Subscriber Community Thread (#11)

Essay responses; the most precious knack; highly dysfunctional leaders; the Elite and the Rest; woke puzzles; NGOs do their thing; Peter Thiel stares into your soul and mumbles about Saudi Arabia

Things have been a bit quieter than is typical around here, I know (this subscriber thread was supposed to be out in September). As usual this is the communists’ fault. China’s upcoming 20th Party Congress and some other chaos has been badly complicating my professional life, and will probably continue to do so through much of October. Which is why you should really all go ahead and subscribe so I can quit and write for you full time – and maybe also move into Ed West’s castle in Gascony, where I can pretend to be the Montaigne to this century’s Wars of Religion. (Subscribe to Ed too though, so he can afford the castle; mortgage payments on those things are really extortionate right now.) Anyway, I should be able to pick things up a bit after this month.

In other news, Substack has just released the long-awaited Android version of its very popular iPhone app. You can get it here if you’re interested:

Now, here’s the usual review and commentary for subscribers on some of the internet’s most interesting links from the last month (and a half). There’s a lot to cover…

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R.R. Reno, “Liberalism and Double Standards” (First Things)

First Things Editor R.R. Reno has written a thoughtful critique of my “It’s not Hypocrisy, You’re Just Powerless” post in his magazine’s latest issue. His argument is essentially that the Class A oligarchs are more frightened of Class B peasants than they are reveling in their power:

To my mind, the true explanation for today’s blatant double standards rests in the weakness of Team A, not its superordinate strength. Our liberal establishment no longer feels it can afford the luxury of its liberal principles. “Our” democracy is at risk! They excuse their illiberalism because they’re convinced that much is at stake… The persistent appeals to emergency need not be cynical, or at least not always and only cynical. Most of us have a sense that things are coming apart. Our country is less coherent and less governable, more factious and increasingly angry. Team A is aware of these facts, and far from imbuing its leaders with a sense of limitless power, the negative trends fill them with foreboding. Their fears draw them toward questionable measures. They slide toward what Pierre Manent has accurately called “the fanaticism of the center,” a fanaticism that tramples those who dissent or resist. It fuels a thirst for ever greater control.

I’d say that’s probably true, but would also point out that fear and dismissive hatred tend to blend together rather easily, historically. But read the whole thing.

The Prudentialist, “Autopolitical Asphyxiation” (Substack)

Writing at his Substack, The Prudentialist has written a very interesting review of my City-Journal essay on a new right-wing counterculture. His main critique is that this counterculture risks falling into pure aestheticism and becoming kitsch before it gains any real influence:

What Lyons and Pogue have accurately pointed out is that these things are happening in normally left leaning or progressive areas of America’s elite settings of capital and technology. Austin, New York, and San Francisco, places that have been the epicenter of someone’s cringe compilation. This, of course, is why so much attention, the Eye of Sauron from the Paper of Record, is being put into this, but I do worry how much this is nothing more than their own transgressive version of getting their ideological rocks off. However, the monopoly stands [so] strong that the culture against those who resist will give the left even greater monopolistic control over body politic.

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As click-baity as the title of this article is, my greater concern with this emerging “art right” or “new right” in general is the political transgressive nature of it all. While these art shows, conferences, and recruitment lead to something that can change the tide of things? Or will it snuff out its own oxygen supply as the fad runs dry and things just don’t hit the same? It is easy to be allured by the alternative vision of traditional Catholicism and Latin mass, or quoting Burnham at a house party, but if it leads to nothing more than just another club or subculture, then this may very well lead into the oxygen being snuffed out of any potential movement.

Read the rest.

Rob Henderson, “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” (Substack)

How do large numbers of people suddenly come to adopt the same view on an issue that, until recently, no one cared about?

Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1952, observed that no one had figured out how to predict in advance the “general line” of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.

The abrupt and ferocious shifts of “correct opinion” puzzled not only outsiders, but Soviet citizens themselves. Even officials within the Communist Party were often bewildered at the sudden reversals of correct opinion.

The term “political correctness” was first used in 1917 by Marxist-Leninist devotees following the Russian Revolution. It was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In other words, the Party line.

Berlin writes:

“Inability to predict curious movements of the line is a crucial failure in a communist. At best it upsets all his personal calculations; at worst, it brings total ruin upon him…But even allowing for disparate factors such as nationalism, human fallibility, and the confusion of human affairs in general, the irregular path traversed by the ideological policy of the Soviet Union still remains abnormally puzzling.”

Marxist doctrine helps to understand these zig zags.

This post by Rob Henderson explores how the ability to read the latest regime propaganda and quickly identify the “current thing” at any given time became what Berlin described as “the most precious knack” a citizen living in any totalitarian regime could acquire. And how sadly, “The inability to master the art of identifying the correct opinion to hold at the correct time led to many of the Soviet regime’s most faithful and devoted supporters to be exterminated.”

Read the whole thing, it’s fantastic. And oddly familiar…

Tara Henley, “On Collapse” (Substack)

Tara Henley cites several recent essays in local prestige media to note that the Canadian elite are now quite perturbed by a new trend: people who openly point out that things are not ideal right now. Some even dare to openly consider whether maybe “the current system of liberal democracy is inherently corrupt and corrupted, verging on collapse…” What is the best way to respond to those people who don’t think everything is wonderful, and say so? If your answer was “censor these dangerous extremists before they endanger the social and political order,” congratulations: you are a right-thinking Canadian!

Brett and Kate McKay, “The 5 Characteristics of Highly Dysfunctional Groups” (AOM)

The rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman spent much of his life studying both family life and leadership. Observing “that no matter what type of group he worked with or in what country or culture that group was embedded, the dysfunctional ones all shared similar characteristics,” he wrote about his findings in a book called A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, published posthumously in 1997.

Friedman found that dysfunctional groups are almost always characterized by a state of “chronic anxiety,” or a systemic underlying tension in which no one knows where they stand or what might set off a conflagration at any given time; everyone begins looking to self-censor, cover their own behinds, and shift blame. This chronic anxiety manifests in five typical characteristics, each of which feed on each other in a vicious cycle:

(1) Reactivity, or “the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.”

People in dysfunctional groups viscerally and automatically respond to stressful events and to each other’s responses to those stressful events. Instead of reacting to stressors with the human capacity for calmness and reason, people in dysfunctional groups react with their reptilian brains… Reactivity in families and other social groups manifests itself in outsized uproars over perceived slights. The threshold of pain from these slights is extremely low. Even the most innocuous statement can be turned into an extreme offense by a highly reactive person. Instead of focusing on the problems they’re facing, reactive groups make things personal.

(2) Herding, or the “process through which the forces of togetherness triumph over the forces of individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.”  

Telling Mom she needs to get her life together is hard and painful — it takes nerve. Hence, family members instead choose to contort themselves into psychological and emotional knots to ensure everything stays copacetic so that Mom doesn’t get upset. They sacrifice their own well-being, not even to make things good, but to keep them from going bad… You see this same dysfunctional dynamic in groups outside of families. Instead of firing toxic and incompetent employees (which would be hard and painful), many workplaces will just figure out a way to organize themselves so that these people do the least damage. But that doesn’t solve the problem, and the group continues to suffer as a whole.

(3) Blame Displacement, or an “emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.”

Friedman observed that when dysfunctional families have an underlying group anxiety issue, instead of each member taking responsibility for themselves and making changes to themselves to reduce the anxiety, they blame other members of the family.

(4) Quick-Fix Mentality, or “a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.”

You also see this dysfunctional dynamic in struggling companies or volunteer organizations that develop “programs” to pull the group out of a rut. They’ll spend tons of money on team-building retreats or consultants that provide communication tools that will supposedly create better group cohesion… These programs and initiatives might temporarily relieve the tension and discontent in the group, but because they’re not tackling the underlying issue — chronic anxiety — nothing changes in the long run. Members are still unmotivated, cynical, and untrusting.

(5) Lack of Well-Differentiated Leadership, or “a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four characteristics.”

By far the “most significant characteristic that leads to and drives debilitating, chronic anxiety in a family or group is an absence of real leadership.”

Real leadership, or what Friedman calls “well-differentiated” leadership, is characterized by a leader’s ability to hold themselves apart from the group’s emotional dynamics and – most importantly – have the nerve to exercise authority and make hard decisions. It is the lack of any clear authority that “creates the kind of uncertainty and disorganization that generates anxiety in an organization in the first place. As anxiety increases, the impulse towards all the above characteristics rises, and these dynamics deepen the anxiety.”

Why do I find all this interesting enough to quote at length here? Well if it wasn’t clear already, the picture painted above of a lack of any mature authority resulting in systemic dysfunction sure strikes me as familiar today! In fact today there no longer seems to be any clear source of authority at all.

And it just so happens that Friedman also “believed that chronic anxiety could consume entire nations. He argued that many of the societal problems faced today in countries like the United States are due to chronic anxiety.” Huh.

Rob Henderson, “I Have Yet to Hear a Satisfactory Answer For Why Adults Care What Young People Think” (Substack)

Meanwhile Henderson has also noticed something:

About two years later, I was at a breakfast gathering with some other students on campus. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious, and spent most of the time answering questions from students.

And in his answers, he continually returned to variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it's up to you guys to fix it. I'm so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been, because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.”

This mystified me. This guy was well into his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experiences in leadership roles, was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was a little older) that older adults are relying on them.

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Older people in this category are now reluctant to say that they have accrued some knowledge and something useful to share. Some wisdom to impart. There is a massive hunger among young people for this. Part of the reason they behave so erratically is to test where the line is, and to see what knowledge older people can share to steady their anxieties… In other words, young people act out to see what they can get away with. They want to test boundaries. Which older adults are often unwilling to enforce because they want so badly to be liked by younger people. Some young adults can sense this, which emboldens them. That is, while some young people are implicitly seeking guidance when they act out, others act out because they experience glee when they taunt older adults…

Older adults [today] crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them. This desire for esteem may be why older adults won’t exert any authority in response to energetic young conflict entrepreneurs who yell at them or threaten them. Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent,” every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.

Huh.

Wokal Distance “The Flattening of Meaning” (Substack)

An essay on why, without the belief in any moral authority to say any one thing or value is better than any other, we end up with a great flattening of meaning, and mass confusion:

The moral ethic of our age says that everyone in society must have all the exact same social and cultural privileges. That is, it is not enough for their to be equality under the law, everyone must have and equal amount of social power, agency, clout, respect, desirability and status. The reason why that there is a move to say there can be no objective standards for what is good, worthwhile, beautiful, and valuable because having standards of that sort creates social inequality. If society decides there are objective standards for what is good, worthwhile, valuable, and beautiful that would mean that social cache, clout, prestige, opportunities, resources, and social power will accrue to people whose life most aligns with those standards at the expense of those who disagree with those standards. In other words claims that standards are objective or that some things are objectively valuable privileges the people who agree with those standards and pursue the things said to be objectively valuable while marginalizing those who prefer a different standard or have different values.

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Once you get to the bottom of the postmodern view of the world you realize that there is no objective point of reference at all by which you can orient your life, and all that is left is subjective preferences. And it is even worse then that. On a postmodern understanding of the world what one prefers is merely a result of socially conditioned preferences absorbed from a culture one neither chooses nor creates.

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And this is nihilism. It’s is like floating in a world without gravity; there is no way to know which way is up and which way is down and there is nothing that holds the world together. The result is the existential equivalent of vertigo and a society that is coming apart.

Alex Kaschuta, “The Tragedy of Our Commons” (European Conservative)

Alex Kaschuta is also concerned about norms. Specifically that the “intangible commons” created by cultural norms and values we take (or once took) for granted are just as vulnerable to destruction by the “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon as any material commons. And that the destruction is now well advanced:

The current trajectory in our relationships and in our other intangible commons is technological Brazilification. The few winners in this game, the good-looking, the uber-conscientious, the already rich, happily cash in their gains, and below them open the sprawling favelas offering limbic tickles for the plebs. You yourself may be immune to their charms for now, but quantity is a quality all in itself, we have never seen such an onslaught of enslavement packaged as entertainment, or as identity.

David Rozado, “Where did the Great Awokening come from?” (UnHerd)

What came first, your colleagues talking about woke stuff, the media talking about woke stuff, or the universities talking about woke stuff? Well now there’s some data:

“Yearly frequency of terms denouncing prejudice in academic papers [blue] and news media [black]. Source: Semantic Scholar Open Research Center”

As the authors of this paper summarized on UnHerd point out, the media has directly followed the lead of the academy. This used to take a decade or two of lag time, but now it happens almost instantaneously whenever a new front in the woke crusade is opened.

But my own further takeaway here is that this data actually may help support the theory that the implementation of the U.S. Civil Rights Act in the late 60s and early 70s, including the creation of a vast federal legal bureaucracy to enforce and expand it (and intellectual entrepreneurs to justify it), was the key structural origin of the woke revolution.

Ed West, “In defence of ideas unpopular with the British public” (Substack)

Using the new Truss government’s unpopular tax-cuts-for-the-rich debacle as a somewhat atypical test case, Ed West examines a strange phenomenon: throughout modern history, if an idea is popular with the public, but not elites (such as immigration restrictions), it doesn’t happen. Contrarily, if an idea is popular with elites, but not with a supermajority of the public, it happens anyway. Odd that.

If you go back in history, most liberal reforms have been unpopular to start with. In his book on democracy and illiberalism, Yascha Mounk pointed out that: ‘The end of segregation was brought about not by the will of the American people but rather by an institution that had the constitutional power to override it. When we think of the civil rights movement, we tend to think of the brave acts of ordinary citizens, from Rosa Parks to James Hood. And yet its history was just as much one of liberal decisions won against the resistance of electoral majorities.’

Most of these unpopular ideas become retrospectively popular because they succeeded, or were seen to have succeeded, or opponents have been crushed. The difference between social and economic liberalism is not how unpopular they are with the people, or how much they are imposed by an ideological minority; it’s how much support they get from elites. If Truss’s plans for a neo-Thatcherite revolution had the backing of academia, showbusiness, journalism and the wider intelligentsia, it wouldn’t matter what ‘the public’ thought. It would happen.

Darel E. Paul, “The Puzzle of Woke Capital” (American Affairs)

An excellent essay that is much too long to easily quote from, but which considers multiple theories for why big business went woke, discarding many and settling on the answer that essentially the professional managerial class that such organizations employ demanded it as a therapeutic ideology. I.e. CEOs are now effectively hostage to employees and HR departments, far more than they are to even Blackrock’s ESG standards. And so:

“This theory of woke capital points to a much needed complementary response of disciplining the professional class directly.”

Peter Thiel “The Tech Curse” (NatCon)

Is Peter Thiel a dark reactionary mastermind, plotting behind the scenes to overturn American democracy? Maybe. Is he a somewhat awkward nerd who likes to totally wonk out giving a fascinating, data-filled talk on why the tech industry might be the new oil, bestowing states with a “resource curse” that systematically captures and corrupts their governments, hollows out their economies, impoverishes their middle class, degrades their infrastructure, and ultimately breaks their societies? Definitely.

Joel Kotkin, “The revenge of the material economy” (Spiked)

Joel Kotkin thinks that maybe “America’s narrow escape… from a major rail-worker strike brought home an important truth: people who make and ship real things – let’s call them material workers – now hold the whip hand over our supposedly ‘post-industrial’ economy.”

The conflict between the material economy and the economy based in ephemera – such as the creative industries, tech and financial services – is likely to define the coming political conflicts both within countries and between them. The laptop elites, led by Silicon Valley, the City of London and Wall Street, generally favour constraining producers of fuel, food and manufactured goods. In contrast, the masses, who produce and transport those goods, are now starting to realise that they still have the power to demand better futures for themselves and their families. Like railway workers, they can threaten to shut things down and win much higher pay.

Honk honk!

Erin Banco, Ashleigh Furlong, and Lennart Pfahler, “How Bill Gates and partners used their clout to control the global Covid response — with little oversight” (Politico)

Politico, for reasons unclear but probably because now “critics are raising significant questions about the equity” not sufficiently prioritized in the scheme, decided it was time to finally detail how…

When Covid-19 struck… What followed was a steady, almost inexorable shift in power from the overwhelmed governments to a group of non-governmental organizations, according to a seven-month investigation by POLITICO journalists based in the U.S. and Europe and the German newspaper WELT. Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments.

A very long and detailed look at how unelected NGOs decided they were just going to run government policy around the world from now on.

Leo Sapir, “America, Exporter of the Gender Revolution” (City-Journal)

Is the U.S. State Department about to classify Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. as human rights abusers? According to an internal memo from Secretary Antony Blinken (leaked to me by an officer in the department’s Foreign Service) and circulated among employees last week, the answer might be yes.

The memo represents an effort by Secretary Blinken to carry out President Biden’s Executive Order 14075 from last June. That order instructs agencies of the federal government to do what they can to stop “conversion therapy” for “LGBTQI+” people…

Ominously, the Blinken memo defines “conversion therapy” to include not only “electric shock” and “corrective rape” but also “talk therapy.” That’s right: using psychotherapy to help a child in distress about her changing body feel more comfortable in it rather than undergo expensive, risky, and irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions is, according to the State Department, no different from electrocuting gays and lesbians in order to “liberate” them from their innate sexual attractions.

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The Blinken directive effectively turns American consulates and embassies into global “gender affirming” spies. Embassies are instructed to “submit robust information on the so-called ‘conversion therapy’ practices” of host countries “as part of the annual Human Rights Reports.” Jessica Stern’s office will then devise an “action plan to combat the practice across foreign policy and foreign assistance lines of effort.”

*Intersectional Imperialism intensifies*

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That’s all for now folks. See you all again soon.