Welcome to a special edition of the Upheaval subscriber community thread, where this time we play a game in which you try to figure out how many of these reading selections have a thematic connection to my most recent essay on liberalism’s struggles with its unresolved internal problems.
Common Sense columnist Nellie Bowles is an exceptionally powerful writer (I might get a little bit jealous every time I read her stuff). This time she’s written a takedown of San Francisco’s self-destructive left-progressivism so relentlessly savage that it is exquisitely pleasurable to read – or it would be if it weren’t so sad:
If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it. The fog keeps things temperate. There’s nowhere in the world with more beautiful views. City workers and volunteers bring you food and blankets, needles and tents. Doctors come to see how the fentanyl is progressing, and to make sure the rest of you is all right as you go.
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One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin neighborhood when she came across someone else’s son. “He was naked in front of Safeway … And he was saying he was God and he was eating a cardboard box.” She called the police. Officers arrived but said there was nothing they could do; he said he didn’t want help, and he wasn’t hurting anyone. “They said it’s not illegal to be naked; people are in the Castro naked all the time … They just left him naked eating cardboard on the street in front of Safeway.”
What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of 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. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
As a few people have noted, the fact that this article was published in elite-left flagship The Atlantic might itself be some evidence in favor of the thesis that the woke-left and its influence has peaked. As you know, I am skeptical. (I am, however, completely swayed by the obvious need to involuntarily institutionalize the state of California as a compassionate intervention, perhaps by building a wall around it and calling it a “shelter-first policy.” I will accept this as a necessary use of federal power to protect the positive rights of the individual.)
In Quillette, Eric Kaufmann has written a very interesting, data-heavy essay that, among other things, compares rates at which people say they identify as LGBTQ+, the rates at which they actually have non-heterosexual partners (rather than just LARPing), and their political identity. The results are pretty fascinating.
The number of women (but, oddly, not men) who identifyas LGBT but don’t actually have same-sex relationships is vastly higher than those who are actually congruent between identity and action – but only among liberals.
Rates of mental illness among all LGBTQ+ people is higher than for those who aren’t – but vastly higher for these people who only take on LGBTQ+ as an identity.
There are a lot of other interesting takeaways here (you should read the whole thing). But one big question that emerges is why so many people who are taking on this identity purely in order to be identified that way are so deeply unhappy – and/or the reverse. Kaufmann has some thoughts:
This could stem from a partly heritable psychological disposition of high openness and neuroticism with low conscientiousness, as some research suggests. Another possibility is that a culture which celebrates divergence and transgression may be nudging those with intermittent same-sex attraction to label themselves LGBT, or inclining people with occasional melancholy to say they are depressed.
More seriously, it may be that modern culture is, as Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld suggests, anomic. That is, by breaking down established identity roles, narratives, and boundaries, it introduces dissonance, indeterminacy, and choice, increasing the rates of identity crisis and, by extension, psychological distress. The rise in mental health problems, she argues, is worse in the West than elsewhere in the world, reflecting the cultural specificity of mental illness. Her analysis takes a Durkheimian approach, which focuses on how a loss of communal regulation of desires and identities can produce higher suicide levels as the mind becomes unmoored from social givens in the external world.
In her own recent piece in the WSJ, Greenfeld presents some interesting data on skyrocketing rates of mental illness in the West, which have shown a “constant, systematic increase in its rates of incidence since the 1840s.” She then takes the very spicy step of openly asserting that the evidence directly “suggests that functional mental illness is a characteristic disease of prosperous and secure liberal democracies.”
The more a society is dedicated to the value of equality and the more choices it offers for individual self-determination, the higher its rates of functional mental illness. These rates increase in parallel with the increase in the available occupational, geographical, religious, gender and lifestyle-related choices. This explains why, since the 1970s, the U.S. leads the world as the country most affected by functional mental illness, though other prosperous liberal democracies aren’t far behind. Before the 1970s, first place belonged to the U.K., which lost that ranking together with its empire and the dramatic contraction in the number of choices the nation offered its members as a result. In contrast, rates of functional mental illness in societies that are insecure, poor, inegalitarian or authoritarian are remarkably low. For decades, the World Psychiatric Association has pondered the “perennial puzzle” of the relative immunity to such illnesses in Southeast Asian countries.
Equality inevitably makes self-definition a matter of one’s own choice, and the formation of personal identity—necessary for mental health—becomes personal responsibility, a burden some people can’t shoulder. A relatively high rate of functional mental illness, expressing itself centrally in dissatisfaction with self and, therefore, social maladjustment, thus must be expected in democracies.
Much like Bowles’ Atlantic piece, this searing, only-about-two-years-late essay in elite-left Harpers on the COVID bio-medical regime is being taken by some as evidence a fever has passed.
Under the new regime, a significant portion of the decisions that, until recently, would have been considered subject to democratic procedure have instead been turned over to experts, or purported experts, who rely for the implementation of their decisions on private companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, which, in needing to turn profits for shareholders, have their own reasons for hoping that whatever crisis they have been given the task of managing does not end.
Once again, in an important sense, much of this is not new: it’s just capitalism doing its thing. What has seemed unprecedented is the eagerness with which self-styled progressives have rushed to the support of the new regime, and have sought to marginalize dissenting voices as belonging to fringe conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous reactionaries. Meanwhile, those pockets of resistance—places where we find at least some inchoate commitment to the principle of popular will as a counterbalance to elite expertise, and where unease about technological overreach may be honestly expressed—are often also, as progressives have rightly but superciliously noted, hot spots of bonkers conspiracism.
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The result is that those who represent rationality and good, sober, pro-science problem-solving have found themselves digging their heels into the dark soil of dogma alongside those who have irrationally defied the advice of medical experts. For the COVID maximalist, it is as if there is no such thing as an objectively hard choice, an existential either/or that must be decided by will rather than by the supposedly unambiguous dictates of numerical data. And even if they have read their David Hume, the maximalists will insist that society’s moral priorities—in resolving, say, a conflict between the interests of teenagers and of the elderly—can be set straightforwardly by looking at the data: that, in other words, an ought can be derived from an is.
The self-image of the liberal West — as based on the rule of law and representative government — is in need of revision. Our society’s response to Covid brought this anachronism to mass awareness. The pandemic brought liberalism’s deeper contradictions into plain view. On the one hand, it accelerated what had previously been a slow-motion desertion of liberal principles of government. On the other hand, Covid culture has brought to the surface the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological: to remake man. That project can come to fruition, it seems, only with a highly illiberal form of government, paradoxically enough. If we can understand this, it might explain why our embrace of illiberal politics has met with so little resistance. It seems the anthropological project is a more powerful commitment for us than allegiance to the forms and procedures of liberal government.
Ok sorry, no points for this one, it’s too obvious.
Crawford goes on here to make some very interesting arguments on Hobbes, fear-based governance, and intentionally dispiriting one’s people to make sure they don’t get uppity.
During the lockdowns, netizens on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, joked that the state no longer regarded non-Covid deaths as deaths. After two years of staking its legitimacy on its pandemic prevention record, the party was ready to go to any extreme to keep its techno-triumphalist narrative intact. What happened in Shanghai was like an auto-immune disease: death by Covid was prevented at the price of tremendous self-harm. “In Wuhan, it was fear of the virus and the authorities,” one Shanghai bookseller told me. “In Shanghai, there was no fear of the virus, just the authorities.”
This wonderful rant by leftist Freddie deBoer critiques how “social justice politics” not only refuses to accept the label “woke,” or any other identifying name whatsoever, but is also outraged even by the idea that “social justice politics is politics like any other.”
We live with this constant two-step where social justice advocates complain that their beliefs are treated differently from other political beliefs, but then turn around and insist that people are not allowed to criticize them because their political movement is unlike any other. And it’s just not sustainable. The army of people who pop up every time an essay like this gets published and beats their chest about how we don’t need white bros to lecture us etc. etc. are demanding that their politics should exist outside of politics.
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Here on Planet Earth, everybody has a politics, everybody else gets to make fun of those politics, and the woke demand that woke politics can never be criticized is childish and unhelpful. People are going to criticize you if you want to change the world. Grow up.
But I think you are sort of missing the core issue here, Freddie: social justice politics is by nature progressive; progressivism by nature identifies a utopian end that can be achieved; all policy actions either move the polity closer to or away from that end; the proper means can be achieved by reason; taking action to move towards the end of Progress is considered obvious, and so there is no need to debate it, as in that old obsolete sense of politics as negotiation between groups to find the best possible compromise on what to do; those who would oppose moving towards Progress must be doing so for one of only two reasons: they are either misinformed (lacking correct knowledge of the obvious course, either because they are simply “low-information” individuals instead of experts, or because they were fed misinformation), or they are deliberately holding up utopia because they are bad; it is those who act to obstruct Progress who dirty themselves with politics, which is a vulgar tactic to limit justice, which is the true will of the people; those who move us towards Progress operate outside the political: they merely point out self-evident rights and wrongs, rectify obvious injustices, and conform with the inexorable trend of the times.
“Recovering journalist” Auron MacIntyre also has a relevant blackpill for Freddie:
Advanced liberal democracies like to maintain the myth of ‘objective public policy’. This fallacious belief rests on the assumption that, by utilizing the bureaucratic expertise of credentialed experts, we can arrive at an objective and value-neutral solution for government policy that is guarded against the ugly bias of purely political actors. The public has been taught to love the idea of getting the politics out of things and letting scientifically-minded people make data-driven decisions. But this is a sleight of hand. Whenever someone proposes to have decisions become ‘less political’, i.e. to be made by the experts, what they are actually doing is handing more power over to the bureaucrats in the deep state, which are their own political class holding similar views.
But here Auron’s warning is for the political Right, which operates under a naïve underlying assumption that, “once the administration changes, the natural pendulum swing of democracy will act to punish the Left for overreaching and consolidating government power while in office. But that’s a common and very serious error in understanding how power really works inside the American government.” Since:
The majority of our government’s day-to-day decisions are not made by the legislature or even the President. The elected officeholder is not even the one regularly exercising discretion. Today, those decisions are handled by the technocracy, which is safely tucked away in our government agencies, i.e. the permanent bureaucracy that has come to be known as the deep state.
Moreover:
To be credentialed as an ‘expert’ today, and thus qualify to work within the bureaucracy, you must attend university. The more prestigious, and most likely progressive, the university you obtain your degree from, the higher you are likely to climb in the deep state. What this means is that every boss and coworker who a bureaucrat needs to interact with and impress to climb the ladder was required in his or her formative years to absorb the morality of increasingly radical college professors. In other words, it is in the nature of the deep state to select those who constantly signal the virtues of the woke institution, which will one day inevitably go on to inform all of their day-to-day policy decisions.
Whenever the Left consolidates power and creates a new agency, it is immediately staffed with diehard progressive bureaucrats. In many cases, it is literally required by law that experts be placed in key positions of authority, who are all but guaranteed to be leftwing zealots. And the vast majority of this staff does not rotate out or get laid off when a Republican administration or legislature comes to power. Protected by their status as credentialed experts, the ideological foot soldiers of the bureaucracy stay firmly entrenched in the deep state. That’s why things always seem to sprint left when progressives are in charge and at best grind to a halt when the GOP has its turn at the wheel.
And so:
We are still told that our government operates by the formal dictates outlined in the Constitution — checks and balances carefully designed to limit the power any one side can wield while in office. But that is no longer the case. In our desire to remove politics from public policy decisions we have replaced our constitutional republic with governance by technocracy, i.e. governance by the deep state. And the deep state is a ratchet: it only moves in one direction because that is what it is designed to do. The deep state ensures that our government, if it moves at all, always moves to the left, especially when it is gaining power. This is why the Right has a very difficult time establishing lasting change in the permanent machinery of Washington. By controlling the institutions that credential bureaucrats, the Left controls the ideology that will guide the decisions of the technocracy, no matter who ‘officially’ controls it.
Yikes, maybe that’s enough right-wing blackpill for DeSantis fans today. Next thing you know we’ll all be deep into our third dram and reading Mosca again.
In an excellent piece of investigative journalism, Jennifer Bilek here exposes how:
Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.
This has represented “a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI).” SSI is a term for a conception of transgenderism that has no clear boundaries, and deliberately flows into transhumanism. E.g.:
Prtizker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.) Rothblatt is an integral presence at Out Leadership, a business networking arm of the LGBTQ+ movement, and appears to believe that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”
And it just so happens that the Prtizkers have a financial stake in the for-profit medical and biotech companies who are able and eager to create patients-for-life out of those individuals whom they liberate with their trans-human revolution. The genius of American capitalism truly knows no bounds!
There is a lot more here on how this mega-rich family has leveraged huge sums of unaccountable foundation money on a huge constellation of NGOs in order to systematically capture our epistemic, legal, and medical institutions in pursuit of their ideological and profit-motivated ends, without any real need to even lobby voters. And they’re not the only ones. But then why should any such people be constrained by democratic accountability when “making change”? Remember, this is money spent on civil society, for justice.
Ok maybe that last one wasn’t so uplifting either, so let’s return to the Golden State for an amusing send off.
Californian environmentalists wanted to protect bees under the California Endangered Species Act. Unfortunately there was one small hitch: the Act only offers protection to listed “native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant.” No problem: on May 31 the California Court of Appeal for the 3rd District ruled that bees could qualify as fish.
You see, “Although the term fish is colloquially and commonly understood to refer to aquatic species, the term of art employed by the Legislature in the definition of fish…is not so limited.” Brilliant! Now that is progress. Is there nothing a little innovative post-modern redefinition of language and the casting off the outdated shackles of material reality cannot solve?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
'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]
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Once again, no mention of a original single idea (that is not obviously wrong) that he has ever had.
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.
Nope, don't think so. Feel free to post an actual quote from Moldbug that has any originality to it at all.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That last paragraph is required if the right expects to retain any role in governance.
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!
'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]
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
Wow, great roundup up of some interesting articles. “A word means what I want it to mean”, prescient!!