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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own

This is the sort of magical thinking that we almost inevitably engage in because our minds are a tiny subset of the enormous universe that they are trying to model, so our minds inevitably have to simplify almost everything about reality.

Another such simplification, for example, is the idea that there is such a thing as "the left" and "the right".

Another is viewing the economy through abstractions like "the market" or "socialist planning" rather than viewing it as an immensely complicated system of land, physical materials, people who all have their own motives, computers, communications flying every which way, and so on.

as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity.

It often is for a long time until it isn't.

Lenin: "there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen".

But it is difficult to function without the belief in this dependability, even though to be convinced of the dependability would again be magical thinking. So again, our minds simplify in order to face reality.