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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters

Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax. I would like to bring up some criticisms of liberalism, and why I think societies that follow it as a singular goal will inevitably suffer from the problems we see (birth rate collapse, sex wars, etc.)

On a newsletter warning of the dangers of sports gambling, Oren Cass wrote:

Careful readers, like all of you, will surely have noted that The Economist asserts not that the gambling frenzy is about people enjoying themselves, merely that it is about their being free to enjoy themselves. And in the distance between those two concepts is the gaping maw into which our society has plunged itself with this and many similar missteps.

The liberal ideal relies on many huge assumptions. Two of those assumptions are that people will choose things that bring themselves happiness and that externalities (or times when an individuals choices impact others) will be easy to detect and foreseeable. In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace. And maybe the executives of the sports gambling company and the 19 year old with a phone can consent to enter into a relationship where the 19 year old gives the executives all his money, but the 17 year old girlfriend did not consent to being beaten more often. (After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)

Another assumption of liberalism is that we enter into the world as individuals, without owing or being owed anything. Marc Barnes of New Polity wrote:

It is the basic thesis of liberalism—that philosophy embodied in all our modern technologies and institutions—that we are not social by nature, but individuals, and that anything that looks “social” is in fact some amalgamation of individual things and persons. The most famous one (repeated by weird people who talk about “marriage markets,” Redditors, and evolutionary psychologists to this day) is the Hobbesian argument that society itself is “really just” individuals making contracts with each other in order to pursue their own self-interest...

Rousseau posits that man, in his original state, was an individual, a silliness that necessitates that he imagine babies as proto-individuals, kept for self-interested reasons and then abandoned:

The mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake; and afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again.

Now, Rousseau gave all five of his kids up to an orphanage, so I concede that some may be nearer to his “state of nature” than others. But, for babies, it is quite literally a joke. Losing the mother is a game they love to play, precisely because it affirms the non-individual status of both: “peek-a-boo” makes known, by way of contrast, that the two belong to each other; that they are members of one body; that the mother is made mother by the child even as the child is made child by the mother, and that this is an enduring metaphysical relationship and a social reality; that, in short, they cannot lose each other, even if, God forbid, they do. Imagining this social reality as actually being a mere individual contract—that the mother might walk away, that she might disappear, that she might hide her face, that the so-called bond is just her choice—all of this is hilarious to the kiddos.

It's hard to believe, but the Enlightenment thinkers really thought that pre-historic humans didn't band together in family or social units. And this complete falsehood is somewhat required to make liberalism work.

The word "atomization" is thrown around as a negative. No one has friends to help them, we have apps that facilitate economic contracts with others to help us move houses or buy groceries if we're sick. Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but we're obviously not the same kind of human at all. Atomization is the founding assumption of Liberalism though.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

But there are places where Authoritarianism is needed, particularly in family life. Parents have authority over their children. More than that, there is a pre-existing bond between parent and child to which neither consented. A child cannot consent to their parents before they are born. A parent has no idea what their child will be like before they are born. And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.

In the latest edition of Dr. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting, Sax describes a family that comes to him for help. The 12 year old daughter has suddenly shown signs of ADHD. Her teacher filled out a form indicating that the 12-year-old's concentration levels are off the charts in a bad way. The girl's family doctor prescribed her ADHD medication to help alleviate her symptoms. They worked, but also left her jittery with heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms.

Sax's first question to the girl's family is how well she slept. Confused, the parents said the girl slept ok, but when Dr. Sax drilled into the details the girl nonchalantly said she was on her phone until 1-2 AM most nights. "Of course, doesn't everyone?"

Dr. Sax told her parents to take her off the Amphetamines and instead keep the kid's phone in the parents' bedroom at night, starting 9 PM. The parents' response was, "Oh, no, we couldn't do that! She'd be so angry at us."

The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier. And Dr. Sax says that this is a very common example that he sees often at his practice.

In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children. Longitudinal studies show that kids who have strict but unloving parents grow up without knowing how to form loving relationships of their own. Kids that grow up with permissive parents are incapable of balancing a checkbook and make poor decisions due to a high time preference. The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict - a combination the Literature refers to as "Authoritative Parenting." Authoritative Parenting used to be the default, but among left-leaning families there has been a surge of parents fearing that they are overriding their kids innate preferences. Proper parenting is illiberal, and therefore immoral.

One young child arrived to the practice with a sore throat and fever for three days. When Dr. Sax asked the child to open her mouth, she refused. Dr. Sax looked to the mother, and said, "I need your help to examine your daughter, could you help encourage her to open wide?" The mother responded, "Her body, her choice."

The liberal order worked when it was founded on an illiberal order. When humans acted like humans most of the time, raised their children like humans, formed natural hierarchies like humans, liberalism worked fine. I think it falls apart when the government tries to impose liberal presuppositions on every-day human interactions. It falls apart when people think they are supposed to act perfectly liberal in every social interaction. A society based around consent instead of love (willing the good of one another) will fall apart.

I love liberalism, in a way. I love how it shaped American culture for hundreds of years. But I think the evidence points to a need for a safeguard somewhere, similar to the separation of Church and State. A separation of State and Hearth? Americans need to parent better than Rousseau.

Tocqueville famously believed that religion, particularly Christianity, was necessary in America to create and sustain our Democracy. It provided shared values. People had shared common ground beyond their mere desires which which they could identify what is good for all. There is a benefit to having an ultimate Authority, in Heaven, who everyone agrees to serve but who seldom gives specific commands.

Maybe the problem will resolve itself, as atheists fail to reproduce and the deeply religious take over again. Or maybe the cat's all the way out of the bag. But the evidence seems to point towards Liberalism being good but insufficient, and the next best thing needs to be figured out before we lose the goods of Liberalism as well.

Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax.

I must have missed this, can you link to the thread you're referring to?

This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing. I will engage as if you wrote libertarianism for this reason (not that you're making a mistake. It's likely me who is confused here)

In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace

This seems like what we'd call "brainrot" or "degeneracy". I started using this latter word almost 10 years ago after reading Nietzsche, and nobody else seemed to use it at the time, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the reason the word came back. Anyway, freedom is actually the freedom to command yourself, not the freedom not to be commanded. One should only seek freedom if they don't need being told what to do in order to succeed in life, if they don't use their freedom to destroy themselves.

We're deeply social by nature (and the most oversocialized lean left! They just want to socialize without taking responsibility for anything, which is why they want the government to do everything for them). It seems that being around a lot of other people is bad for you, for the same reason that social media is bad for you. People start competing and aiming for superficial appearances of what people value while neglecting what actually matters.

The advantage of libertarianism is that you can choose which group you want to depend on and have depend on you (living as a hermit for very long is almost impossible). People are only equal in value, that they're actually equal is a stupid idea. I also agree that family values are essential, and throwing them out is basically taunting darwinism to remove you from reality. I also don't see how anyone would disagree with "The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict".

I consider myself pro-freedom, and around my friends I give myself all the freedom that I want, and I give them all the freedom that they want, too. But this only works because we're all reasonable and because we can take responsibility for ourselves. Those who believe "freedom" to be the freedom to indulge in vices (because it seems unpleasant for them to resist unhealthy urges) cannot live like this.

I agree with your conclusion, but you can word it differently. We don't need "authority" but "coherence". The advantage of Christianity is that it gives value to things which are healthier than our random urges/impulses. The disadvantage is that you can lose faith in Christianity (but if you have a preference like vanilla ice cream, you don't care if there's no objective proof that it's good - you still believe in your own preference). We also need Reponsibility (this is one of Jordan Petersons core values too) and you don't have to call this "authoritarianism". Being overly lenient with others only works when they're being too strict on themselves. I feel like this might have something in common with "we praise those who degrade themselves and degrade those who praise themselves". We recognize the need for a balance. As long as internal control + external control > X where X is some threshold, the individual will turn out alright. To the extent that a person is able to control themselves, they've earned the right to be free from external control

Liberalism, historically, meant something more like libertarianism (though probably a little less anarcho-capitalist than libertarians will get). It is sometimes still used in that sense. You'll see people calling themselves classical liberals from time to time, and these are pretty much always right-leaning people.

This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing.

The most common (and therefore correct, at least in American English) meaning of "liberal" in the US context is as a slur used by both the right and the left against the centre-left. Occasionally this extends to using "liberalism" to mean "whatever the US centre-left does". This is also slur-adjacent - the American centre-left generally call their own ideology "Progressivism" because their political tradition (with some degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice) goes back to the early 20th century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. There is a similar but different use of "liberal" and "liberalism" in British English (in this case not a slur - it is what we call ourselves) to describe the political tradition which runs through the British Liberal Party (1859-1988) and its predecessors and successors and their international imitators - there is a similar degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice that begins with John Locke advising William III and runs through to Earl Russel negotiating the Whig-Peelite merger and on to Nick Clegg and Justin Trudeau doing the things they do.

But @OracleOutlook, and the Economist (which he cites supporting it) and Marc Barnes (which he cites opposing it) are using "liberalism" in an even broader sense (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is also correct in both British and American English) - to refer to a whole panoply of mutually sympathetic political traditions based on ethical individualism, limited government, respect for a private sphere than includes religious belief, etc. All of British liberalism, American "liberalism"/Progressivism, Reagan/Thatcher conservatism, technocratic-elitist "One Nation"/"Rockefeller Republican" conservatism, and Cato Institute-style libertarianism* can trace their political traditions back to John Locke, and occasionally do so with pride. This is the background that mainstream political actors in the Anglosphere can not notice in the same way that fish don't notice that water is wet. (Many leftists, including the British Labour party, are swimming in the same water). Increasingly, it is the water that everyone is swimming in because the British won the 19th century and the Americans won the 20th.

But big-tent liberalism is not actually universal, even if it is foundational to Universal Culture. All the sub-varieties of liberalism would look at online sports betting and see "This is probably a vice, but that is a comment about private morality, not political morality. It may be so harmful that we need to ban it, but it should be legal by default because you only harm yourself." Most would cite to John Stuart Mill for justification. But a fascist, a communist, a Catholic integralist, a Christian fundamentalist, a Muslim fundamentalist, a Confucian, or a Lee Kwan Yew style technocratic-elitist would all ban it without a second thought, with "It's a vice." being sufficient justification.

* The brand of libertarianism being pushed by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and such-like is arguably not part of big-tent liberalism for reasons that this post is too short to discuss in detail.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

…

In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children.

This is something I find myself talking about more and more online. I just finished writing a short essay to post on Tumblr (it's a little too heavy on pathos and light on logos for the Motte's rhetorical standards), after I listened to a portion of this "Dad Saves America" interview with Michael Munger. Specifically, at about 20 minutes in, Munger says:

Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.

I recall a couple of Tanner Greer posts on the popularity of YA dystopias, and the passivity of their heroes, gesturing to this point: that so many of us in the West have so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority — any and all human authority — that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, that power and authority can be used for good ends. Thus, like the parents described above, they are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership, because they're convinced that such authority can only ever be oppressive and abusive.

But power must be wielded — sovereignty is conserved. Man is a political animal; and decisions — political decisions — have to be made. Someone, singular or plural, has to make them. But if no humans, singular or plural, can ever be trusted to make such decisions, then the only choice is to have something non-human make them. Hence, Weberian rationalization — the replacement of human judgement, now deemed too terrible and corruptible to ever be trusted, by rules and procedure; that is, by algorithms. In Weber’s day, implementing them still required human bureaucrats in all cases, but nowadays, ever more of them can be done by our machines — "software eating the world."

Liberalism, in this view, is simultaneously severely misanthropic, and yet highly utopian, in that it holds that if we just design our rules and procedures well enough — whether implemented on bureaucracy, or on silicon (the "alignment problem") — we can achieve a perfect "moral alchemy" that can get virtuous outcomes from even a society of Kant's "rational devils":

As modern folks, we love this kind of solution. It promises a sort of “moral alchemy.” Take the base stuff of human self-interest and turn it into the gold of a functional—maybe even a “just”—society.

You can see this kind of move all over the place. Take the problem of value, for example. It would be overwhelming if we had to figure out and agree on what things are really worth. How would we even get started? Markets, we’re told, solve the problem for us. Money translates countless different forms of value-comfort, usefulness, safety, nutrition, beauty—into a single, eminently countable measure, and the intricate workings of supply and demand yield prices. Everything can be compared. The question shifts from "What is this worth?” to “How much does this cost?” None of us needs to know what anything is really worth. All any of us has to do is buy what suits our preferences and our pocketbooks. Out of the mess of market interactions comes a price—which isn’t really the same as the value of a thing, but it’ll do.

Moral alchemy is built into our legal system too. A defense lawyer’s job isn’t to seek the truth, but to represent their client’s interest, even if that client is guilty. They aren’t directly responsible for discerning the truth. The process is supposed to suss out the truth—at least often enough that we can feel OK about it.

The same impulse is behind interest group politics. Your job as a voter isn’t to discern what’s right and just for your society and the world. It’s to represent your interests. Elected officials, in turn, are there to fight for what their districts want. And the process is supposed to sort it out into something like fairness and justice.

It’s easy to see why procedural moral alchemy is so appealing. “Only you” responsibility can be daunting. How can we be expected to discern the good (value, truth, justice) over and over again as life throws us into the daily grind, not to mention the crises and conundrums and dilemmas that crop up more often than we’d like?

The problem is that our trust in moral alchemy may be un-founded, and depending on it may leave us unable to do what we need to when systems fail. These days, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that democratic systems and free markets can produce virtue despite the nefarious actions of vicious participants. A Western world once confident that the line between good and evil ran between democracy and autocracy now worries about democratically elected autocrats. Increasingly, we see that discerning the truth by letting opposing views argue it out doesn’t work if both sides don’t actually have some sort of basic commitment to truth-seeking. And free markets regularly seem to miss crucial components of the value equation, like the CO₂ emissions that are destroying the planet. Unfortunately, the longer we lean on moral alchemy, the more dependent on it we become. Our moral discernment muscles atrophy. And precisely at the moment we need to discern what is just or true or to assess value for ourselves, we find ourselves and our societies unable to do so.

(From Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz.)

Munger's "liberalism", which matches my experience of actual liberals in this vein, ends up holding that if parents are allowed to exercise authority over their children, the bad caused the parents who abuse their children, however few, will always outweigh the good done by all other parents. If you applied this sort of reasoning about the avoidance of any bad outcomes to your personal life (and I can't believe I'm the one making this argument), you'd end up at "euthanasia for a sprained ankle" thinking.

(Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones. Some parents will abuse any authority they have over their children… but far more will exercise that authority to their children's benefit. ersonnel will always be policy. Power will end up in human hands, and thus the personal virtue of those hands will always matter. Good parenting will always be dependent on good parents. Good governance will always be dependent on having good men. So stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtue.)

Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones.

Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable. This has been the case for a long time (see for example the "people will die" video from the halcyon days of the Internet mocking this tendency) but it seems to be getting worse over time. Safetyism is rampant, and not a lot of people are willing any more to bite the bullet and say "yes, it's not worth (obtaining some good) at that cost". This strikes me as a profoundly immature way to approach the world, but it's not clear what one can do to improve it.

Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable.

Perhaps, but I'll point out that this is far from uniform. It varies on factors like class, education, race, religion. Safetyism may be especially rampant among the PMC, for example. But, while inner city black communities have plenty of problems, I wouldn't say that this sort of rampant safetyism is one of them. There are plenty of smaller rural communities, of a religious conservative character, where older, more lax norms of parenting still persist. And then there are professions that pretty much select against risk-aversion, most notably front-line combat troops. If you go by Munger's definition, then "lead, follow, or get out of the way" is a pretty illiberal motto, no? And I'd note that from where I sit — though I don't have the hard data — it looks like safetyism is negatively correlated with birth rates. So, these lingering adherents of Thomas Sowell's "Tragic Vision" have advantages in both fecundity and in undertaking the risks involved in violent confrontation.

The problem is organizing them to step up, overthrow our safetyist elites, and take charge of society. Contra David Z. Hines perpetual calls for the right to learn from and adopt lefty organizing, those decentralized methods are really contradictory to our nature. We're hierarchical. We "organize" by falling in behind a leader.

Thus, the solution to this, as with so many other problems in our society, is for our own Augustus Caesar to arise.

And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.

I’m pretty sure you can raise children in orphanages and they turn out fine (They may whine, more on that later).

You just assume that parenting matters. Why? I don’t think anything my parent did made me taller or smarter (aside from feeding me and not hitting me with a rock), so why would it have made me more well-adjusted (or whatever parenting is supposed to achieve) ?

I think the main reason for the

birth rate collapse

is just everyone obsessing about parenting. The idea that, if you fail to provide the exact balance of ”loving, but strict“(plus ridiculous amounts of money, time and attention), you should not have kids.

Adult children are always whining that their parents either were or were not strict enough. They, as well as parenting experts should be ignored, and apathy should again become the cornerstone of parenting. Before contraception, kids used to just show up, and life just went on as usual, with just slightly more crying and laughter.

Now that a woman has to make a conscious decision, it opens the door to all this anxiety and neuroticism and talk and judgment about what should be an easy, natural and popular path. What’s needed is less your strict authoritarian father than a deeply apathetic one, who just goes “I don’t care”, “It doesn’t matter”, “Have another kid if you’re worried about this one”, “Of course it’s not your fault our son’s a junky”.

You just assume that parenting matters. Why?

Because if you spend any time around children at all it is immediately apperant which ones have more engaged parents/caregivers.

The idea that it doesn't matter is another one of those ideas so manifestly absurd that you need to be an academic to take it seriously.

How do you separate it from a genetic influence?

Most academics think parenting is very important, they’re into the rousseauian blank slate, nurture not nature. Is this your opinion as well, groups that fail are just badly parented?

How do you separate it from a genetic influence?

Why do you want to?

Its readily apparent that the absense of engaged parents/caregivers has a deleterious effect on a child's development, that in itself should be sufficient to declare that "parenting matters".

Imagine the conterfactual where your parents and entire extended family were simultaneously struck dead on your 8th birthday, how would your life today be different?

I think it'd be painful at the time, but I'd basically be the same person I am now - same personality, intelligence, looks, height... maybe slightly darker sense of humor.

Adoption studies usually find that you take way more from your biological parents than your adopted ones.

Do you have kids?

Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.

There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.

I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.

After that, I don’t trust this body of work about parenting styles. It sounds like another spurious explanation for group differences, of the kind that produces new and revolutionary interventions in schooling every few years.

I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.

Except it isn't. People can, and do, abuse their kids and ruin them in horrific ways. You don't get to claim "parenting doesn't matter" by gerrymandering "parenting" to exclude the sort of behavior you agree would make a difference in a child's outcomes.

Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.

If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.

Is this language example an analogy? I’m not proposing to lock children outside in a stall for the first 12 years of their lives and never letting them hear a human word. And if it is an analogy, I don’t think a permissible parenting style is comparable to being raised by wolves.

People used to beat their kids. My father was occasionally severely beaten with a hose. Not because my grandfather drank – he didn’t – but because that’s what the parental-educational fashion was at that time. He would know, my grandfather was a schoolmaster. Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to. At some point before he retired, he got a directive from the education ministry that teachers weren’t to do that anymore. He told me he had to let go of a few of the old-timers, who could not stop beating children – they had always done it this way, this was what education was to them, teaching children how to behave in a society that has authority over them.

So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc. In my opinion they were not any more correct than their predecessors (because parenting and schooling don’t really matter), but at least the unnecessary beatings stopped, and that’s a small win, because it’s unpleasant for both parties, and you could break something.

And now the experts have turned the wheel again and apparently children need strict rules or something. I am skeptical.

Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to

And if you're a teacher who is wicked (I beat my students because I enjoy it), simple (I beat my students because I'm not capable of getting them to learn any other way/it's the path of least resistance to the required outcome), or just going through the motions (I beat my students because everyone else does), what a convenient boon! Why do the work to justify anything in a house of learning when you can just let the lash do it for you?

So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc.

Sure, but the problem is that once you make it a blanket rule (otherwise known as "going too far"), the wicked, the simple, and the checked-out start taking advantage of it. Fast-forward a generation, and compound that with changes in labor laws that compromise the quality of your labor pool, and you get the fart-huffing "no wrong answers, only wrong targets" education system of today that's merely cargo-culting what was once valuable about that way of doing things. So the wise are now punished for trying to mark on right answers since that's the only way students learn, the wicked teach grievance studies to get that same personal euphoria as they used to get with the beatings, the simple think having no standards... well, that's great, they don't have to do any work now, and the checked-out are happy so long as the official metrics look good.

I am skeptical.

I am too- replacing abusive men (and the ways men conduct abuse) with abusive women (and the ways women conduct abuse) didn't actually reduce the amount of abuse in the system. My skepticism rests on the degree to which the balance will tilt- if we can let the wise do their jobs and sufficiently protect them as they run into the practical challenges of the policy, delay the wicked sufficiently until it's time to change the system wholesale and knock them off balance again (I think government central planning tends to call these '5 year plans'), get a little more out of the simple, and motivate the checked out into wisdom, we're going to succeed in some way.

Changing policies always have this effect to a minor degree at first so it's hard to tell what shifted, and by the time you know, the will is gone. (This is why tech companies believe in 'moving fast and breaking things'- it is in theory an institutional policy that really hurts the wicked. But it also really hurts the customer, who can trust dishonest, self-interested men to be consistently dishonest and self-interested; it's the checked out in the process of becoming wise that really screw everything up.)

because parenting and schooling don’t really matter

They don't to/have a negative effect on children born wise. For everyone else, it's "we know you're going to try and fuck up everything, so the best we can hope for is that those energies are channeled in at least a coincidentally-productive way", "you're too stupid to figure this out but our society is very insecure about some people being objectively better than others so we launder this through our daycare system", and "learning how to learn" for those who don't know but, if they knew, could perform very well.

The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.

Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.

The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.

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It is a question of selection IMO. The issue of using like-like samples here is it eliminates the bad outliers. And bad outliers do have significant effects (I think its a bit more shaky on the great vs. average side). If you are a girl and never have a husband, but instead have 3 baby-daddies, and some of your other boyfriends do what they do (molest the kids) its going to be a real negative compared to if you had locked down man 1, even with his flaws (usually). But so few of those women do lock down man one, and even fewer really are on anyone's radar.

I think liberalism has two main discomforts: Impositions of will or power, and hard natural limits. It’s not like they won’t ever impose, but they do so with reluctance, and further are often deeply suspicious of anyone who would use power to impose limits on others’ behavior. Saying that a behavior is “bad” is seen as a denial of autonomy and integrity. I should be able to do anything I want to, especially things that are seen as integral to one’s view of himself. If I see myself as a man I am one and you must treat me as one. If I want to get a tattoo or dye my hair, you thinking less of me, or not hiring me, or saying it’s a bad idea is oppressive.

Now the other thing I notice is the temptation to “snowplow” life. To remove the negative consequences of choices made, to make life less demanding, to lower and weaken standards that keep those who cannot meet them from sharing the resulting benefits that come with success. If someone has more, it’s unfair.

The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier.

I don't think either of those¹ should have been the first choice. Maybe ask why she wants to stay up until 0100-0200, and address that.

¹Beware the false dilemma!

Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice. It is the only way to improve her concentration and the path to health.

They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.

How to address this? It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents. You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club. Most said that they would respect their parents' decisions over peer pressure. Now most kids don't even understand the concept of their parents having a say at all. Kids need security in an unconditional relationship, and that relationship is with their parents, not with the teenage totem pole.

It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents.

Small-n and possible bias due to typical-minding, but this was not at all what I observed in my environment growing up (and I would expect the schools I went to to be biased for some measure of well-adjustedness if anything).

You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club.

What was the exact survey question/setup? Did it come with a guarantee that if you join, your parents will never find out? Otherwise, this would have been confounded by fear of consequences. (Many people are not confident that they can maintain a lie in front of their parents, which could be internalized like "I wouldn't want to live with the guilt".)

More than 50 years ago, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman asked American teenagers this question: "Let's say that you had always wanted to belong to a particular club in school, and then finally you were asked to join. But then you found out that your parents didn't approve of the group. " Would you still join? In that era, the majority of American teenagers responded No. They would not join the club if their parents did not approve.

These figures are provided in Edwin Artmann's doctoral dissertation, "A comparison of selected attitudes and values of the adolescent society in 1957 and 1972," North Texas State University, 1973.

Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice.

True, but there is a difference between 'address why she isn't sleeping' versus 'ignore her goals and just issue a decree'.

They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.

That would not have been my first guess: I would have suspected either the standard circadian-phase differences¹ or bedtime procrastination².

If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both. (Note that when she is fully grown, she won't have parents there to limit when she can respond to messages.)

¹There has been much research showing that adolescents tend to function on later time-zones than other ages (possibly as an evolutionary adaptation ensuring that someone would always be awake to tend the camp-fire and watch for hostile mega-fauna), and that later start times for secondary schools would be beneficial.

²A phenomenon in which someone stays up late because they perceive that that is the only time that they have to themselves.

If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both.

Personally, I think that the answer is to take the phone away so that the child can see "oh, actually this isn't that bad". Fears about ostracization like that are almost always severely overblown, in my experience. But I think what is clearly not the answer is for the parents to refuse to parent (putting limits on the phone) because "oh she'll be mad if we do that".

Like I can respect that one might not want to turn to taking the phone away (and damn the consequences) as a first resort. But if it comes down to it, your One Job (TM) as a parent is to put your foot down when your kid is doing something self-destructive. Whether or not they will have teenage moodiness about it doesn't even remotely factor in IMO.

In terms of "liberalism", this post is a big old strawman akin to e.g. an orthodox Maoist claiming any slight movement towards free markets is functionally indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if it thinks the externalities are too hard to control, e.g. hard drugs. There's no reason it couldn't do the same to sports betting.

Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have.

This is a consequence of the Internet making it easier to apply for distant jobs, not of liberalism. It's happening in China too.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

I am criticizing the idea that liberalism can stand on its own. The event that prompted this post was the Lindsay hoax, in which he re-wrote a section of the Communist Mannifesto criticizing Liberalism. I'm not going to dive into that specific criticism of Marx, but I am surprised at Lindsay calling all criticisms of Liberalism "Woke Right." There is a lot to criticize and debate about liberalism as an intellectual tradition.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

Again, you're playing games with definitions here. It's like saying "capitalism is fine as long as people still have a Maoist-Communist understanding of common good that can supersede the free market".

Which might be true if capitalism is implicitly defined as "crazy anarcho capitalism", and Maoism is "anything that's not that". But those are silly definitions.

I think you should look at this comment, but I thought it was pretty clear that I meant Liberalism as the political philosophy tradition begun by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

The argument goes that they're only capable of doing so by justifying it with illiberal principles, which the society also holds.

Can you name, using Liberal reasoning only, the reason you should ban an individual from gambling? All the reasonings I can think of rely on some kind of collectivist ethos.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect", "Don't build a business around looking for suckers and taking them", and "Don't deliberately place harmful addictive products in the stream of commerce" are all very much ideas in the mainstream of the big-picture-liberal tradition despite not being consistent with Nozickian libertarianism. Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK. Conservatives and socialists favoured the brewer-and-publican interest - Churchill (while a Liberal) famously attacked the Tories as the party of, among other things, "The open door at the public house".

Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK

I'll disagree those were on the grounds that you state. Rather on "stop beating your wife", public health and religious considerations. And those were, in fact, defeated by the superior Liberal argument of personal freedom.

I'll concede that there has been a strong Liberal movement for personal empowerment including freedom from such influences in the past. But the contention here is that this has been soundly defeated with Liberals' own arguments. Much like Churchill's support for eugenics was.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect"

This is mostly a smokescreen for absolute paternalism; that is, "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make".

No, because "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make" is an overly general category that includes not only gambling, but a lot of other things that gambling opponents genuinely don't also want to restrict.

I'll take a swing at it: some people are incapable of good decision making about specific things, in this case gambling. They are effectively mentally incompetent in this narrow area but are otherwise generally mentally competent enough to be responsible for themselves. Therefore, similar to how we don't allow children or the insane to buy guns, we should ban people who have demonstrated this incompetence from gambling.

This is the mental illness or childhood or savage argument. And it is an unprincipled exception that cannot stand.

Most instructive here is the case of John Stuart Mill. Ever the archetypal liberal. Who makes this argument for India, but makes the argument that destroys this one for Women.

It is no surprise that Liberals have had to give up this, because it isn't motivated. Ultimately it is not principle that prevents the Liberal from giving children or the mentally ill dangerous weapons, but mere pragmatism. Indeed one can perfectly imagine (and scifi authors do) a world where these actions would be without lasting consequence. And in the Culture, giving children guns isn't really that big an issue, after all we can resurrect them if they splatter each other's brains. The question of whether this is reasonable is entirely evacuated, because it is an individual whim, and those are beyond question.

This entire line of reasoning is vulnerable to the Critical Theorist demand of realized freedom instead of procedural freedom. i.e.: you have constructed a society that has enslaved the mentally illl or children or gamblers, and this makes you their oppressor, your own principles demand that you create the condition where they can roam around thinking they're Napoleon/eat infinite candy/gamble their life savings without consequence.

This has been the ultimate Liberal project since Rousseau. Your pragmatic objection runs against the General Will, which means you're a counter-revolutionary that doesn't actually want to return us to the State of Nature. And these pragmatic demands are reactionary.

Or at least so says pure ideology.

If you want an ideological counter to this, you have to reach for Hobbes and become what Nick Land calls a "cold liberal" and reject the egalitarian and humanist part of the package to let markets and rationalism stand on their own. But then you are something different.

(After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)

Considering that a similar claim made about the Super Bowl turned out to not be real, I'm going to be skeptical of this.

Also, for every loss is a win on the other side. Does it cause a corresponding reduction, eliminating the net effect?

Not necessarily; loss aversion is a thing....

I've been uncomfortable with the "Authoritarianism is always bad" line for a while. I don't love or seek authoritarianism, but clearly it's something people want because we keep bumping up against two of it's many flavors: top-down bureaucratic oligarchy or Strongman monarchism. I've been in discussions with very smart quasi-famous idea generating people who simply refuse to accept that Authoritarianism can be useful and desirable.

I think the reason is that an authoritarian state has no exit, once you're in it, there's no way out except violent revolution. So it's to be avoided because you'll get crushed...even though you're going to get crushed regardless. If the POTUS had meaningful executive powers, I could see how every 50 years or so, we'd want a person to come in, clean house and then depart once their time was up.

That is effectively what the Trump election was all about. But the reality is he's stuck muddling around with the same bench-warmers and institutions every other president has to muddle about with. Sure, he might find some loopholes and it's always possible that some appointee will be surprisingly capable, but the course for humanity's destruction (nuclear war, AI safety, energy and environmental limits, etc.) is set and on-track barring some miraculously gifted leadership.

Bureaucratic oligarchy's are simply too beholden to self-interest and bad incentives. They can manage but not lead. Monarchies are too easily converted to tyrannies, they can lead but not manage. Liberal democracies are racing to the bottom pandering to every whim, they can't lead nor manage long-term. It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much, but as the threats increase and we near the great filter, it seems impossible that Democracy can solve the problem.

Someone turn my black pill white...please!

It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much

Why does this disgust you?

For the same reason some people are disgusted by sushi. They register disgust because of a fear of eating raw things, even though they understand it might be delicious and millions of people eat it without issue. The disgust is a conditioned reaction, not a rational point of view. Rationally, I'm mostly on board with Yarvin and his essays are fun to read. As a conditioned American, classical liberal, democratic patriot type, the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts makes me feel queasy.

You can appreciate a thing without having it rule you.

Autocratic monarchies and tyrannies were the rule for most of human history. Arguing over the system of government is a very modern problem. Previously, unga bunga with the biggest bunga stick wins, and the biggest concern was either getting curbstomped by some other unga's tribe or that your unga wasn't great.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them. And even then, the person has to spend most of their time maintaining their tyranny. Diffusion of power also means diffusion of responsibility, and vice versa.

The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.

Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny. The purpose of the liberal order is to try and preserve some semblance of continuity through time culturally and politically, too smooth the road, so to speak.

The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.

Agree. Another belief that is simply accepted by most people is that universal suffrage is 100% right and good. Try arguing the opposite! I agree that landed families probably ought to have more of a say than renters or welfare people, but of course I think that...I own property. How we would manage giving some people more than others based on some type of meritocratic system is kind of the base level problem. The simple solution is 'might makes right,' but 2k+ years of human society have brought us to a point where most people globally think there's something wrong with that formulation, largely that the mighty (not the same a noble, merely those with power) shit all over the weak. So we have an ideal--a liberal ideal-- that we give everyone the same amount of liberty, or whatever, and here we are...the mighty shitting all over the weak, again.

The Yarvin solution, as I understand it, is to stop pretending that liberalism exists and embrace the power of the strong and attempt to wield it...somehow. My main disagreement is that it just gets right back to the starting point where it's a coin flip if the monarchs will curb-stomp you or not and there's no exit, just monarchs/tyrants/oligarchs all the way down.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.

I'd agree that the quality of 'tyrannies' (a rather loaded term for "rule by one") "depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them"… but only because all governments depend massively on the quality of the people in them. Personnel is policy, personnel will always be policy. If 'tyranny' is thus problematic, it's only because, like Aristotle noted, it's higher variance than the "rule of few," and "rule of many" is lower variance still, as larger numbers "average out" the extremes of both vice and virtue.

Going back to my comment in the "liberalism and parenting" thread, the liberal project has been about seeking out a set of top-down institutions so well-designed to align incentives that the quality of individual people within the institutions no longer matters, working even for Kant's "rational devils." I'd argue that this is an unworkable project with an impossible goal; any government depending upon human beings depends massively on the quality of those human beings, so we must stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtuous leaders.

But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Five minutes with the average person should tell you all you need to know about including them in your system. You either have to build a more perfect system, or exclude those people entirely.

People consistently try to build a more perfect system because they notice things are broken, and correctly intuit that building a more perfect system is preferable to trying to make other people perfect.

But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Why not? Were people in the Middle Ages doing so? Or did they hold that

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

And that the world is fallen, we are barred from Eden by the sin of Adam, the poor we will always have with us, and perfection will only be in the Kingdom to come?

People have always worked to make things a little better, but they accepted that some things are just facts of life, that cannot be changed, only endured. Only with the "Enlightenment" did the West really start trying to immanentize the eschaton.

Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?

Much as with the medieval era, it seems like a total civilizational collapse back into barbarism and pre-industrial technology would probably do the trick, so why not something less extreme?

Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?

I hope I don't need to point out that this is a hard sell to anyone in the information age. Please, by all means, share your less extreme plan for getting people to accept this.

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the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts

Monarchy is a model of government which has independently emerged in nearly every human civilization known to history. Why are you suggesting that the only reason to favor it is “giving into wild instincts”? As if it’s nothing more than some atavistic act by primitive savages, like ritual human sacrifice. Like, I grew up in America the same as you, and although the patriotism and the pro-revolutionary sentiments never really took root in me the way they appear to in you, I was certainly exposed to the same information and the same memes. I don’t recall the primary criticism of monarchy ever being that it’s the mere result of wild instinct.

One of the main problems outside of science in academia is that they never had to confront the poor axioms. Physics had to throw out Archimedes and then throw out Newton. It was painful but it had to be done. Accepting Darwinism invalidated a large body of work based on prior ideas. It was tough for the people whose papers got invalidated but it had to be done.

In Social science people can still pretend that the garden of Eden existed, that fanciful tales of people on paradise islands living in absolute freedom were true etc.

Economists still talk about how money was created from people who wanted to barter more efficiently even though this has been disproven and even though writing is older than money. The idea of a social contract is still used even though humans lived in groups for tens of millions of years before we became human. The social sciences are stuck in a worldview in which humans spawned on Earth as individuals and invented all social structures even though this goes against all evidence.

The idea that women were historically oppressed is based on the assumtion that the natural state of women is a state of absolute individual freedom. The reality is that no hominid females of any species live in such a state. An animal that lives in a social structure isn't going to be happier if they are deprived of that social structure. If women were historically oppressed they could have packed up and walked into the woods. The reality is unless the family was exceptionally abusive most women clearly prefered belonging to a social structure over complete personal autonomy in the great wild.

Nitpick: the abstract says that the effect of home team losses on rates of DV goes up by 10% in the presence of gambling, not that DV goes up by 10%. I wonder if there is a corresponding improvement for victories.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

It would be great if this wasn't just another lie that Liberalism tells about itself. If Authoritarianism was always Bad, we would not be seeing cancelled elections, officials playing with the idea of banning opposition parties, or young women being sent to prison for sending mean WhatsApp messages to gang rapists.

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