuff other than making partner down at the law firm.
Men used to understand this, because men were once trained to take the long view, to delay gratification, to suck it the fuck up for the greater good. It’s the same gene — and it IS genetic, 1,000,000+ years of evolution — that causes men to charge bullets or punch kangaroos or do whatever else needs to be done in the face of obvious threats, even at the risk, or even the near certainty, of his own injury or death.
Women don’t roll like that, because they can’t — “that 1,000,000+ years of evolved behavior” thing again. They’re evolved to put the kids first — their kids, not some abstract ideal. Women can be, and often are, suicidally brave — for their own offspring. But absent those — absent the possibility of those — all those maternal instincts go septic, which is how you get the BCG. She knows she’s not cut out for this, no matter how successful she is academically — indeed, in my experience it’s precisely the most academically successful ones who sense it the clearest.
Alas, they are trained that feminism is the answer to those inner alarm bells, so they carry on like caricature cavemen — being as crude and offensive and obnoxious as possible, trying to treat sex like an itch to be scratched while beefing with that basic bitch Becky on the next dorm block.
Severian, “Gettin’ Jiggy in College Town”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-08.
May 3, 2025
QotD: When the Cursus Honorum failed, so did the Roman Republic
The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always potential Caesars running around. But the names of the Old Republic’s Caesars don’t appear in the history books, because back then they still maintained the distinction between process and outcome. If there’s a conflict between them, process must yield, and so even though a potential Caesar did a competent job as quaestor and was ready to stand for curule aedile, he’d be taken aside by an old man (“senate” comes from senex, “old man”) for a stern talking-to … or more than a stern talking-to, if it came to that.
By Julius Caesar‘s day, though, process had completely eclipsed outcome. Again, the “real” Caesar is much debated by historians, but what’s not in dispute is his naked ambition. Everybody knew what Caesar was about, right from the get-go. But since there was no way to stop his climb up the cursus honorum spelled out in the Policies and Procedures Manual, nobody did.
Indeed, by Caesar’s time, the rot was so deep that most (I’d argue all, but I’m not a Classicist) of the offices on the CH were eyewash, just lines on a CV. The curule aediles weren’t managing the grain supply; they had battalions of freedmen running that. They were still putting on games, of course, but they weren’t personally putting them on; again, battalions of clever freedmen did that. The only thing the aedile did for “his” games was pay for them … on credit, and only in order to take the next step up the ladder.
And the rot was, of course, recursive. Caesar at least had clarity: He wanted to be quaestor so he could be aedile; to be aedile so he could be praetor; to be praetor so he could be governor; to be governor so he could be general; to be general so he could be … well, whatever, that’s part of the great debate surrounding Caesar, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. For us, what matters is that everyone else was doing the same thing, and because all the real work was being done by those battalions of clever freedmen, the quality of Republican leadership dropped off dramatically. How can a praetor-in-name-only accurately judge the competence of an aedile-in-name-only? Yeah, he technically held the office for a year, but he left it as ignorant of its duties as when he entered.
Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.
[NR: Links to the Roman Glossary added.]
April 27, 2025
QotD: Fighting against Japan in the Pacific
And lord knows the Americans took the bait, more than once. If “bait” is really the right word, because if you’ve got no choice … the early campaigns in the Solomons were so legendarily nasty for that reason: You have no choice but to go right up the pipe to seize an objective, and if you do, the enemy has no choice but to go right up the pipe to get it back.
The genius of the later American strategy — and credit where it’s due, few people have a lower opinion of MacArthur than I, but this was brilliant — was to simply go around. Heavy bomber strips are a must, and in the even fewer places in the Pacific that can take heavy bombers, the Americans had no choice but to go right up the chute … but carrier airpower can do a hell of a lot, particularly when it can move about completely unmolested by the enemy. Thus the Americans turned all those guaranteed meat grinders the Japanese had set up for them into big open-air POW camps, without bothering to go in there and force them to surrender (which, of course, they wouldn’t). Have fun starving in your bunkers, boys; we’ll just leave a covering naval detachment, to make sure you can’t evacuate; see you when the war’s over.
Severian, “Strategy”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-21.
April 21, 2025
QotD: Thomas Hobbes’ view of the “state of nature” in Leviathan
The idea of “natural rights” was nothing new, of course. It goes back to at least Aristotle; Thomism and the whole medieval Scholastic schmear is incomprehensible without it. But Aristotle lived in a pre-Christian world, and Aquinas in a monolithically Catholic one. Both would find the idea of two sets of believers going to the hilt at each other over different versions of the same god incomprehensible. But that was the reality in Hobbes’s day, and it was real enough to reduce parts of Germany to cannibalism — the best modern estimates put casualties from the Thirty Years’ War at World War I levels proportional to population. That simply couldn’t go on, especially with the infidel Turk hammering at the gates.
Thus Hobbes decided to write God out of the picture. There’s lots of debate over Hobbes’s personal religious beliefs, if any; ranging from “he was a sincere, if somewhat unorthodox, Anglican” to “he was a raging atheist”. It doesn’t matter for our purposes. All we need to know is: because appeal to Scripture couldn’t end in anything but more bloodshed, perforce political legitimacy must be secularized, and the old concept of “natural rights” seemed to be the answer. Do we have rights just by virtue of being human, and if so, what are they?
Thus the “state of nature”. Hobbes was always quite clear that this was a thought experiment, not a statement about historical anthropology. His employer, the Cavendish family, the Earls (later Dukes) of Devonshire, were investors in the Virginia Company, and we believe Hobbes acted on their behalf in some capacity with the Company. So he knew better than anyone that the North American Indians weren’t in the state of nature (as he semi-jokingly suggested in Leviathan). Only semi-jokingly, though, because […] it was a real question back in the 1500s just what authority, if any, the conquistadores had to overthrow the native regimes in New Spain. Cortes and the boys might’ve laughed when the Requirimiento was read out, but they nonetheless felt compelled to do it, to legally cover their monarchs’ asses.
From the perspective of post-Hobbes political philosophy, it’s an easy answer. Montezuma was legitimately ruler of the Aztecs, as they, the Aztecs, had gotten out of the state of nature the way everyone else does: Via the “social contract” (recall that Hobbes himself doesn’t use this term). But since international relations remain in the state of nature, by definition, that’s all the justification the Spaniards would’ve needed. That Fernando and Isabella would’ve cheerfully burnt Hobbes at the stake is ironic, Alanis-level at least, but they were practical people; they’d be happy to use his arguments
Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.
April 15, 2025
QotD: PhD delusions of (universal) competence
And the delusion of competence is truly a thing to behold. They expend enormous effort in maintaining it. Just as the “gender is just a social construction” feminist somehow retains her belief in this every time she has to call the stock boy over to help her lift the can of economy-sized kitty litter, so the other eggheads shrug it off when they have to call in tradesmen to perform the simplest household maintenance. I think I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating as an illustration:
Back in grad school, I was invited to a back-to-school shindig at the Department Chair’s house. She made sure to tell us that the only toilet in the house (she lived in a breathtakingly restored Victorian; it must’ve cost close to a million all in) wouldn’t work unless you followed the elaborate five-step process she and her “domestic partner” had worked out over months of trial and error. Said process was helpfully taped on the tank lid for us. They were on the plumber’s list, she said, but it would be a while (“you know how those people are,” wasn’t stated outright, but very clearly, sneeringly implied).
I had few beers, the inevitable happened, and so I meandered upstairs to throw a whiz. After zipping up, I followed the elaborate handle-jiggling procedure … and, well, look, y’all, I’m far closer to those helpless eggheads than I am to Mr. Fix-it. I have ten thumbs, and thank god I never had to do one of those “spatial rotation” tasks for real back in grade school, or they’d have stuck me on the short bus. But even I know when a toilet float bobber is stuck. So I lifted the lid, turned the little screw, flushed twice more to double-check my handiwork, and went back downstairs to report my success …
They looked at me like I’d just contracted leprosy, y’all. Instead of being happy that I’d saved them a lot of effort, not to mention a fair amount of money, they were disgusted. I mean, I’d done a menial’s job. With my hands. On the one hand, I suppose it was proof that people with PhDs can master very, very, very basic plumbing. But on the other … eeeeewwww. I was a class traitor!
Severian, “Gettin’ Jiggy in College Town”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-08.
April 9, 2025
QotD: Legitimacy and revolution
But though the English Civil War produced the first truly revolutionary regime, they were able to effectively co-opt most of the old regime’s symbols …
Let’s back up for a sec: As you recall, a revolution seeks to replace a people’s entire mode of living, whereas rebellions are just attempted changes of government. England had faced many rebellions before 1642, some of them successful, by which I mean they replaced one ruling faction with another. The usurpation of Richard II’s throne by Henry IV was extremely problematic, political theory-wise, but nobody was openly challenging the institution of monarchy as such. So too with the Wars of the Roses, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and so on: Those were all about the person of the king and his methods of rule, not about the legitimacy of his government.
The English Civil War was different. Charles I wasn’t the first English king executed by rebels (the aforementioned Richard II was starved to death; Henry VI died under extremely suspicious circumstances in the Wars of the Roses), but he was the first one found guilty of treason. To the kingdom he was king of. That’s a far different thing than “oopsie, I guess we forgot His Majesty’s lunch for two months running” or “we sent a whole bunch of goons with knives to the Tower, only to find His Majesty dead of melancholy”. A king who is guilty of treason is necessarily somehow inferior to his own kingdom, which forces us to confront the questions of 1) what, exactly, IS the kingdom? and 2) where does its legitimacy come from?
That’s why the rule of first the Council of State, then Lord Protector Cromwell, was a true revolution. In both cases, it was all too obvious where their legitimacy came from: out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao would so pithily put it 300 years later. And thanks to that power, they were free to remake the “lifeways” (as anthropologists say) of the people how they saw fit. Puritan England was as close to a totalitarianism as 17th century technology and information velocity would allow …
… but that wasn’t very close at all, as it turns out, and so most people in most places could get on with their lives pretty much as before. And even for those people directly under the State’s gaze, the Protectorate looked enough like the old monarchy that if you squinted and tilted your head sideways, you couldn’t really see the difference.
Severian, “Repost: National Symbols”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-27.
April 3, 2025
QotD: When the History Department at Flyover State committed slow motion suicide
Now, you have to understand something about the academy at this point: Though these people are profoundly ideologically enstupidated, they’re still pretty cunning where their wallets are concerned. Indeed, that’s the whole reason they allow “scholarship” on left-handed LatinX truck drivers in the Ming Dynasty or whatever that persyn’s book was, to pull that kind of stunt — only “original” “research” gets published, and since all the true facts have been ascertained long ago, you have to make shit up if you want tenure. Publish or perish, baby!
A clever plan, but with one teensy tiny flaw: “Tenure” requires a university, and universities require students, which means that, while pretty much all professors hate teaching, they have to do it … and not only that, they have to actually appeal to those icky little deplorables, the students, in sufficient numbers to keep the faculty employed. If, back in your own college days, you wondered if maybe the only reason Western Civ I or whatever was required was that it gave Professor Jones something to do, congrats, you were right. But you can’t require History majors, and there’s only enough Western Civ to go around, which means you have to have 200- through 400-level classes that students actually want to take …
You can see where this is going, and to their credit, some of the faculty at Flyover State saw it, too. At the time, there were still enough upperclassman History majors (and grad students) that the class on LatinX truck drivers in the Ming Dynasty would fill … barely … but that situation obviously would not continue. Nor could you simply stick the new hire in Western Civ classes, because in addition to the other obvious problems, of course xzhey would immediately turn “Western Civ I” into “LatinX truck drivers in the Ming Dynasty … and maybe, if there’s time, the Roman Empire or some shit.”
You know what the Department ended up doing (hint: nothing), and so the first semester after the new hire went exactly like you knew it would. And so did the next, and the next, because as we all know, chicks of both sexes and however-many-we’re-up-to-now genders are herd animals. Hiring the radical lesbian gave all the slightly-less-radical lesbians, again of both sexes and however-many genders, permission to let their freak flag fly. Which, of course, they did. Pretty soon you couldn’t find a History class that wasn’t some bizarre, micro-specialized SJW mad lib. Sure, they’d still call it “The US in the Civil War Era” or “Modern Germany” or whatever, but the course description made it perfectly clear that the class was really about transsexual cabaret acts on the New York Bowery … and maybe, if there’s time, secession or some shit.
And soon enough there were no more History majors, and thus no more History Department. At one of the small schools that collectively make up “Flyover State”, the former History, Psychology, and Classics departments have been folded into something called the “Humanities Department” … to which, last I heard, the former English Department will soon be added.
Severian, “The Dunbar Problem”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-06.
March 28, 2025
QotD: Prosopography
Prosopography is vital in the study of Classical Antiquity, especially the Roman Republic. The Romans, as I’m sure you recall, practiced “patronage and clientage” — a man’s clients were often in a very real way more important than his biological family. Prove that Wossname was So-and-So’s client, and you know a lot about Wossname, even if you can’t find it in the archaeological record, and what you do know about him from the record takes on a whole new meaning. For instance, under Gaius Marius (et al.), the patron / client relationship got extended to the army — coteries of officers and NCOs personally loyal to their commanding general, not to the State — and there’s your Fall of the Roman Republic.
Kremlinology required something similar. Since the important levels of the Apparat all went to the same Higher Party Schools in Moscow, the fact that So-and-So was Wossname’s roommate for a few semesters was potentially of much greater importance than anything So-and-So did as the People’s Commissar of Whatever. He might’ve looked like a real up-and-comer based on his early promotion to a prestige post, but based on his prosopography an experience Kremlinologist might deduce that this was just horse-trading — someone high up in the Politburo owed Wossname’s father a favor for something back in the Great Patriotic War, and so this was payback; Wossname wasn’t going any higher than that.
It’s even more important in a completely ideologized society like the USSR. No Roman client would ever go so far as to openly stab his patron in the back — no one in his society would ever trust him again; he’d get shanked the very minute he donned the purple — but a Roman could have a change of heart. He might get religion, of either the philosophical (Epicureanism, Stoicism) or the actual cultic sort. This would significantly change the patron / client relationship. But in a society like the USSR — ostentatiously dedicated to the World Proletarian Revolution — ideology imposed some hard limits …
Severian, “Alt Thread: A Brief Bit of Brandonology”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-01.
March 22, 2025
Fundraising is much tougher for Democrats right now … and they’re not coping well
It’s not just Canadian politicians getting driven completely insane by the Bad Orange Man’s antics — he’s even doing it to his domestic opponents in the Democratic party as well:
“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee.
Kansas City Star:
Democrats Suffer Blow Ahead of Senate Elections
It’s a goddamn slide show, but as it might be amusing I shall wade in. The things I do for you people …
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement is expected to significantly impact the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming Senate elections, amplifying pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The party’s challenges ahead have heightened with the departures of Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). Democrats must regain four seats to reclaim the majority.
It sure looks like the Donks are planning to get clobbered in 2026. Or, more likely, they anticipate a series of bruising primary fights as the old grift-and-grin Democrats are challenged by True Believers, because as HGG has taught us — credit where it’s due — SJWs always double down. Batshit insanity is the hill they’ve chosen to die on — Trump keeps handing them 80/20 issues, and they keep jumping on the 20 with both feet.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently noted the Party’s challenges in the upcoming Senate elections. With the need for a net gain of four seats, Cillizza expressed concern over potential financial limitations that may hinder effective campaigning.
Yes. “Financial limitations”. Democrat donors are stupid — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be Democrats — but even they can see that 80 is way, way bigger than 20.
Oh, and also: It doesn’t help that you’re openly, gleefully endorsing no-shit terrorism against Tesla dealerships — and drivers! — calling for Musk’s assassination, and so on. It’s a bad look in general, and a bad look in particular, because now the guys with the big checkbooks are wondering if that kind of thing won’t happen to them if they get crosswise with the most lunatic members of the lunatic fringe (hint: It will. As the scorpion said to the frog: can’t be ‘elped, mate, it’s me nature).
Cillizza said, “The money that gets spent there playing defense, just to hold Democratic seats, means money that doesn’t get spent playing offense in, let’s say, a state like Ohio, where Democrats are trying to recruit Sherrod Brown, the former senator, to take on John Huston, the appointed Republican senator.”
Yes, a dwindling asset pool forces those kinds of choices. It also doesn’t help that you keep going back to the well like that. One assumes there’s a reason Sherrod Brown is a former senator. Do you have no one else?
Haha, just kidding, obviously you don’t have anyone else. That’s one of the biggest problems with gerontocracy — the Groovy Fossils are going to have to be carried out at room temperature, so anyone with anything on the ball has been giving Government a pass since the 1980s. Trump went around the Official GOP for lots of reasons, but not the least of them was: he had to. They have the same gerontocracy problem as the other side of the Uniparty. It’s turtles all the way down.
Cillizza concluded, “I just do not see it. I don’t see the money there. I don’t see the energy there. I don’t see the candidates there to expand the playing field”.
It won’t be for lack of trying, though. You’ve still got The Media in your pocket, and they can still do some damage. You’ll never get to the 80 side of those 80/20 issues, but you might get it to 50/50 — as has been done with abortion, gay “marriage”, and so on. On the other hand, those took 40, 50 years, and The Media hadn’t totally pissed away all its credibility back then. It’s a real corner you’ve backed yourselves into,
guysgalspersyns.It also doesn’t help that you’re stupid:
Democrats have identified potential pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).
Holy breakdancing Buddha, why would you target them? Thom Tillis is the very definition of “RINO”; Collins is a Leftist, full stop. The next time they vote against the Democrats on any issue of substance will be the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s as predictable as sunrise, so much so that it’s a joke to anyone right of Mao — the GOP officially has X number of seats, minus Collins and Murkowski.
Vulnerabilities among current incumbents, especially Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), have added to the party’s challenges.
Oh, don’t worry about it — the GOP will find some way to throw it. Georgia, Georgia … hey, what’s Herschel Walker up to these days? Think he’s up for another run? Why not parachute in Alan Keyes or Ben Carson? They’re still alive, right? What about “Nikki” “Haley”? She’s gotta keep her arm loose for the 2028 primaries …
Some Democrats have remained optimistic despite the hurdles. Discussions have included potential candidates such as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) for key races. New Hampshire Democrats have prepared for competitive primaries, with Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) considering a bid for Shaheen’s seat.
As we know, when it comes to crime 13 does 50. When it comes to Leftism, though, it’s more like 20 does 100, and there’s no better illustration than New Hampshire. It should be the reddest state in the union, and people who live there tell me it really is… except for their Congresscritters, because the good people of New Hampshire didn’t shoot every Masshole they could catch. The fine folks in Oregon, Colorado, and (soon enough) Texas know what I mean — y’all didn’t introduce migrating Californians to wood chippers when you had the chance.
QotD: The Dunbar Number in the ivory tower
Leave your logical brain aside for a second — I’ll pause, to let you pound as many shots as necessary — and think like a chick. Declining enrollment numbers are just a line on a graph. Indeed, the students themselves are mostly an abstraction — professors hate teaching and avoid it whenever possible, which, thanks to grad students, research sabbaticals, and the like, is fairly often. But that radical-even-by-academic-standards lesbian? She’s right there. All the time.
If you’ve never been inside the ivory gulag, it’s hard to convey just how tiny and all-encompassing that world is, but I’ll try. Imagine you’re just out of school and living with two roomies (for the one or two young folks who might still remain among the readership: It was once considered a good thing to move away from home, so much so that even if they had the opportunity to live in Mom’s basement after graduation — even if it would make great financial sense to do so — young folks would endure quite a bit of deprivation in order to make their own way in the world. This often necessitated living in crappy apartments in a dodgy part of town with one or more roommates, for several years). Your roomies do what young guys do — sometimes their girlfriends move in; sometimes they move out; sometimes their friends crash on the couch — but here’s the kicker: Everyone involved does the same job at the same company, such that you’re effectively always at work. Anything you do at “home” gets brought into the office, because everyone you live with — and everyone you could potentially ever live with — is there.
Imagine living life like that. That’s the ivory tower.
Severian, “The Dunbar Problem”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-06.
March 16, 2025
QotD: The “Social Contract”
Hobbes didn’t actually use the phrase “social contract” in Leviathan, but that’s where his famous “state of nature” argument ends. In the state of nature, Hobbes says, the only “law” is self defense. Every man hath the right to every thing, because nothing is off limits when it comes to self preservation; thus disputes can only be adjudicated by force. And this state of nature will prevail indefinitely, Hobbes says, because even though some men are stronger than others, and some are quicker, cleverer, etc. than others, chance is what it is, and everybody has to sleep sometime — in other words, no man is so secure in so many advantages that he can impose his will on all possible rivals, all the time. We won’t be dragged out of the state of nature by a strongman.
The only way out of the state of nature, Hobbes argues, is for all of us, collectively, to lay down at least some of our rights to a corporate person, the so-called “Leviathan”, who then enforces those rights for us. So far, so familiar, I’m sure, but even if you got all this in a civics class in high school (for the real old fogeys) or a Western Civ class in college (for the rest of us), they probably didn’t go over a few important caveats, to wit:
The phrase corporate person means something very different from what even intelligent modern people think it does, to say nothing of douchebag Leftists. In the highly Latinate English of Hobbes’s day, “to incorporate” meant “to make into a body”, and they used it literally. In Hobbes’s day, you could say that God “incorporated” (or simply “corporated”) Adam from the dust, and nobody would bat an eye. I honestly have no idea what Leftists think the term “corporate person” means — and to be fair, I guess, they seem to have no idea either — but for us, we hear “corporation” and we think in terms of business concerns. Which means we tend to attribute to Hobbes the view that the Leviathan, the corporate person, is an actual flesh and blood person — specifically, the reigning monarch.
That’s wrong. Hobbes was quite clear that the Leviathan could be a senate or something. He thought that was a bad idea, of course — the historical development of English isn’t the only reason we think Hobbes means “the person of the king” when he writes about the Leviathan — but it could be. So long as it’s the ultimate authority, it’s the Leviathan. For convenience, let’s call it “the Leviathan State”, although I hope it’s obvious why Hobbes would consider that redundant.
Second caveat, and the main reason (I suppose) it never occurred to Hobbes to call it a social contract: It can’t be broken. By anyone. Ever. It can be overtaken by events (third caveat, below), but no one can opt out on his own authority. The reason for this is simple: If you don’t permanently lay down your right to self defense (except in limited, Rittenhouse-esque situations that aren’t germane here), then what’s the point? A contract that can be broken at any time, just because you feel like it, is no contract at all. And consider the logical consequences of doing that, from the standpoint of Hobbes’s initial argument: If one of us reverts to the state of nature, then we all do, and the war of all against all begins again.
Third caveat: The Leviathan can be defeated. Hobbes considers international relations a version of the state of nature, one there’s no getting out of. If pressed, he’d probably try to attribute Charles I’s defeat in the English Civil War to outside causes. Indeed at one point he comes perilously close to arguing something very like that New Donatist / “Mandate of Heaven” thing we discussed below, but however it happened, it is unquestionably the case that Charles I’s government is no more. Hobbes bowed to reality — he saw that Parliament actually held the power in England, whatever the theoretical rights and wrongs of it, so even though the physical person of Charles II was there with him in Paris, Hobbes took the Engagement and sailed home.
Severian, “True Conclusions from False Premises”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-22.
March 10, 2025
QotD: The “Basic College Dude” of the 2020s
But mostly it’s just because none of them stick in my memory. The #1 characteristic of the Basic College Dude is that even if he’s there, he’s not there. He’s checked out — mentally, emotionally, spiritually (if that even means anything anymore). Unlike the girls, all of whom seem to be in 72 different clubs and organizations (and list them all on their email auto-signatures, such that by junior year, their honorifics are longer than my entire resume), the guys don’t seem to do much of anything. How do they while away their hours? I assume with social media, like everyone, and with video games and blackout drinking …
… the latter of which I have seen, a lot, and if you’ll permit a brief digression, if you really want to know how fucked our society is, go to a student bar on a Friday night. I myself was a bit of a party animal in college, and like everyone I went over the line a few times, but college kid drinking these days is almost Soviet — they’re aiming to get knee-walking, gutter-puking, total-blackout shitfaced, and they set about it as grimly and efficiently as possible. The girls, too, with the added bonus that they’re all on Ambien and Klonopin and every other happy pill you’ve ever heard of, which makes for some interesting, by which I mean terrifying, behavior …
[…]
But mostly it’s because college dudes have had their libidos beaten out of them. […]
Not only does the BCD not know how to do this, as Nikolai says, he apparently doesn’t actually want to. Constant stimulation by blinking screens, shit diets, and a lifetime of indoctrination have reversed the sexual dilithium crystals. Heartiste used to go on about this, and while I’m no biochemist, either, I think his theory is sound: There’s so much environmental estrogen floating around that men develop the emotional equivalent of gynecomastia, while women turn butch. Throw nth wave feminism into the mix, and you’ve got women acting like the crudest, most obnoxious male stereotypes (they call this “being strong and empowered”), while the men mope and sigh to their diaries.
The end result is that the BCD walks around like he’s shellshocked. He does the bare minimum, hoping to just grind it out without any further affronts to his basic human dignity … but so mal-educated is he, that the phrase “basic human dignity” doesn’t even register with him.
Severian, “The Basic College Dude”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-05.
March 4, 2025
QotD: Twitter-thought and the basic university student
Alas, Twitter is still a thing that exists, so even though I tried it for about five minutes and promptly forgot all about it, my students didn’t … which explains, like nothing else can, their bizarre approach to classwork. For every quiz I gave, no matter how straightforward the question, I’d have at least one barracks lawyer coming to me afterwards, trying to weasel her (always her, mentally if not biologically) way back into some points, with some elaborate rationale why her picking the wrong answer was really my fault, because in class I said “The Russians won the Battle of Stalingrad” and the question on the quiz was “Who lost the Battle of Stalingrad?” and how is she supposed to be expected to recognize that “lost” is the opposite of “won” when it comes to battles and blah blah blah (thanks, Greta!).
Or the other depressingly common thing, which was when that same kid, who went to the fucking mattresses for one point on one quiz — which amounts to something like 0.01% of her final semester grade — just didn’t turn in the term paper. This happened at all academic levels, from community college (where you often lose half a class or more by the end of a semester) all the way up through the SPLACs, which cost something in the neighborhood of $70K a year all in. I never could figure this out — I mean, how can they not know that the term paper is 30% of your final grade, while all the quizzes put together amount to 10%? — but then it hit me: Twitter.
Everything on social media has, of necessity, equal weight, in that whatever’s in your feed at the present time is the only thing that exists. So when Snowflake was in “schoolwork” mode and missed that one question on that one quiz, it was the only thing that mattered in her world. My quiz was at the top of her Twitter feed, so she had to put all her energy into battling me for it. By the end of the semester, though, she was in “sorority” mode, or “getting ready for that kickass ski vacation” mode, or “beefing with that basic bitch Becky” mode, so my term paper barely registered — if she bothered to turn anything in at all, it was copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, because who cares, when Becky is out there on Twitter, h8ing?
Severian, “Also Sprach Froggy”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-30.
