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Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t. Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests? I don’t think so; female thot-leaders online who parade themselves as sex workers often have the most boring political ideology, and that is still “impermissible” today, whereas the typical incel online has insane and sometimes truly revolutionary beliefs. Is it actually the case that sex outside of norms is freeing to an individual? Probably not. I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners, and my explanation is more parsimonious.
Regarding the naughtiness of sex, a new take: every human has an evolutionary predisposition to have “naughty” sex, where naughtiness is the feeling of secrecy and haste and aggression. In our evolutionary environment there were copious opportunities to copulate outside the view of other competing humans (don’t copulate in view of the woman you previously copulated with, or in view of another interested party, or another potential mate, or just in view of other humans generally). So humans have an instinct to want to have sex covertly. And they also want to have sex with haste, which increases the probability of pregnancy and permits more opportunities. And lastly they want to have sex with aggression, explained by men stealing women from other tribes or members and all of the historical evidences of that (founding myth of Rome, the tradition of fake “wife-kidnapping” as a marital rite in certain cultures).
If you can introduce the vibes of secrecy and haste and aggression — which describes so many fetishes and deviant communities and role-play and erotica — then the sex is more enjoyable. The liberalization of sex has taken away these features: sex itself is no longer a “secret” thing that polite company doesn’t talk about, something that maybe a married couple doesn’t talk about bluntly. It is no longer something you do hastily because of all the relatives who share your humble abode. And it is no longer intrinsically tied to male aggression because of the paranoia regarding consent culture and spousal rape and etc. Notice that all of these features could apply to vanilla, married sex! The more puritanical your culture is, the greater the vanilla sex. Making sex itself taboo actually cements its pleasure.
An aside: men also have an instinct to have sex with lots of novel women. This is the one thing that vanilla married sex cannot satisfy. But many tens of thousands of years ago, enterprising young women learned that if they changed their hair style, changed their hair color, changed their perfume, and wore new clothes, they could trick their mate into thinking she’s a whole other woman. Behold! The invention of make-up and deception. The women with an instinct to play dress up gained an enormous fertility advantage.
I don't think you need to share many of his theoretical presuppositions to understand and evaluate the passage I quoted. You can just read his description of the phenomenon and see if you think it's accurate or not.
Well, there's not a one-to-one direct causal link, no. I think there can be surprising interrelations between seemingly disparate domains of life and culture though. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something that could be said here.
(For what it's worth, I'm not a Marxist, and I don't believe in the urgency of "revolution" in the way that Marxists do, so my investment in this question would be quite different from Marcuse's.)
I don't think it's that at all. In fact I think it's just the opposite - psychoanalysis provides a lot of clarity and insight into why people do the things they do.
To give a very simple personal example: every year, my mother hosts a rather large Christmas party for our extended family. Every year, she swears she'll never do it again, because it's too much stress, because her family is taking advantage of her generosity, because they don't appreciate all the work she does, etc. And yet every year, she continues to host the same party right on schedule.
What is the reason for the discrepancy between her words and actions? I used to think, well maybe she's just too meek to tell everyone "no", maybe she's just that selfless, maybe she just doesn't want to upset people. But psychoanalysis gave me an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she enjoys it! Meaning she enjoys all the parts of the process that are allegedly such a "hassle" to her. She enjoys the feeling of being stressed, she enjoys feeling like all the work is being unfairly shoved on her, she enjoys being judged by our extended family, even if she's not consciously aware of enjoying it.
Psychoanalysis posits that, when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to. It's possible that someone can want to do something even when they claim to not want to, and even when the pleasure of the act takes on the superficial form of pain. (This has immediate applications to politics - why do leftists find cishetero patriarchal oppression under every rock they turn over? Because they want to, it's what they're hoping for. They want the feeling of being oppressed - that's the whole point. It's just the same patterns that Freud observed in his "hysterical" female patients, inflated to a societal scale.)
You might say that this is just obvious, or that it's common sense, or whatever - that's fine. But I can't recall this point being made anywhere else as forcefully and clearly as it is in psychoanalytic thought.
Isn’t the clearer explanation that she enjoys a part of the organizing the party, and doesn’t enjoy a different part, and when she is satisfied from the enjoyable part then the displeasing part becomes salient? She enjoys socializing and leading, then is satisfied; she doesn’t enjoy stress, and so when post-party fatigue hits all she thinks about is the stress. No different than a marathon runner swearing off running when they are exhausted, but in a few days when recharged they want to run again.
A Freud-ish leap to the conclusion that “when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to”, seems dangerous. We can say that there is some aspect of the thing that they like. A drug abuser enjoys the relief from the drug, but wants to find relief in a better way. He doesn’t enjoy every part of the experience of doing drugs.
What you've rightly detected is that psychoanalysis depends crucially upon the notion of contradiction. How, one might ask, could someone look at something unpleasant, acknowledge that it is unpleasant, believe that they don't want it, and yet still, at the same time... want it? Isn't that just manifestly incoherent? And so, on the presupposition that desires can't be self-contradictory, you propose an alternative explanatory model that is free of contradictions: we have a multitude of competing desires and aversions, each with their own individual weights, and these desires and aversions can come into conflict, but ultimately each individual desire is self-consistent, and some will win out in some situations and not in others.
But this is ultimately just a presupposition on your part, and it is a presupposition that can be challenged, in the same way that the presuppositions of psychoanalysis can be challenged. It goes beyond mere skepticism about the unconscious because of concerns about its observability; it is your own positive theoretical axiom about the nature of desire as such. Psychoanalysis takes an alternative point of departure: what if desires can be self-contradictory, paradoxical, "incoherent"? What happens if we try thinking about people in those terms?
In fact for Lacan, the term "desire" is reserved for precisely these moments of self-contradiction and self-undermining. When you know what you want, you know why you want it, and you're happy when you get it - I want to take a nap because it feels good, I want to drink soda because it tastes good, I got the thing and now I'm satisfied - these are "demands", not desires, in Lacan's terminology. Desire is when you take yourself by surprise - it always includes a certain element of dumbfounding. "I don't know why I keep doing this, I don't know why I keep letting this happen to me, and yet it does - eppur si muove". Surely you've had the experience of not really knowing why you did something, yes?
G. E. Moore raised the question of the logical and linguistic structure of sentences of the form "it is raining, and I do not believe it is raining". Ordinarily this seems like an absurd thing to say: one would only say it as a joke, or, if it were asserted seriously, then we would assume that the speaker had somehow failed to grasp the meaning of what he was saying. But the wager of psychoanalysis is that this is a paradigmatic illustration of how the psyche is structured: paradox is the engine of subjectivity.
Now of course you can ask why you should adopt this model over the commensensical one. And the very short answer is just: read Freud, read Lacan, read the commentators in the psychoanalytic tradition who have expanded on their work over the past century, and see if there's something in it that speaks to you. These are ideas that have to be experienced and lived with; there's no knock-down logical argument in their favor, besides asking yourself how accurately the ideas describe your experience of yourself and your experience of other people. But I have tried to provide examples in this thread and the other post I linked where I think psychoanalytic thinking is applicable.
There was a great post on TheMotte one time, and unfortunately I didn't save the link, so you'll just have to take my word for it: someone here was describing their experiences with Adderall. He said, I've always struggled with ADHD and motivational issues before, and it keeps me from accomplishing things that I would really like to accomplish. And when I'm on Adderall I feel a ton of motivation, and I'm able to work hard and get things done, and then afterwards I feel great and everything's great. But for some reason I just... don't really want to take it anymore? I think I might like being unhappy and lazy better? Why would I not want to do this thing, that solves this terrible problem I've had for a long time, and helps me accomplish good things that I want to accomplish, and makes me happy with basically no downsides? And I thought, wow! If that isn't the best case study for psychoanalysis I've ever seen, I don't know what is!
Of course you can always construct a model of any situation that only makes reference to non-contradictory desires, by introducing enough desires and aversions with the appropriate weights. It's not a question of whether it's possible to do that. It's just a question of which story ultimately rings true in the end.
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Witchcraft also gives us an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she is under a witch's spell! She may not even be consciously aware of it!
Having more alternative explanations does not necessarily give you clarity and insight. Having more alternative explanations to choose from could just as well confuse you, and having more explanations that are wrong can lead you away from insight.
See what I wrote here and the ensuing replies. If we're going to accept that people have things called "desires" at all (and that is a philosophically contentious claim - it can't just be taken for granted, any more than Freud's theories can be taken for granted), then we have to accept that we don't have direct empirical access to them. So any model of desire-attribution has to be holistically evaluated across multiple axes: parsimony, elegance, ability to unify multiple disparate phenomena, etc.
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