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A. N. Owen's avatar

The Atlantic's SF article did impress on me that cruelty in the name of good has many guises. "...progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all...." hence the cruelty of leaving a dying man alone on the sidewalk without attempting to help him. So much for dignity!

However, I'm also intrigued by how "dignity" has evolved from a gravitas based on responsible and respectable (remember when respectable used to mean something?) self-control to being forced to tolerate impassionate, illogical and ultimately self-destructive behaviors.

I'm also fascinated by Eric Kaufmann's Quillette study. I'm well aware of how "queer" has morphed to be something far more than just sexual attraction. It's a distinct ideology now. I'm not surprised that the conservative subjects in the survey should be the most grounded in reality. The explosion of left wing women identifying as queer is also responding to cultural power. In an age that gives tremendous cultural power (and now even political influence) to identity groups based on oppressed statuses and intersectionality, the closest most left wing people can come to identifying as an oppressed group is to identify as LGBTwhatever+ with the sure knowledge that they never actually have to act upon it. No one is going to challenge a self-declared bisexual identity even if the said person never actually has same-sex relationships.

But it's also probably very true that it's a form of mental escape too, people seeking new identities as an escape from their everyday problems. A cousin, in her early 30s, always never conventionally attractive, overweight, long history of bipolarism, has now adopted a masculine name and implying in various correspondence a masculine identity. Should I be surprised? I can see someone who would feel pushed to the margins of culture for never being conventionally attractive as a female would seek an escape from her problems in a new identity.

Which does lead me to Greenfield's essay. I spent more than a decade an expat in non-western countries (Middle East and Asia). One of things that struck me was the strength of the extended family dynamics in which everyone had a place and no one was left behind or alone. And because of this, the larger society was never a lonely place. Loneliness is a real problem in the modern west, a byproduct of liberalism (by destroying attachments to culture, society, institutions, and even family itself, all in the name of the primacy of the self-autonomous being). But I also imagine it's also a byproduct of Western affluence - the state can support a large demographic who have become effectively dysfunctional. Go back 150, even 100 years ago in the West, if you didn't work, you starved. It was literally as simple as that. But Western affluence allows generous welfare support, which, combined with concerned by enabling, parents and social workers, likely allows people to persist in developing mental problems that worsen over time through this indulgence, as they never actually have to, you know, work and feed themselves. There's something to be said about hard physical work in helping people get through any personal issues.

Last but not least, the One Way Government rings true enough. These concerns go all the way back to Eisenhower! I am agnostic about DeSantis, but watch him carefully and I suspect he is also aware of this problem too. The future might be very interesting if there is ever a DeSantis presidency. He is the one potential presidential candidate who seems to have both the ideological commitment and political resolve to try to battle the bureaucracies. Time will tell. Elections are years away.

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N.S. Lyons's avatar

Thanks for the great comment. Your expat anecdote is especially thought provoking in raising the family/loneliness vs. affluence angle. I also suspect it's both, but I'd be interested to see any data comparing family-centric democratic Western countries (like Italy, maybe others?) vs. similarly wealthy Western countries where family life has declined.

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A. N. Owen's avatar

I wish I could offer the data, unfortunately I can't. But I wouldn't be surprised to see the Southern Latin countries having better mental health compared to the Northern European countries. It doubtlessly can be explained away in part with Protestantism versus Catholicism, the former prioritizing individualism and self-help (the most important Protestant creed was probably God helps those who help themselves), and the latter prioritizing family and community. To be strictly fair, the Protestants did also emphasize family and community but they were more individualistic too. The industrial revolution swept the Protestant countries first while the paterfamilias and quasi-feudal dynamics lingered in the Catholic south and even East into the 20th century. Then the decline of meaningful faith in Protestant countries likely worsened the situation further by removing the anchor of faith. Even today, the Italians and Spaniards (and the Greeks) are still infamous for big family lunches and everywhere I travel in these regions I'm always struck by how lively towns and squares become in the evenings as communities come together in social activities. Anecdotal observations, but shared by many.

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Sunshine's avatar

A wonderful selection of articles. There is so much that could be said about each of them.

If you put together the institutional analysis in "One Way Government, and the Bilek article on the medical/legal/cultural moves of the Billionaire Pritizkers you have the foundation for a profound analysis of the modern American power machine.

In addition I consider Liah Greenfeld is one of the most insightful cultural analysts around. In her major text "Mind, Modernity and Madness," she clearly lays out all of her key assumptions and presents a powerful argument for the controversial claim that what she calls functional mental illness, stuff of unknown biological causes, like major depression, bi-polar disorders and schizophrenia, are, in fact, cultural in origin. She claims that the invented idea of nationalism, first introduced into the world in early 16th century England and then to later spread throughout the world, is the primary cause of such mental illnesses. She argues that the three key principals of nationalism--secularism, egalitarianism and popular sovereignty, have incrementally changed the consciousness of the human mind and have also profoundly affected the formation of individual identity (largely for the worse) particularly in prosperous and supposedly stable liberal democracies.

But what is of even more fascinating for me is her argument and key assumption in an earlier book, "Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity," -- that the concept of nationalism was created because of anomie (involving the emergence of new societal roles that did not fit existing categories) among a significant number of well-placed individuals who were experiencing a form of status inconsistency accompanied by a growing sense of insecurity and anxiety. As a consequence of such anomie, this particular emerging English cultural grouping was motivated to reinterpret their actual experience partially through their creation of a new definition of nationalism which more accurately reflected (in this case) their rising social status.

Flash forward to 2022, with anomie again pronounced throughout many segments of American society. Is it conceivable that a platform like Substack (where lots of independent thinkers and readers are now congregating) becomes a vehicle for the beginning attempts at a necessary redefinition or reinterpretation of our contemporary woke cultural/religious/political and economic reality?

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N.S. Lyons's avatar

Thanks for expanding some more on Greenfeld, I'll have to check her work out some more. My first instinct was that this is not how I'd define nationalism at all, but then this is I think a more accurate definition of nationalism in how it eventually played out in the modern era, so it would still make sense. Will have to give it a read.

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Stephen D. Adams's avatar

I suspect they all are related. I’ve already read most of themOne of the reasons I love Lyon’s Substack is that the essays and point of view are so generally pessimistic, but humorously so. I’m also very disturbed and pessimistic about how effectively the Cathedral (I like Curtis Yarvin’s term, even though he seems more than a little—er—eccentric) has sent it’s emissaries/moles burrowing into all areas of government, culture, etc. In some ways it seems like the Borg—“Resistance is Futile!” But it should be noted that in Star Trek TNG the Borg did NOT win. The fatal flaw in the Permanent Woke Hegemony Theory is that the ideology of the Cathedral is empirically false. (People with penises cannot give birth…) Objective reality will crush it in the end, just as it crushed the economics of the Soviet Union. Liberalism triumphed because it works better. With any luck the Cathedral’s life span will be shorter. It’s very true that liberalism is displaying many possibly existential pathologies that I wish I knew how to solve, but it should be noted that the best and the brightest from those countries where family and tradition is very strong, where the individual is enmeshed in a (strangling?) cultural web, are emigrating HERE, to Western Enlightenment Liberalism, where they have a) a greater chance of material success, and b) the choice to be ALONE if they so desire.

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N.S. Lyons's avatar

The humor comes from the true absurdism of our current world, as far as I'm concerned. It seems to know no end. Hopefully you are right that this will be it's downfall.

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MarkS's avatar

Moldbug (aka Yarvin) is not "eccentric", he's a racist fascist asshole who gets everything wrong that he didn't crib from his betters. To wit, "the Cathedral" is dumb, because it invokes a sense of religious awe that the deep state commands in no one. It's misleading and useless, just like everything Moldbug has ever written.

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Ringo's avatar

Moldbug isn't everyone's cup of tea - but I find him an interesting subterranean thinker worth reading and paying attention to. He's also hilarious and a very good writer...

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MarkS's avatar

Once again, no mention of a original single idea (that is not obviously wrong) that he has ever had.

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Tom Watson's avatar

I take it you were living in a hermitage for the last 2 years and have only just got back on the internet? Gosh have a couple of things passed you by.

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MarkS's avatar

Nope, don't think so. Feel free to post an actual quote from Moldbug that has any originality to it at all.

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Frank Lee's avatar

Great piece!

Here is how I frame the big picture that is this thing called wokeism. It is within this campus-hatched orthodoxy that the current LGBTQ+ crazies emanate.

Don't we remember the trauma of grade school? We had to traverse a gauntlet of abuse from our equally insecure and hormonal-confused classmates. Sexuality... what a confusing mess. During that time how many of us were at times overwhelmed by a sense that we would never fit in? I know I was frequently... even though I was a considered an attractive (as told to me by my few female school chums) and tall athlete that achieved good grades. But I grew up in a single-wide headed by my divorced and high school-educated mother. I had weak confidence of my social skills. I often did not get the cutting joke and would be teased about it. I felt I was always outside the popularity bubble. And later, talking to my fellow classmates, ALL of them admitted that they felt the same at times. We all have a bit of K-12 PTSD and admitted that it was a difficult time in our human development.

Most of us got through it... learned how to cope... launched our careers... learned that everyone is unique but that there are social standards of behavior we must learn to adopt unless we want to stand out as a social rebel. Most of us eventually found ourselves and became comfortable with it. However, some struggle with it far into adulthood. And some of these became social malcontents.

But what if instead of facing this challenge to figure out ourselves and where we fit in the social hierarchy, we could join some powerful cult that would punch down the status quo and elevate us? What if we could bypass the social gauntlet and rewire the culture so we could immediately be seen as the better person?

It has been the dissociated social malcontents in academia that came up with critical theory (upset that collectivism was proving disastrous and needing an excuse) and then later more of them turned it into the fake scholarship parasitic mind virus of wokeism that infected the campuses first, and because the infected graduated and made their way into the world, infects everything else.

It is a giant victim mentality movement that blames what the malcontent feels he is still entitled to on those that traversed the gauntlet and made their way in the world. From decades of corrupting school curriculum and instruction, they have brainwashed millions of students to adopt their victim mindset. Their resentment powered this creation of an army of nihilistic cult followers.

However, traversing the social development gauntlet is required for the human animal to sufficiently develop to a functioning adult. There is a pile of individual mental and psychological problem-solving we must all do. We develop our emotional intelligence by facing our internal and external conflicts... otherwise we stay emotive reactionary infants. And if we stay emotive reactionary infants, we are diagnosed with mental health problems.

Much of this woke project is pushed by feminists who insist that society is racist, and misogynist and that the white male patriarchy needs to be destroyed. However, they are really attempting to destroy the social and cultural norms that had developed over decades if not centuries... to circumvent the hard work required to navigate it and fit in. Certainly, there is a need to advocate tolerance for difference, and racial, gender, sexual, etc... bias should always be a target to irradiate. But the wokeists have taken it way too far to attempt to mainstream absurdity and frankly insanity. They are not well. They need cognitive behavior therapy. But first, we need to fix our education system to eliminate the critical theory fake scholarship from the education system so future students are not so corrupted and damaged.

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N.S. Lyons's avatar

I'd just add the internet as a maladaptive new variable, which allowed socially maladjusted malcontents to find other malcontents and express themselves with collective malevolence to a degree that is unprecedented.

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Frank Lee's avatar

Good point. Without the Internet there would likely be limited mob power. Yes, the malevolence displayed by these self-anointed victims of oppression seem to confirm the points made by people like Jordan Peterson that it is ubiquitous in the human condition.

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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

You are really onto something here, and i think it's partly based on the fact that the New Left is (and always has been) as much a therapeutic enterprise as a political one.

So whereas the Old Left was about the redistribution of wealth, the New Left is about the redistribution of esteem (and the reversal of stigma).

So in this iteration of the Permanent Revolution we call Leftism (which is as much a religion as it is a moral crusade and jobs program), those who are most miserable are called to bring their pain to the marketplace, recite an incantation of canned jargon, and hopefully get a sinecure or status boost (or even just the thrill of getting to destroy an enemy).

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Vit_D's avatar

I second this sentiment. I do observe this "therapeutic enterprise" manifesting in the workplace and promoted without question. It is rather disheartening.

What keeps me from exiting is a conviction to raise and support awakened souls to lead and operate organizations for the welfare of each other and our communities. I can't abandon ship to the pirates, I tell myself.

Though I admit, leaving this Western progressivism behind and slipping south of the border sounds attractive...perhaps too easy an exit.

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Brian Villanueva's avatar

Harpers magazine, an organ of the uber-progressive, uber-educated Left, has apparently forgotten that it was progressives 100 years ago who distrusted democratic institutions and pushed create a rule by experts largely immune to the vagarities of politics. As pleased as I am that they've realized the danger, they seem oblivious to their fellow progressives' role in creating it. That's the great thing about being progressive: your intentions are good, so you never have to apologize for all the damage you cause.

Of course, one could also say that if the expert class has lost Harpers Magazine, they've lost pretty much everyone. Let us all hope.

"Greenfield then takes the very spicy step of asserting that the functional mental illness is a characteristic disease of prosperous and secure liberal democracies."

Spicy is right. She should expect the Charles Murray treatment to be coming her way in the near future. However, for those actually interested in truth, this is a fascinating idea: people who are wealthy enough to be bored spend so much time navel gazing they make themselves crazy. Who knew?

"But here Auron’s warning is for the political Right..."

The deep state power structures serve to insulate the elected representatives from accountability. Regardless of how dangerous they are to the rest of society and to republican government, they are useful to the people elected to that government and will therefore remain.

However, the Right could attack the accreditation system of the universities, the state funding for grievance studies programs, use DOE money strings to force ideological diversity, the spread of occupational licensing regimes, etc... These things they might do, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Frank Lee's avatar

That last paragraph is required if the right expects to retain any role in governance.

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Denise Chukker's avatar

What in the world happened to societal norms?! Tried as I might to read all the essays by all of the various people: my eyes were continuing to go from left to right…….yes, they were moving, but they were all glazed over. I actually felt like I was a kid again, on a Sunday afternoon, my mother was forcing me to watch William F. Buckley, Jr., on the television and I’m sitting on a stool and she’s giving me a Richard Hudnut Permanent………I would sing songs in my mind and my eyes glazed over then too.

What happen to our society when one could call the police and, I don’t know, say that there’s a man who is a naked laying by the shopping carts at a grocery store AND IT’S DISGUSTING AND GET HIM OUT OF HERE!

OMG PEOPLE OUR SOCIETY HAS RUM AMOK!

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Tom Watson's avatar

'Politics is a vulgar tactic to limit justice' was an excellent summary of progressivism's self-image. Reminded me of an acerbic Scruton comment about the rhetorical two-step allowed by scientific materialism: "my ideology is science; your science is ideology." [Obvious implicit analogy is obvious]

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David Watson's avatar

Don't confuse the coastal cities with California. Most of the state is fairly rational. Instead of a wall, just block a few freeways, and the residents wouldn't know what to do.

"Last thing I remember, I was running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. Relax, said the night man. We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Eagles, Hotel California

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Madjack's avatar

Wow, great roundup up of some interesting articles. “A word means what I want it to mean”, prescient!!

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