Jesweez
2yr ago
Wow, yeah that’s wild. I’ve never really talked to anyone who is trans about it so I’m blind on how it really works.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
I think Lex Fridman’s interview with Kanye West was an amazing example of this.
If you know anything about Lex Fridman, the guy is obsessed with reading about the horrors of history and taking it very seriously. He’s also Jewish and of course had a family history of experiencing everything that went down in Europe. But it’s almost secondary to how much he reads and tries to understand why humans commit atrocities. Very serious person about these issues. It’s gotta be a core trigger for a person like this to make light of what happened in WWII, or the Soviet Union, etc.
So he interviews Kanye, and with this background, you just know that every time Kanye says something like “Jewish media” — there’s pits full of bodies flashing behind Lex’s eyes.
But man does he keep it stoic. He even gets personally attacked during the interview. Equated with the Jewish media and everything! Later goes on to confess that it hurt him when Kanye lashed out at him. But throughout the entire thing, you can tell he’s striving with every ounce of himself to be open and calm and understanding/compassionate to the human in front of him, while also being true to his own principles and calling out the bullshit where he sees it.
Kind of an inspirational example of not allowing yourself to shut down into angry/closed off mode, in my opinion.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting
I don’t know if it’s naïve, but I’ve always sort of assumed that transition is something which gets recommended after years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric.
I’m curious because I think this is a key point where left assumptions and right assumptions tend to diverge. Left assumption: you talk about gender dysphoria with a therapist and they evaluate you for a long time to make sure it’s actually there and is affecting your life in a severe way before recommending any life altering treatments. Right assumption: any old kid reads something online about gender fluidity, experiments with the idea for a short phase, the doctor algorithm says, dysphoric, boom here’s some hormones to take.
Idk which one it looks more like in reality.
Like, I think it’s fine that people transition, but I also know it’s easy to basically trick psychologists until I get prescribed Adderal. Right? So ideally transition would be there but you’d have to spend a huge amount of time and commitment to get anybody to open up the door where it’s locked up at.
That feels to me like a place where some common ground can be found? But maybe I’m also naïve there too, lol.
This is part of a bigger suspicion that all of our problems are solvable by understanding that there are fractions of truth claims in what both sides tend to offer, but it’s very unpopular to say so because we immediately perceive the other side as the worst consequences of their way of thinking rather than looking for where there is a bit of truth in what they say.
I think I agree that religion can offer group selection benefits to a society and that this likely has been relevant in history.
Some of it also may have just been by chance as well, humans like a good story and maybe some of these religions are just very successful memes that do a good job at lighting up our neurons in a way that reproduces itself well. We should be careful to not fully confuse evolutionary fitness on the memetic landscape with fitness on the landscape of intergroup competition.
But it’s definitely true that it’s a useful lens. How else do we explain for example that once a man came out of a cave with a prophetic vision, and within one generation a group of desert nomads have conquered half of the known world, and that the territory they originally conquered still maintains their religion and often too their language some 1500 years later. That was a highly successful cultural meme which was the main driver leading a backwater ethnic group to huge social and linguistic power.
But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world. And I believe this to be true. The intergroup competitive landscape is not what it was in the pre-modern world. If a modern secular country were to become deeply religious, there may be consequences in the level of their decision making which puts them at a disadvantage relative to other countries. Even if you have trouble accepting that conclusion, if we’re working from the thesis that a societies’ worldview determines evolutionary outcomes at the scale of the group, were confronted with the fact that it’s the secular countries which lead the world and that “your society having one religion they all believe” is currently inversely correlated with measures of human development, as well as with geopolitical power.
If we’re using an evolutionary lens to explain these things (which I think is quite useful and a fun way to look at history), we might also acknowledge that sometimes the evolutionary landscape itself shifts and favors certain adaptations over others. I’m waiting for any non-diverse mono-religious society to rise to global prominence to prove this thesis wrong, but I have trouble even imagining such a thing occurring in the modern world. I just don’t think it’s one of the favored adaptations for our current landscape.
Jesweez
2yr ago
I think he was intentionally going for the intellectual leaders of the movement to make his case and deeper point.
Which is why he says at one point:
The best New Right thinkers will avoid those mistakes, but still every political philosophy has to be willing to live with “the stupider version” of its core tenets.
It’d be hard to argue that the figures I list are not part of the same wave of political thinking which Cowen is describing, IMO. I don’t see any tenet in which they fundamentally differ.
That's because it's not so much as a political movement as it's an online or pundit movement. People like Tucker or Yarvin do not aspire to public office.
Trump? Greene? Boebert? De Santis (who’s at least very influenced by it)? All the people running for office under a Trumpist Republican type banner?
Jesweez
2yr ago
Tyler Cowen published an analysis of the “new right” today.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html
He illustrates the new right as a reaction against two factors: the pretty crazy level of what we’ve come to call wokeness on the left, and the capture of most of the main cultural institutions by the same left.
At the same time, there are signals that the woke left is declining in power and relevance (not quite a sure thing yet, but he lists a few signs that we’re trending this way).
Tyler does a good job in my opinion of fairly representing the views of the new right, while also laying out his own disagreements with the philosophy. These center around the idea that the new right is unlikely to be able to create a high trust society. Indeed, since 2016 we have had a precipitous decline in trust in our society, and while almost no one would disagree with this, the different sides would place the blame on different factors.
He finishes the piece:
The polarizing nature of much of New Right thought means it is often derided rather than taken seriously. That is a mistake, as the New Right has been at least partially correct about many of the failings of the modern world. But it is an even bigger mistake to think New Right ideology is ready to step into the space long occupied by classical liberal ideals.
Overall I think it’s an important piece and potentially a lot of the more thoughtful members of the new right might get a lot out of reading it.
Political movements often do a good job at identifying problems in society, but it’s usually their own internal quirks and flaws that end up being magnified if and when they do come to power. Politics tends to progress as these flaws become exposed, as one side reacts against the excesses of the other, and vice versa.
Whatever the case may be, it leads one to wonder whether the woke left and the new right are short term aberrations, specific to what will be looked back upon as a short period of time, or whether these are indeed the feedstock of long lasting ideologies that we’ll be stuck with.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Have you ever read a blog article that changed your perception of your world?
Many, perhaps even most of the interesting ideas out there do not currently exist in blog or other online shortform formats.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Books are psychoactive and change your perception of reality.
Your perception of reality now most likely isn’t as interesting as it could be.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Wow, that article is just like, paragraph upon paragraph of distain for black people. Went to read it to see if there’d be anything interesting brought up, but… oof.
Jesweez
2yr ago
If NIMBYs NIMBY at scale then it’s a problem.
What do we do then?
(My solution: NIMBY labor and re-education camps)
Jesweez
2yr ago
It’s in the style of waging the culture war, to me.
[People we don’t like] don’t value anything anymore! They’re rushing in to replace the values they destroyed!
We are in the fight against them and their values!
This was also my experience.
Edit: in Colorado. I think we were pretty chill about the whole ordeal. I just went about my life normally and I don’t think anything that I did was even ever against any certain new rule. There was a mask mandate I guess and restrictions on the number of people in an establishment, but other than that really not much changed.
We were encouraged to get out and get fresh air, for example. To go to parks, go hiking, things like this. There were never any outdoor mask requirements either.
Sweeping generalizations of the outgroup, consensus building.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Maybe OP can correct me, but certain therapies try pretty hard to be evidence based and have built up a decent track record, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
There’s a sense in which this is a consequence of the nuclear family model. When children grow up, they move away and create their own life away from their parents, and the now grandparents end up with very little familial social support. Once they finish working, they have no role in society. In other cultures, the grandparents play a large role helping their children with child rearing and maintaining the household. But nuclear families struggle to involve them in a way that’s sufficient or fulfilling for them. Thus they go off to create new social ties among their cohort.
This creates freedom and individualism for the young, but puts high burdens on working parents, and for the old it means that you’ve got only a shadow of the role that the grandparent generation traditionally had.
Jesweez
2yr ago
We should invest to keep people alive and healthy for the karaoke period IMO, but we do have an unfortunate aversion to death to where we keep people alive who are a shell of themselves through ever more invasive and difficult treatments. I’ve got a few ICU nurses in the family who always speak on this. It’s not the patients themselves who want this either, but usually the patients family who won’t accept anything less than keeping their loved one alive as long as possible.
The irony of your comment being downvoted, lol
More options
Context Copy link