A 'rightward shift'? Only if our confidence is destroyed! Which both MAGA and Hollywood seem bent on achieving.
I quote below a passage from interesting book -- The Aftermath: The last days of the baby boom and the future of power in America, by Philip Bump. Indeed, as far as it goes (see below) the passage and the article/book make some supportable assertions. Certainly my own kids mutter “boomers!” pretty often, sometimes without a smile!
And yet, this obsession is also misleading. For one thing, U.S. boomers aren't French. They like to work and have politically allowed the retirement age to keep incrementing upward, in order to maintain Social Security solvency as lifespans rise. (A further increment is on the table, refused by Republicans, who dread an end to one of their top complaints.)
So far, Boomers are still paying their way.
Are there many of the generational problems that Mr. Bump cites? Sure. For one thing, a substantial minority of boomers are Trumpers, resentful toward America's ongoing, 200 year project of ever-expanding inclusiveness. That large minority of boomers is also biliously hate-drenched toward all of the fact and knowledge castes - those nerds & professionals who seem to understand a world that MAGAs find bewildering.
(Name an exception to this near-uniform resentment, from science, teaching, journalism, law and medicine to the FBI/Intel/military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on Terror, all now MAGA-hated. That resentment of achievers is far stronger than their racism or sexism.)
On the other hand, a larger segment of that boomer generation are members of - or associates with - the fact and knowledge castes! The greatest and most creative such clade of humans the world ever saw, leading to heaps of very good news seldom mentioned in exploitive media.
Moreover, those fact-and-progress-oriented boomers are (for the most part) eager mentors and enablers of their coming replacements. And there's another fact that’s seldom mentioned - that boomers will leave to their heirs the greatest tsunami of middle class wealth the world ever saw. Though – as described below – it could have even even bigger.
No, all this 'boomer' talk is - to some extent - deliberate distraction! Generation-fixation is a cult, especially among rightist intelligencia, desperate to divert attention from the real story - the real divide - which is (as both Adam Smith and Karl Marx told us) about CLASS…
… especially after 40 years of 'supply-side' scams transferred at least $10 trillions from the U.S. middle class into the open maws of a top 0.001% that never, ever invested any substantial amount of it into the promised productive uses. A lordly aristocracy whose bloated wealth disparities are now surpassing French Revolution levels!
Fully aware that those chickens may come to roost, the rightist mystical-obsession is with CYCLICAL HISTORY. Raving notions of fore-ordained generational cycles like those clutched by Nazis, Confederates and other romantics...
...and that now propel a desperate fantasy called prepper-ism, as many of the uber-rich build luxury bunker-redoubts and mountain refuges to ride out a coming "Event," or fall of civilization. As if we spurned survivors - especially the nerds who know cyber, bio, nano, and nuclear stuff - won't trivially know where to find those who betrayed and abandoned us.
== A Quasi-Religious Cult to Justify Neo-Feudalism ==
Among the core scriptures of this cyclic-history mysticism that obsesses conservatives, there is a tome called The Fourth Turning, a pile of jibbering hogwash by authors Strauss & Howe, whose apophenia/pareidolia incantations are so easily disproved that obsessives can only double down, obsessively - and religiously - averting their gaze from any doubts. (I know plenty of these guys - and not one will wager over the testable falsifiability of these cult 'historical cycle' cult assertions.)
That is the undercurrent, beneath all this 'generational shift' blather. A desperate drive to distract from real problems and divides. Or how foolish the sycophancy-lobotomized oligarchy truly is, for rejecting the great benefits they gained from the New Deal and the Great Society. Or their plunge back down the path that old Karl ordained. Dreaming of harems and consigning themselves to tumbrels.
But fine. Now here's that promised quotation from The Aftermath. Read it both for how right it is... and how there are other, unmentioned layers.
"The Baby Boomers... were a cohort of historically unprecedented size, whose basic need to be clothed, fed, housed and educated was a decades-long jobs creator and economy stimulator. And they were a cohort whose massive size and timing — not just in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but decades into a postindustrial era of growth, government investment and a strong middle class — meant cultural and economic dominance for much of their lives. As teenagers, boomers saw their desires met by marketers who had only just discovered that teenagers with few obligations and a little disposable cash were a huge potential consumer group. Now, as older adults and retirees with waning obligations and a lot of disposable cash, boomers continue to hold a significant chunk of American wealth and the consumer power that goes with it — and in turn, products and services for boomers have proliferated, a trend that will no doubt continue as they enter their sunset years. The government adjusted, too, smoothing boomers’ entrance into the world with significant investments in infrastructure and education, and now smoothing their exit with significant entitlement expenditures."
Statements and assertions that are true – in themselves – can also add up to distraction and bullshit.
== "Caesarism" - the latest treason ==
Let's go past all the headlines and spume. The Mad Right’s neo-feudalism fetish is its only priority. All supposed “policies’ boil down to it, leading at last to this inevitable end state: “For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic” (With Peter Thiel among the major subsidizers of dismally microcephalic propagandizers, pushing the same cult incantations under a different name: “neo-monarchy.”) Yeah, sure, guys.
Dig it. After 6000 years of wretchedly stupid misrule by inheritance-brat kings and lords, we broke from that feudal Divine Right romantic twaddle. And in so doing, we have accomplished vastly more - in every conceivable category - during the last 250 years of gradually improving constitutionalism – and especially during the post- Rooseveltean era – than all other human cultures… combined. And I include the neolithic.
Yes, I mean combined. Put up wager stakes. Anything that is consensus Good and factually verifiable. Like the percentage of human beings who have been able to raise healthy children in conditions of light and peace. Or science. Or production, economics or entrepreneurship. Or far-sighted literature. Or a burgeoning ecological movement that just might save our children's world...
... or the thing that Adam Smith promoted, but that these hypocrites now openly hate -- flat-fair-creative competition.
Faced with a looming demographic collapse of U.S. conservatism (the mad Bush/Trumpian version) -– and the fact that all fact-using professions have turned against them -- these bozos surround themselves with lobotomizing flatterers who only prove my case! They have replaced politics - the high art of negotiating positive sum solutions to a wide variety of problems, ambitions and interests - with a tiresome litany of rationalizations toward one goal. A goal that is pathetically predictable, rooted in male reproduction reflexes…
…that of restored feudal rule by inheritance brats, yearning to restore the practice of kingly harems.
Oh, it’s an insane-masturbatory goal. One chased by incel yammerers. But sure, you guys will try, and if 2024 elections aren’t going your way, you will unleash on us waves of McVeighs.
(Prediction: the caesarites won’t let the ’24 election be about Donald Trump. Especially if he's either self-torching or going full brownshirt. Desperate, the oligarchs will find some way to push their beloved asset aside, either gently or (preferably) in some "Howard Beale Option" designed to incite the base. Think not? Then give me odds? 1:3 it’ll be Nikki Haley or one of her clones. And God bless the US Secret Service.)
And so, let's explore the logical path they have chosen.
Hey, feudalist cultists, have you considered what-if - just maybe - we (especially all the nerds you despise) are far more ready than you think? Exactly how do you believe this is gonna go, when you are waging war vs. all fact-using professions? From science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror?
Open war against the nerds who know cyber, bio, nuclear, chemistry and all the rest? Those who have the exact location and every feature of every single Prepper compound?
I know some of the suckers falling for this prepper/aristocracy stuff. They used to be science fiction fans. Today, they think any "Event" will follow a course portrayed in one of the classics - Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Alas, they put too much masturbatory faith in ego-pleasing sci fi.
Oh, it’s a great novel, written in a bygone age. But is it an accurate model of some post-Event future, when survivors will throw themselves at the feet of prepper lords, emerging from sanctums and bunkers? When the inevitable blame backlash gets turned against all nerds?
Are you guys really so sure the blame won't fall upon those 'lords,' whose active or passive sabotage undermined our institutions of resilience?
Want a model for what'll actually happen, if those would-be caesars do trigger an "Event?"
Paris, 1789.
Okay, just one more thing.
Yeah, bad – tho sometimes well-written – science fiction has played a role in forming caesarism. Foremost among those pushing this rejection of the American Experiment? Take Orson Scott Card – a writer of unquestionable persuasive genius and psychological manipulativeness. Scott spent his entire career relentlessly inveighing that democracy is futile and no institution can be trusted. Certainly, the very notion of self-rule via negotiated, positive-sum politics, thrashed out openly by several hundred million citizens, is ridiculed and dismissed at every turn.
Instead, we all should throw ourselves at the feet of some super-uber-demigod-Caesar, hoping (in fact praying) that he’ll be as nice as Ender Wiggin. Only he should also have an all-chastising whip – and maybe cattle cars and smokestacks – to back up his unquestioned (unquestionable) wisdom.
While this lesson is pushed in all Card tales, including the dangerously misunderstood Ender's Game, the anti-democracy propaganda gets explicit in Card’s EMPIRE, the author's wish fantasy novel that is clutched and extolled as a keystone document of this Caesarist/neo-monarchist ‘movement’ that bodes for the rest of us…
... nothing but pain. I promise though. If that happens, you fellows will share in it.
65 comments:
In the previous thread someone commented about how John Viril's father was not at the Battle of Manila. My dad was not there either, but a few years earlier he was with the Red Cross during the Rape of Nanking.
Sorry for your father.
I think the US may have a psychological blind spot here - dropping a nuke on a city is bad but permissible in a good cause (ours), while having an army surround the city and kill everyone artisanally is much worse. Somehow. Of course, the people I ran into the USAF that spoke that way technically had "drop bpmbs on civilians" as part of their day job (in planning and support if not in actuality).
Pappenheimer
P.S. My own dad, who's never been in the military, didn't see anything wrong with bombing Afghan villages, because of what the 8th had done in Europe when he was growing up.
Re Pinker and anthropologists and violence in early cultures
The blinkered "noble savage" approach was very very real - it took a lot of people pointing out things like - one murder in five years with 50 people is a VERY high rate of homicide - before the establishment started to accept it
I remember the sheer horror when people started reporting what actually went on in Chimpanzee society
A big part of the problem was people not understanding the "Rate" issue - a murder in a city of 50,000 is not the same as a murder in a tribe of 50
This is a strange post with many internal contradictions:
(1) It credits & condemns the Boomers for simultaneously being inclusive fact-using nerds and bilious knowledge-hating nerd oppressors;
(2) It fixates on the Boomer generation while condemning the 'generation fixation' tendency as cult methodology;
(3) It excoriates & dismisses the '40 years of Supply-side scams' for which the spendthrift Boomer generation is directly responsible;
(4) It hand-waves away the CYCLICAL HISTORY MODEL even though history shows that human beings & their civilizations tend to make the same (short-term good, long-term bad) decisions over & over resulting in similar civilization-ending outcomes; and
(5) It tries to blame toxic 'male reproductive impulses' towards 'harem formation' for BELOW-ZERO GROWTH WESTERN FERTILITY even though plunging reproductive rates actually correlate positively with female empowerment.
The only consistent theme therein is Orson Scott Card being our host's favorite whipping boy (after Michael Crichton), as if Card's 'Empire' was significantly more objectionable than Heinlein's 'Revolt in 2100', even though Card's major recurrent theme is the pursuit of goodness, moral purity & doing the right thing.
It's true that Orson Scott Card tends to design his protagonists (Worthing; Wiggin; Maker) with special 'winning' abilities, but it's likewise true that these protagonists tend to exercise great self-restraint in victory by displaying mercy, forgiveness & a dislike for positions of authority.
Card's focus is much more morally prescriptive than Dr. Brin's, as Dr. Brin tends to focus upon the moral 'win-win' benefits of the competition itself -- how competition strengthens all participants -- and Card focuses in on what the winner 'should, ought & is supposed to do' after winning in order to be moral & godly.
I may be wrong about this, but Dr. Brin does not appear to place as high a value on 'forgiveness' and 'letting bygones be bygones' as does Card, and he seems to live by the grudge.
Our host's prolonged antipathy, enmity & hostility towards FEUDALISM suggests that he is engaged in an actual FEUD which makes him a practicing FEUDIST (and/or FEUDALIST) whose hatred perpetuates the very FEUDAL mindset that he claims to despise, and he does not seem to understand the circularity of his predicament.
Best
French Boomers ?
L's patented mix of cogency and inanity ... and I simply lack time to answer. Several of his points were actually primly correct... and answered with "So?"
Human societies making the same dismal failure modes over and over again - e.g. relentlessly and almost universally repeated feudalism - is NOT 'cyclical history'. It is an attractor state in which top harem-keepers fear they will lose their harems - and lives - if they allow any of the one thing that can (proved) help their nations to prosper... the general freedom to argue, criticize, point to each others' errors and thus evade some mistakes.
The fact that he cannot see that difference exemplifies similar delusionalities in his other points. And yet... within the fundamental of his weirdness... isn't he doing better, guys?
Sometimes attractor states are cyclical, maybe even periodic. Assuming Markov chains model anything in the real world.
“isn’t he doing better?”
It is his best post [if such signifies anything]. But two obvious errors.
(3): Reagan himself was not a Boomer and, as chief executive, his culpability cannot be ignored.
There is no evidence that DB is a Grudge; allowing Loc to comment is a sign of forgiveness. Amen.
.
Duncan,
Absolutely correct about the rate issue. Keep in mind that the "noble savage" myth was a product of the 18th Century (Rousseau) before any scientific study of the human species existed. The whole Rousseau vs. Hobbes meme stream formed the intellectual background for the next century, which then bumped up against the Negativist tradition of science - out of which were born the social sciences (and not just mine).
And just like then, people today mostly see what they expect to see in the data, which usually has much more to do with the unconscious baggage of the last few centuries than the actual data. It's a function of how human brains operate, so it isn't exactly blameworthy for people aren't aware of the extent to which we do it.
Ask yourself these questions:
Are the numbers you quoted 1 in 50 for a year, or for a generation? Likewise 1 in 50,000 for a year or a generation?
How representative are these numbers?
Do these numbers control for differences in context?
If murder rates are lower in one case than the other, are there any trade-offs? If so, how do you evaluate the value of one system versus the other?
Is it appropriate to compare two radically different populations using the same parametric statistics?
What actual factors lead to a rise of reduction of murder rates?
And what does all this tell us about the presumed nature of the human species?
Claims about the naturalness of violent behavior and the means necessary to restrain it are subjects for dissertations. As usual, reality is far more complex than a slogan on a bumper sticker. And as Stephen jay Gould once said, God and the Devil are both in the details.
Paul SB
Lorraine,
I can't say too much about Markov Chains specifically, because I haven't looked at them in any depth. However, you're probably correct to question how well they model reality. Mathematical models are made to simplify complex states with the intention of making those complex states more comprehensible. Over time, however, mathematical models - at least in the life sciences - tend to fall by the wayside the same way taxonomies do. Eventually enough people know enough about the complexities of the situation that the model not only fails to shine light on the subject, it actually obscures more than it reveals. This is the stuff of paradigm shifts.
Paul SB
Dr. Brin,
Your constant repetition of the same couple refrains is kind of proving my point. The #1 rule of survival is adapt or die. No one can know what the future holds, so flexibility is the strategy that is most consistent with long-term survival. The more doors you leave open, the more likely your species will make it out of there alive. Sure, some of those doors might seem worse than death, so it's tempting to nail some of them shut. But if you have slammed every door but one, and everybody tries to exit through that same door, you'll more than likely just plug up the door in a deadly bottleneck.
Human brains being what they are, it's a very good idea to take breaks from the things you spend most of your time doing. Branch out, take a break, try something new, then get back to it. This is common advice for breaking writer's block, as I suspect you know. You have a very sharp, focused brain, better than mine, to be sure. But the subjects that you blog about are few. I have been having a renaissance in reading since I gave up teaching, digging in to both the sciences and science fiction. But to break the routine I pick up a contemporary novel once in a great while, or a book on an artistic subject, something historical.
Branching out is especially important as we age. As a lover of democracy, maybe you could ask your "regulars" if there are any subjects they would like discussed here, ones that would require you to do a little bit of research outside of your usual haunts. You never know what might come up. Maybe someone would love to hear your take on the applicability of the poems of Omar Khayyam to today's world, or the psychological hazards of method acting. Once in a while you used to devote a page just to interpreting a movie, especially ones that are popular, though maybe it would be nice if you introduced us to something more obscure that you think is an overlooked gem.
Thoughts? That's what we come here for.
Paul SB
I just had a thought. I read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" way back in the Early Pleistocene when I was in college, but I never picked up the sequel. I thought the title sounded kind of stupid. "St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Women." Has anybody picked this one up? Any good?
Paul SB
"Sometimes attractor states are cyclical, maybe even periodic. Assuming Markov chains model anything in the real world."
Lorraine, without question most 'cycles' are driven by attractor states. We've spoken here of the Seldon Paradox, where a seemingly inevitable trend raises counter forces that cancel it... till those forces assume the trend is over and go away... e.g. fear of Marxist revolution causing the rich to cooperate with FDR and draw the working classes into prosperity... then, whenm Marx seems in the dustbin, returning to insatiable predation...
That is NOT "inevitable cycles of history." You really should look up this FOURTH TURNING crap that has half of all conservatives who deem themselves 'intellects" in its thrall.
Paul's 'door' metaphor is good. Indeed, America's diversity is one of its greatest strengths. Though sometimes we get overly obsessed with it.
Folks can raise any topic here. A small best top-level community. I have seen none better, anywhere!
Paul SB,
Can you think of any way of taking the Boston Strangler out of the equation entirely?
I'm afraid I can't. Not completely. The best I can think of is a cocktail approach.
When I was ill is 2013 the recommended chemodrug for that condition had a 90% survival rate at 5 years (I've made it to 10 years so far), but the price was a 90% chance of some side effect that ranged from moderate to hideous*. Bladder cancer was on the side effect list, but they knew how to mitigate that one. What they wound up giving me was the chemodrug and a cocktail of others to mitigate the worst risks.
THAT I think we can do to reduce the harm of stranglers.
———
There is an example underway right now involving Musk. He wants Tesla to give him a gigantic compensation package. Tesla's Board agreed, but it was so over-the-top a Delaware(!) judge blocked it. Now Musk wants to move the incorporation paperwork to Texas where he thinks it would be allowed.
If you look at the total package, it is (not so surprisingly) about the value of his stupid investment in Twitter. From my perspective it looks like an attempt to milk Tesla to mitigate his mistake. As a Tesla shareholder, I'll vote against this nonsense if I get a chance… because it looks like cheating to me.
Strangler? In this case I have to say he is in the wrong and I'll do my best to mitigate the harm. Everyone with voting shares should step up too. Shares are going for about $181 right now and institutions own about 43% of the company, so buying a right to try to clip this abuse isn't out of range for most of us.
———
Do we really need rapacious monsters to head our industries? When did rapaciousness become competence? Would whole industries collapse if they were led by people actually who care about their own species?
We don't exactly need the rapacious monsters. We need the system in which they are flourishing.
They flourish in other systems too. Especially feudalism. Those monsters wind up with aristocratic titles they pass to their idiot children, so swapping to our current system is actually an improvement.
Cocktail medicine is probably our best bet.
If you squint a bit at modernity, you might see that swapping out feudalism for what we have now IS the cocktail approach in action. No one has a solution for dealing with monsters that doesn't involve divine intervention, so we debate which partial solution mitigates with real or potential harm.
* My colon cancer was not on the side effect list. It runs in the family, so I have a semi-colon now. 8)
On the topic of the post, this cyclic history stuff kinda reminds me of astrology. We love cyclic narratives that sound like fate.
What sign are you? (Heh.)
While I was in school I actually studied astrology for a while. I taught astronomy and had to deal with questions from students.
-----
Cycles associated with attractors are not the same. They make a kind of sense in that we can poke at the conditions that enable to attactor and see what changes.
The difference involves hand-wavium. If the narrative translates roughly as "That is the way the universe works" you've got an astrology-wannabe. If it translates as "That is what humans do" you might not IF what humans do can change enough to matter.
Generational 'cycles' and the so called Fatal Sequence assume that each generation is an explicitly separate thing and that it raises the next one to be uniformly the NEXT thing, in raction and rebellion against the universal thing their parents had been.
There are about eleventy twelve things insanely wrong with all of that. Including the fact that many can see what's going on and rebel against the cycle non-generationally. As many in GenZ now rebel against the cult of snowflake fragility that infests that otherwise lovely generation.
It is an incantation mumbo jumbo that says so much more about the believers than anything remotely found in actual history.
As for the Fourth Turning... OMG! In order to maintain their 80 year cycle (for America only, by the way) they reach back another 80 years before 1776 to England's so-called "Glorious Revolution." WTF? That was a purely political coup by one set of elites vs another set of stodgier elites, with absolutely no participation by the masses or even the bourgeoisie, no violence, no disruption in anyone's lives. A 'revolution? Or a pure example of giggling apophenia.
But worst of all is their riff on World War II, which was - in fact - an extension of the very same 'crisis' called World War One. THAT was the generational upheaval that toppled all prior institutions and assumptions. Want a 'cycle'? HERE is a cycle for you! https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/2014.html
Alfred
The Musk package was negotiated in 2018 - which unless my maths is completely wrong is well before the Twitter nonsense
AND
When it was being negotiated the overall complete consensus was that Musk was going to get NOTHING as the goals were completely impossible
I'm a (small) shareholder and I will vote that Tesla should honour its agreed package
Although I suspect that Musk would actually prefer a package that gave him more "Control" even if it gave him less "Ownership"
Re: Markov Chains
About seven years ago, I took a Coursera course* on mathematical models for economics, geopolitics, and sociology from U of Michigan. It covered probability, formal models like Markov, and models around stuff ranging from the Monte Hall problem to Schelling. I came to the conclusion that math is not great for life and psychohistory models. Even just trying to enumerate confounding variables seriously hurt my head. I am certainly no mathematician, and I agree with Mark Twain about statistics, although Bayesian methods are way more promising.
So I took the computational route instead, thus 'computational psychohistory'. I do this work on two levels. One is first principles computation right from lowest level quantum effects (ie transistors) on up through vast agent-based models (such as the SELDON I processor). The other is a simple calculus structure (I won't even call it a model) that is sort of what Asimov had in mind (I guess, never met him).
Now I rely on my soldering skills and pigheaded stubbornness because I'm not great at formal learnin' and even worse at herding cats like github requires. Here I stand, I can do no other :)
* "Model Thinking", prof. Scott E Page
As usual, off the topic of this post, but not entirely.
Sex! Before he was thoroughly discredited by the scientific community Wilhelm Reich did manage to connect the dots between sexual repression and authoritarianism. Makes me wonder if there is a down-tick or uptick of activity in the bedroom for participants after Trump rallies. If the non-right wanted to embrace competition, sex and Dr. B’s wager gambit, theoretically you could create some sort of app and take wagers. You could call the app the orgone accumulator. Of course it could backfire and result in something like Roald Dahl’s The Great Switcheroo.
Drugs! This was light work. "Trump election support highest in areas with highest rates of opioid painkiller use, study reveals"
Rock and Roll!
Country Pop Hip Hop/R&B Alternative Rock Dance/Electronic Latin
Trump 50% 26% 9% 9% 4% 0%
Biden 10% 38% 33% 10% 6% 2%
Hmm...I think we have a problem. The above data was nearly 4 years ago. The Top 100 songs among consumers who have a positive opinion of the two (then) candidates.
Seems to me that Country music has suffered less of an identity crisis on the female side. The ladies are prospering. The men's room is in distress. George Jones, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Merl Haggard might as well be a different species. YouTube search Pat Finnerty stink Jason Aldean for a (lengthy) humorous insight.
Ears are getting dumb.
Alfred Differ 11:18 AM:
What sign am I? Neon.
I don't believe in astrology... because I'm a Scorpio.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!
Dr.Brin's objection to the Generational Cycle, the Cyclic History Model & the so-called 'Fatal Sequence' is pure semantics, as what he objects to most is it's supposed inevitability, even when these arguably non-inevitable outcomes are the easily foreseeable result of the human beings & their civilizations making good short-term but bad long-term decisions.
(1) Diversity & Unrestricted Immigration;
(2) Moral Decadence & Corruption;
(3) Economic Debasement & Deficit Spending;
(4) Ill-Advised Military Adventurism;
(5) Civil & Political Disunity; and
(6) Climate Change.
Do all-of-the-above criteria sound familiar?
Well, they should because all-of-above are believed to be the main causes of the decline and fall of both the British & Roman Empires, according to an eminent historical & scholarly consensus, and these are the very same non-generational non-inevitable sequences that the Modern West has chosen to repeat on its own volition, except for maybe (6) which was thought to be non-anthropogenic during it's preindustrial occurrences.
Humans choose the same 'good short-term, bad long-term' temporizing measures time after time because it's the only way of deferring malignant consequences until later (aka 'kicking the can down the road until it becomes somebody else's problem'), even though later arrives soon enough.
Best
Alfred,
The cocktail approach makes the best sense I have heard. If it works for pathogens, we should be able to make it work for bastards.
"We don't exactly need the rapacious monsters. We need the system in which they are flourishing.
They flourish in other systems too. Especially feudalism. Those monsters wind up with aristocratic titles they pass to their idiot children, so swapping to our current system is actually an improvement."
Is it an improvement, or is it just new skins for old wine? Presumably our system makes upward social mobility available to anyone who is smart and works hard, but I'm sure every one of us know hordes of smart, hard-working people living in abject poverty because they were born there, and people who are dumb, lazy, and were born rich. And as higher education gets so expensive it is increasingly out of reach for huge numbers of people, we seem to be going backwards to the olden days when the university system worked to ensure that the sons of the wealthy and only the sons of the wealthy got the kind of lucrative and influential jobs and/or positions that can make them the movers and shakers of society.
One big reason I challenge anyone who naïvely assumes that competition is the greatest thing since sliced baloney is that I spent a lot of time learning about the forces that bring civilizations up and the forces that strike them down. More often than not, they are the same forces. What works in one set of conditions can turn maladaptive, even fatal, under other circumstances. In every social collapse that we have a modicum of understanding of, competition played a starring role.
Paul SB
"what he objects to most is it's supposed inevitability,"
While that may be 5% of my disdain, 90% is that it's utter bullshit. Not a single assertion made by those cultists is even marginally true and all flee from factual tests. It is masturbation and an especially perverted kind.
Paul and Alfred,
The problem with a cocktail approach is that it’s susceptible to contraindications that undermine the system / do harm without being understood, especially in a vast complex system.
For example. PSB
“...higher education gets so expensive it is increasingly out of reach for huge numbers of people, we seem to be going backwards to the olden days when the university system worked to ensure that the sons of the wealthy and only the sons of the wealthy got the kind of lucrative and influential jobs and/or positions that can make them the movers and shakers of society.”
In today’s news Darmouth joined MIT in reinstating SAT requirements. The decision several years ago to make the SAT optional with the intention of leveling the playing field for under privileged students, unintentionally exacerbated the problem, leading to less of those students being admitted.
From their press release: “The absence of such scores underscores longstanding misperceptions about what represents a "high" or a "low" score; those definitions are not binary. A score that falls below our class mean but several hundred points above the mean at the student’s school is "high" and, as such, it has value as one factor among many in our holistic assessment.”
The counter argument to what I’m saying is that you take corrective action, like Dartmouth. My counter to that is that when multiple agencies are do-gooding willy-nilly you end up with too many cooks in the kitchen with one hand not knowing what the other one is doing and you get messes and accidents. PSB, you spent time in education so you likely saw how a corrective measure or buzz word is embraced, implemented abandoned, rebranded and attempted again in a cyclical Sisyphean endeavor.
Linking social catastrophe to ecological depletion/overusage is convincing - I believe there's a study that links Mesopotamian population crashes to salt buildup caused by repeatedly flooding fields, for instance - but blindly mapping a Great Cycle onto human history is something I gave up on as a sophomore. You would need a Ptolemaic System of epicycles and epi-epicycles, and you still wouldn't get any predictive value, except 'all empire fall down some time'.
Pappenheimer
"One big reason I challenge anyone who naïvely assumes that competition is the greatest thing since sliced baloney is that I spent a lot of time learning about the forces that bring civilizations up and the forces that strike them down. More often than not, they are the same forces. What works in one set of conditions can turn maladaptive, even fatal, under other circumstances. In every social collapse that we have a modicum of understanding of, competition played a starring role.
Paul SB"
That seems accurate, but I think the same could be said about cooperation or any other sort of relationship humans engage in. In short, human behavior played a starring role. But I'd wager that there are other more significant factors that are key reasons for past social collapses. Ignorance has got to be a contender for the title.
Also, I can certainly understand pushing back against "competition über alles," but that is not a fair assessment of Dr. Brin's views or messaging.
Slim,
"PSB, you spent time in education so you likely saw how a corrective measure or buzz word is embraced, implemented abandoned, rebranded and attempted again in a cyclical Sisyphean endeavor."
To which I say, Hell Yeah! But that's not a cocktail approach, that's nearly uniform, top-down decision making. There's a huge industry of people researching better ways to educate children (and adults too, believe it or not), and much of what they do is good work. But the only research that gets noticed is what is embraced by the Textbook Duopoly, which lobbies superintendents and state DOEs endlessly. They claim to be "innovative" and "scientifically proven" but don't publish effect sizes. Researchers who publish them are quickly defamed by the corporations - yet another example of how profit motive screws everything in the end.
Paul SB
Darrell,
"Human behavior played a starring role" sounds very Pratchett, doesn't it? However, I don't know of a single case where a human civilization was so cooperative it destroyed itself. Parasitical, perhaps. Note that cooperation is not the same as groupthink, which creates all sorts of dead ends. There's no reason that cooperation should necessarily stifle innovation or scientific discovery. Both of these phenomena are generally team sports, which others here correctly pointed out that involves cooperation and competition - though the competition aspect is not necessarily a requirement.
"Also, I can certainly understand pushing back against "competition über alles," but that is not a fair assessment of Dr. Brin's views or messaging."
Dr. Brin's messaging is about well-regulated competition, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than what most people think competition must be. However, we saw what happened to "well-regulated militias." As soon as the actual militias were rolled into the National Guard, the nutbags all came out and formed their own secret "militias," all of which are a threat to our very existence. My point is not that competition necessarily means competition über alles, but that unrelenting glorification of capitalism will be received as a rationalization for corporate marauding and all manner of behavior that is ultimately destructive to society, and, INMHO, flat out barbaric. When you dump random antibiotics into a bloodstream intending to kill one particular pathogen, that antibiotic does more things than just kill the intended pathogen. Feeding all ultimately feeds evil, too.
Paul SB
Don't be so dismissive of historical cycles.
"History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme."
You should familiarize yourself with Chris Hedges, a front-line journalist who reported on the collapse of the old Yugoslavia - and how we bear a striking resemblance to that nation right before it broke up.
He knows something about societal collapse.
For example here is a talk on "Sacrifice Zones" created by bankers and investors gutting communities, individual and the real economy by the banking system's financialization of the economy.
A philosophy that believes there is nothing more important than maximizing short term profits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZEdPnSbRjc
“The idiots take over the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, "experts", and "specialists" busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy. There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour
Pappenheimer,
I'm working with the evidence. If you can find an example of a collapse that was not exacerbated by, if not precipitated by, factional competition, I will accept the evidence and acknowledge the exception to the general rule. No epicycles required.
Best of luck!
Paul SB
DP,
The Chris Hedges paragraph is great stuff (especially if you set it to Michael Hedges' guitar work?). However, I think the people who Dr. Brin is talking about are not quite the same species here. Observing a set of conditions from the past, noting similarities to today, and forecasting similar results is exactly what learning from history means. But these folks are basically scammers. They grasp at a few commonalities and claim that they have discovered some mythic iron-clad rules of reality, which will scare people to death and sell a whole lot of copies, both physical and in ebook form. They are about dogma, not responsible use of the historical method. Their babbles come across more like religion. In fact, there are many cultures around the world where is literally is religion.
Paul SB
(1) Unrestricted immigration, yes;
but diversity?
(4) There’s DARPA.
You’re not assessing other factors. Watergate negated trust: when trust is gone it takes a long time to return.
I think you’re a fastidious physician, thus you have some expectation that the world ought to be smoother in its operation than it is.
Loc is similar to all, every one, of the ultra-idealists I’ve talked to—religionists; Leninists; Libertarians. They expect great things; when outcomes aren’t what religionists had wished for, they hold culpable The Devil or scapegoat some person/group as evil and worthy of extreme punishment.
b. Class systems or c. The State are held culpable. Not they or their families & friends and those they admire. Of course not. The Other is to be held responsible.
Loc thinks progressives are extreme idealists and (perhaps) if we’d only unite behind an Ike or a Gipper, we’d have better results. But the Greatest Generation is on the Endangered Species List; Ike and the Gipper are dead. The last complete-conservative potus was probably Coolidge.
‘Modern Conservatism’ is oxymoronic.
Alan Brooks:
when outcomes aren’t what religionists had wished for, they hold culpable The Devil or scapegoat some person/group as evil and worthy of extreme punishment
"Just say 'Jewish'. This is taking too long." :)
They’ll reply,
“not Jews—it’s the Lib’rals.”
Meaning, obviously,
“too many Jews are Libs.”
You’d have to discuss with them, btw, I’ve been CB-convinced since Jan 6th.
Alan Brooks:
You’d have to discuss with them, btw,
My comment wasn't directed at you.
Meaning, obviously,
“too many Jews are Libs.”
Communists. Globalists. Pretty much everything they dislike is Jews. Even the Great Replacement Theory is that Jews are the ones using blacks and Latinos to replace them.
They like Netanyahu, though.
Because Bibi is quite Rightist, having Trump’s seal of Approval.
“My comment wasn’t directed at you.”
Problem is, we’re directing comments at each other and not at our opponents. Loc isn’t an opponent, he’s testing CB/sealioning, etc. The people we have to reach are usually far less educated than Loc or anyone else at CB. It takes patience and also applying guilt; as otherwise one is only going superficially into their core beliefs. Too gentle with them, they ignore it—too harsh, and they’ll terminate discussions.
Paul SB,
Is it an improvement, or is it just new skins for old wine?
It is a vast improvement, but not one that is easy to see due to it being multi-generational in length.
…but I'm sure every one of us know hordes of smart, hard-working people living in abject poverty…
And this gets to that point. Unless you've travelled far and wide, you probably DON'T know anyone living in abject poverty. Even if you have travelled, you don't know hordes of them. The economic fact is that abject poverty is going the way of the dodo worldwide.
Take care when defining poverty. If you let the goalposts slide with each generation, you won't see the progress being made. There are NOT many humans left in the world living below subsistence levels. Our global market IS penetrating everywhere there isn't some feudal warlord willing to kill people to prevent it.
You can still have your sliding goalposts for relative poverty and I won't object. There are plenty of people in the US trying to get by on wages that are too low for where they live. Some wind up homeless. Some just wind up with unintended roommates to ensure they can cover rent. However, when you slide the goal don't be shocked when I smile and use that fact as evidence we are winning. You COULDN'T slide it unless the system was an improvement.
…higher education gets so expensive…
Stop government underwriting of student loans. I worked in the loan industry and know what that does to risk perception. It absolutely skews the amount of available money flowing in and THAT leads to perception failures at the universities.
I WANT everyone educated, but underwriting loans like that is causing tuition hyperinflation. Prices are best understood a market signals informing capital where to go.
More often than not, they are the same forces.
I agree, but will point out one small issue. I don't think there are many people who understand how our current civilization got started. What forces mattered? What did we do that essentially toppled feudalism and created The Modern West?
What we are doing right now is remarkably different from historical civilizations. None of them come even close to what this one has done.
A bad poem on moderation rather than extremism, as too much of anything good soon becomes an unpalatable mess:
Diversity is strength, Diversity is strength.
It's a falsehood oft-repeated to simulate a truth.
Analogous to some salt & spice being added to a stew,
A pinch suffices but too much causes an inedible ruin.
And a plate of just seasonings does not qualify as food.
Best
Slim Moldie,
My counter to that is that when multiple agencies are do-gooding willy-nilly you end up with too many cooks in the kitchen with one hand not knowing what the other one is doing and you get messes and accidents.
Indeed, but I consider that a feature instead of a bug. 8)
The underlying problem is that we do NOT know how to improve thing. At the individual cook level we think we do, but we often lack a consensus. So… what to do?
I recommend making messes in the kitchen and seeing what works. Do the social experiments and discover possible viable solutions. Mess things up and some will come to harm, so we also have to make a few more messes in attempts to mitigate that harm. And then a few more to mitigate the next ones. Keep recursing.
…corrective measure or buzz word is embraced, implemented abandoned, rebranded and attempted again in a cyclical Sisyphean endeavor.
My wife teaches in autism classes (mod to severe) in the nearby elementary school district. I've seen this and her frustration with it in just the five years she's been doing it. Her way of coping… turns out to look like an individual cook making a mess in her own kitchen. Some top-down stuff she just ignores, but much of it she adapts.
And no… I say nothing to her about making messes in the kitchen. I just smile, nod, then ask what the others like her are doing at her school because they actually DO work at creating a local consensus.
Sure, everyone here knows it, they’re not tards.
But you do have to be diplomatic. I’ve lost count of how many bubbas will start out with something similar to the Bell Curve—and finally say,
“mud people [not-whites] are ugly.”
Such is tactless, not candid.
More evidence of Mad Right lunacy? With a teensy House majority +all-out war vs ALL fact professions, from science to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps, now see their "Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Govt." Sure, KGB guys.
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/NSF-Staff-Report_Appendix.pdf
Diversity is strength, Diversity is strength.
It's a falsehood oft-repeated to simulate a truth.
You sound like some monocultural farmer, who is so proud of how much money his single crop is making, until a disease comes along and entirely wipes out his crop. :D
Diversity is resilience.
“ My point is not that competition necessarily means competition über alles, but that unrelenting glorification of capitalism will be received as a rationalization for corporate marauding and all manner of behavior that is ultimately destructive to society”
Alas, Paul relentlessly evades the point. Monopoly and oligarchy are efforts to CHEAT and EVADE competition. They are part and parcel of what Adam Smith complained about, -- 6000 years of feudal rule by inheritance brats RUINING market competition. You are conflating actual flat-free—creative-fair competition with its most deadly enemies…
…which other enemies (e.g. Maoists etc) want you to do.
DP: again and again and again… failure attractor states… like feudalism and elite cheating… ARE prevalent across history…
….and they have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with ‘generational cycles of history’! The latter are mystical incantations that each generation has an explicit CHARACTER. The Hero Generation raises an explicit generation who almost-uniformly rebel in some (arm-waved) direction of universal personality that then makes THEIR children universally indolent slobs who create a crises that THEIR children must then heroically solve, setting the cycle in motion again.
Would you please make an effort to understand the topic? Please tell me how that disparagement of the masses as slaves to explicit generational character has ANY overlap with the always present (never cyclical) almost-gravitational drive toward feudal power grabbing by a few tens of thousands of inheritance brats?
Indeed, the later cabal is likely financing The Fourth Turning, in order to instill fatalism and complicity with oligarchy’s putsch.
--- Jeez, locum keep drinking better water! That was a well-expressed and not remotely insulting or jabbering expression of a point of view that most of us dislike. (A rich gumbo stew is a metaphorical reply.) But still, an actual argument, aimed in our general direction!
Alas, it is related to Henry Ford’s: A nation is improved by the presence of Jews… till their numbers become toxic.” Or something similar. So is it kinda evil. Yeah, still.
But you actually (and concisely) made an actual argument. Good going!
Jeepers. Anne Coulter raging that her former god-emperor should…die? Have I said this is where they'll go?
What’s scary is right now the oligarchs GOP-owners – including Vlad P – are likely discussing the Howard Beale option for their gone-stale asset. Bets which side of the confederate-brownshirt mob acts first with a Night of Long Knives? God bless the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJsZlwTr2Y
Dr Brin:
Jeepers. Anne Coulter raging that her former god-emperor should…die? Have I said this is where they'll go?
While I'm willing to note that someone who belatedly sees the light can be an ally, it sticks in my craw that they got to look down on those of us who understood what Donald Trump really was all along, and now they get credit for recognizing what we knew all along while they were mocking us for it.
Remember, Coulter wrote a book called E Pluribus Awesome: In Trump We Trust. And I don't think that title was meant sarcastically.
What’s scary is right now the oligarchs GOP-owners – including Vlad P – are likely discussing the Howard Beale option for their gone-stale asset.
Doubtless this makes me a terrible human being, but I don't find that option scary at all. More like Mike Doonesbury's Summer Daydream.
"Bad liberal! Bad!!!"
Coulter is not mad at Trump for ANY of the reasons that we are. She simply deems him a no longer useful tool of her cult.
Today I learned that one can visit Youtube and listen to Gilbert Gottfried read all of "50 Shades of Grey".
Truly this must be a sign that civilization is about to fall.
I do wonder what monstrosity will replace trump in the hearts, or gall bladders, of his followers should he be martyred.
Pappenheimer
"Martyred" here includes "choked to death on a cheeseburger"
Pappenheimer
Coulter is wrong. The best thing Trump can do for the Republic is to live a long, long time... behind bars.
My, Chris Hedges appears to be aware of a lot of suddenly industrious idiots! Who let them all in? Well, Oregon State Congress will be showing out the ones who boycotted legislative sessions, because they are disqualified from running by measures passed by a wide margin, even in their own constiuencies.
My take on Beale martyrdom: Drowned in gaslight. Strangled by a tie strap. But I'll take being ruled not immune to prosecution, if only somebody had the gumption to actually prosecute.(What's that: timing? There's a well known cartoon featuring a couple of vultures discussing patience...)
Meanwhile, Tucker 'Yo, Rose' Carlson is going to interview Putin. One of them, anyway.
Here endeth the rant.
Dr. Brin,
"Monopoly and oligarchy are efforts to CHEAT and EVADE competition. They are part and parcel of what Adam Smith complained about, -- 6000 years of feudal rule by inheritance brats RUINING market competition. You are conflating actual flat-free—creative-fair competition with its most deadly enemies…"
Monopoly and oligarchy are what happens when people succeed in cheating and evading competition, which happens after they have succeeded in competition. They are natural byproducts of an ethos that stresses competition and winning over humility and human decency. Once again, when you feed all, you are also feeding the evil ones. People who are competitive are going to compete. That's just their nature. When you tell them that being a competitor makes them among the finest of human beings, a whole lot of them are going to interpret that to mean that honesty, kindness, pretty much anything that most humans value, are not important. In fact, they just hold you back from getting what really matters - being a "winner."
This is how you make Robber Barons, who try to create monopolies, and if they have enough success in whatever arena they are competing in, they do exactly that, and pay congress critters to look the other way. Glorifying competition is how you get people like Trump, people who don't value human life whatsoever, only themselves. Flat, fair, open - that's great, but if the superstructure emphasizes competition over all other things, then you motivate people to end flat, fair, and open, to strive to create monopolies, rather than striving to make quality products and fair profits.
A majority of people are naturally social enough that they may only cheat a little bit (as detailed in Ariely's "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty), but for the most part will behave decently, and feel guilty when they do something wrong, which helps to teach them to do less wrong in the future. But when society glorifies competition, the superstructure pushes the curve to the right, drawing more people into the narcissist category. Message matters. Tell people that being a businessman is good, as long as you're an honest one. When people are worshipped for how much money they have, regardless of how they got it, many of them will drop all morals to make sure they not only continue to be constantly praised for their wealth, they are praised more than everyone else (thus the addiction called conspicuous consumption). Donald Trump says that evading taxes and not paying people for the work they did is "smaht" and he is applauded by tens of millions of people who think that competition is more important than fairness or honesty. Egomaniacs don't want fair, flat, or free. They want total victory. In business that means monopoly. In government that means dictatorship, in religion that means one and only one religion to collect all the tithes.
Praising wealth creation is exactly how you end flat, free, fair competition. It might take several generations, but look at all the people today who think the best thing in the world would be to turn America into a fascist dictatorship, where only the "winners" have control of government, business, and religion, and all the "losers" have no way to stop their exploitation. Flat, free, fair is fantastic, but you won't get it for long by praising competition.
Paul SB
I agree with Paradoctor:
A Trump conviction could mean the salvation of the US Republic, as it will end all types of government immunity and allow all former & current government officials to be held criminally and personally liable for each & every official action taken or not taken, until all who dare serve languish in prison and dangle from lampposts like so many Derek Chauvins.
And then, my friends, the competition will be fierce.
Best
Re: Fall of Rome (Again):
In the late years of the Western Roman Empire, Christianity was a state religion, and with it, the overall tolerance against other heathen faiths or moral practices were gone. This hurt the civilian and military morale and overall cohesion. Also, as the religion allowed to dodge military services by entering the clergy so it reduced the number of recruits available further.
Under Odoaker, Rome and the Italian Peninsula experienced a short renaissance, and even the Senate got reinstated and honored ... until Justinian, Belisarius and the plague came and ended that dream once and for all.
Paul,
When you tell them that being a competitor makes them among the finest of human beings, a whole lot of them are going to interpret that to mean that honesty, kindness, pretty much anything that most humans value, are not important. In fact, they just hold you back from getting what really matters - being a "winner."
Ah. I'm sensing a strawman here. Or maybe just an exaggeration.
A whole lot of them are going to decide we mean nothing when we talk of virtues and character? Truly?
I don't think anyone here advocates promoting an amoral approach to 'winning' let alone an immoral one. Are you sure you aren't imagining Dickensian villains behind every* bush? Bumble starving his charges? Scrooge pinching every farthing? (Duncan does a bit of this too I think when he brings up how the sharks win out.)
That's not how our markets work at the end where they are most competitive. The vast majority of US-ians are employed by relatively small entities. That means if even a moderate percentage of people actually thought an amoral message was implied there would be millions of bosses who pinched pennies and didn't give a rat's a$$ about your work/life balance. They would praise your children only as a way to win more work out of you since "praise is cheaper than raise."
That's not what happens. Most little bosses have to be less than rapacious or people quit, complain, or otherwise demonstrate that virtues still matter. An unjust boss with a staff of people who have choices doesn't retain staff well and higher bosses/directors notice that as a cost associated with turnover. That is actually BAD for business because training costs $$.
As for the bosses at the top, there is less pressure on them to behave better whether or not they were taught to be monsters. They might accept an impact to the bottom line and blame it on something else beside their own bad/unjust behavior. These bosses definitely exist and might be willing to twist social rules since, by definition, they ARE unjust.
Thing is… most of us in the US don't work for them. The vast majority of us work for 'big bosses of small companies'. THAT means the mobility argument comes into play again if you aren't in a tiny labor market.If your boss is one of those monsters, you CAN express your outrange at their lack of character in a meaningful way… assuming your own character is solid enough to include the virtue of courage.
If you have a hard time believing that most of us work for small groups, just hit up the US Census data. That's what I did tonight. If you don't want to slog through the data you can check out my chart.
* Well… not every one. Most perhaps. There are going to be exceptions of course.
Meh. Locumranch loves his Slippery Slope arguments.
Lest people forget, we do occasionally indict and convict our elected officials without causing the world to come to an end.
We are expected to believe things will turn out different this time? Because a bunch of our Brownshirts are upset? Bah.
Alfred
In NZ the UK or Europe I could almost agree with you
But in the USA the power imbalance is simply too strong
People HAVE to put up with appalling managers because they have no legal rights - and if they change jobs their families may lose their medical cover
So working for smaller companies does not help - Good Managers are more common than hen's teeth - but not by a lot
I was an engineer - so I had enough clout to be treated well - but most people don't
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Feb07-2.html
In short, [House Speaker Mike] Johnson suffered two high-profile failures yesterday, adding to the evidence that he is no Nancy Pelosi. In fact, he may be no Kevin McCarthy.
Sadly, what we already know...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/opinion/immigration-senate-house.html
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
Alfred,
This isn't only about the top. Dr. Brin repeats "fair, flat, and free competition," but huge numbers of people hear "competition." That word goes straight to their manly schema, a schema that includes other words like "powerful" (and its many synonyms), "victorious," "ruthless," "callous," "unyielding" ... you get the idea. The scum that rises to the top have just as much of this junk swimming around in their schemata as your average bubba, they just express it financially instead of with fists, guns, and axe handles. The smaller group leads and corrupts, the larger group votes and sends death threats to people they don't like.
It matters very little if you can quit, even if you can get another job. The scum that rise to the top pour filth into the air we breath and the water we drink, they manipulate markets so huge numbers of people can't get healthcare to counteract all the problems they cause, and it goes on and on. Why aren't the Sacklers in prison when they killed more Americans than Hitler? In the eyes of huge numbers of Americans, they didn't do anything wrong. They're super rich, which in their eyes means that everything they did was right. They are super competitors, real men (even the women).The people they killed just weren't good enough competitors, so they deserve what they got. How many Americans fell for America's Most Obvious Conman? 72 million? They see him the same way. He's a winner. It doesn't matter how many people he cheated, robbed, or raped, he's a real man. In fact, the more he transgresses the law and human decency, they greater they think he is.
You and Dr. Brin both keep trying to bring it back to politics. I'm talking about belief systems and how those motivate people. That includes politics, business, religion - pretty much all aspects of life where people can make choices. When you stress the value of competition, a majority of people are not going to be robbed of their moral values, but those who never had them in the first place are praised as heroes and people to emulate. They become "the smartest men in the building." People aspire to be just like them, and that shifts the curve from relative restraint to increased rapaciousness.
People who are naturally competitive will compete. Cultures don't need institutions to promote behaviors that come naturally to people. People are going to compete no matter what you do. That's not a problem. The problem is how to keep competition from doing more harm than good, turning brutal and repressive. Charles Dickens based his characters on actual people, including his villains. Writers who write caricatures don't tend to last long or be read and remembered centuries after their death.
Back around 1980, anthropologist Marvin Harris (a guy you probably have never heard of if you aren't an anthropologist, but one you most certainly know if you are) made a very interesting point about the success of the American economy. When Europeans began migrating the North America in large numbers, they went from a continent where a large population had lived at an Iron Age level of technology for a couple millennia, exploiting the resources of that continent, not all of which are renewable. North America, on the other hand, had been occupied for millennia by people who had a Stone Age technology. Most of the resources of the continent were pretty much untapped. Under those conditions, how could any society not thrive? If George Washington became America's first king instead of America's first president, America would still be a major superpower.
Paul SB
Sacrifice, also, voluntary or otherwise. One might postulate that Floyd was sacrificed for the streets of Minneapolis. Later, Chauvin was sacrificed for the prisons of America; he still lives although perhaps he doesn’t have much of a life left to him.
Re: Anthropology and Psychohistory
I think I've said in here before that I have zero interest in predicting the future as in FOUNDATION. I don't even think it's possible, and seems like a fast road to financial ruin and perhaps worse. Extrapolation to future or even present-day society is not my recommendation. A clock can inspire tales about time travel, but it has much more concrete value in physics, navigation, and baking.
I'm interested in the past - mainly anthropology, maybe some archaeology, maybe even a smidge of paleontology. Having a good 'living' model of a past population might be a useful tool. It's sort of a new type of 'practical anthropology' (akin to and expansion on computational anthropology) instead of the usual theoretical, almost dialectic sort. Ancient languages for example: an accurate model of Minoan society might give clues about Linear A. Asimov projected Rome onto a galactic future. I'm more interested in working out the puzzles and processes of Rome itself. Extinct cultures and civs need not remain forever mysterious. Self-consistency is the touchstone of an accurate model, which really is only possible when knowing both priors and results. Again, this isn't possible with future prediction.
Biology in general might benefit too. Years ago I worked on a zebrafish model that had some of the same ideas. Computers were crummy back then though.
Der Oger, I assume you’ve red: LEST DARKNESS FALL.
Alfred re locum: “Lest people forget, we do occasionally indict and convict our elected officials without causing the world to come to an end.”
He and his pals are upset that diverse grand juries (mostly white retirees) across the nation (mostly in red-run states) have carefully and dutifully weighed presented evidence and then indicted GOP factotums for crimes from corruption to child predations… and subsequent juries of their peers have convicted most … at rates approaching a HUNDRED TIMES that for high Democrats.
Not one of their writhes to evade this fact – that their party has been sinking into a sewer of criminality and perversion – has worked. The ‘vast conspiracy’ evaporates when you consider the VAST whistle blower rewards offered by Koch and Fox etc, for ANY evidence of such a grand (and implausibly PERFECT) conspiracy with no defectors among the MILLION or so it would require.
What L fears is he and other repubs might have to slink back to those they have spent years deriding… honest, mature conservatives who are willing to negotiate and act like grownups. Alas, before trying that loathed otion, they’ll first go for a brownshirt wave of McVeighs.
=======
Paul: “Monopoly and oligarchy are what happens when people succeed in cheating and evading competition,”
Correct
“which happens after they have succeeded in competition”
Half right. Howa human gained the power to cheat varies widely. Conan the barbarian seizing a throne is competing. Likewise Edison inventing movies then trying to control the market. Did Conan’s inheritance brat heir compete for the role. Did the privileged son of a Leninist revolutionary, who take a top socialist bureaucracy job “compete’ for the power he then uses to crush fair competition?
“They are natural byproducts of an ethos that stresses competition and winning over humility and human decency..”
Stunning, absolute malarkey. For 6000+ years, sages and priests and gurus and moms have wagged their fingers for people to behave better… and maybe half of people responded a bit… the half already inclined to behave decently. The other half just shrugged and went on acting predator…
…UNLESS they were prevented from being predator by the thing that actually, actually works. OTHER humans saying “No, I have my eye on you, holding you accountable if you do harm. So, act decently in your own best interest.”
Hey, aren’t you COMPETING WITH ME, RIGHT NOW?
As for wealth creation… it’s pretty easy to disdain it while wallowing in its comforts and the magic powers of gods you are enjoying right now, snacking on elf-level foods while arguing (competing) with me via the magic Palantir on your desk… all of which miracles happened because some folks said I want to make all these things happen and benefit from my efforts.
onward
onward
It's so very droll:
Alfred dismisses my Slippery Slope argument, an act which I have just redefined as an insurrection (in accordance with the current legal standard), and this now allows me to indite, imprison & bankrupt him as an imminent threat to 'Muh Democracy' in both the EU & US.
Some mistakenly refer to these boringly predictable & repetitive events as the Cyclic History Model, even though such 'preordained' future histories simply result from an inexhaustible supply of stupid people who attempt to prioritize immediate short-term advantage over adverse long-term consequence.
As a practicing physician, I've talked myself blue in the face in the futile attempt to prevent many boringly predictable events like these, as most involved the well-known adverse effects of sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, impulsivity & poor decision making, but to no avail.
The truth be told, most living human beings are as dumb as posts, and stupid is the one thing that good intentions & a free government education can't fix, as even the smartest of our smart people are too stupid to fathom the unfathomable depths of their own ignorance.
Best
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