TY for a lotta things. Your essays are great, and the tip towards Paul Kingsworth has paid additional dividends. Can't thank You enough, Sir, for all You do.
I first came across your substack through a reference to it in the substack of a British writer, Ed West. The first essay I read was like having a glass of cold water thrown in my face, but in a good way. It was shock to the system to read something with a high degree of intellectual curiosity married with keenly sharp analysis and historical understanding. It did make you realize how much of that intellectual curiosity has been lost across the usual institutions from the media to higher education in the last 20 years. The pursuit of truth has collapsed, with all the implications that come with it.
Keep up the good job. I keenly look forward to your next essay. As a classic enlightenment liberal / small 'c' conservative living in a deeply blue bubble that's found himself suddenly, without warning it seems, on the wrong side of history, I will also say for all the moaning of the horrendous impacts of the social media age, one of the upshots is that it's also allowed for the disenfranchised resistance scattered across the world to find each other and enjoy each other's thoughts. Social media and technological advancement may have allowed a greater degree of totalitarian control, but it also makes resistance much easier, as substack shows.
I'm a big fan of Ed West. Good point on social media. I'm also divided in my opinion of it; on the one hand I despise Twitter, for example, but it is also home to many dissident voices, and the "mainstream" media would love nothing better than to have no alternatives other than themselves.
But that doesn't mean they won't be forced into cracking down anyway. I recently sent the following to Substack in an internal thread by writers on the platform, but maybe it should be an open letter:
Dear Substack:
Recently Substack has come under sustained political pressure to censor content published by authors on the platform. The recent statement of principles by Substack’s co-founders reaffirming a commitment to free speech was reassuring and appreciated by many authors here, including myself.
However, I note with significant concern the following facts about Substack’s business infrastructure:
Your digital payment processing is provided by Stripe.
Your web hosting infrastructure is provided by Amazon Web Services.
Your domain and internet security services are provided by Cloudfare.
If any one of these service providers were to cut off its business with Substack, your platform (and our content) would go dark overnight. And all three of these dominant service providers now have a well-established history of acting, both individually and in direct collusion with one another, to systematically deplatform emerging startup competitors and dissenting voices.
Therefore I write to ask, as a stakeholder with a material interest in the continued wellbeing of Substack and its business model, what steps Substack has taken or is considering taking to preemptively mitigate risk exposure by establishing relationships with alternative providers more aligned with Substack’s mission and values.
I became a subscriber after reading the virtual v. physicals essay. It brought such clarity to the current divide and the gnostic essay was equally fantastic. Thank you for allowing these essays to be read without a subscription. I subscribed after being blown away by these posts.
Just don't stop. I have no doubt you're worth a thousand times the monthly dime I'm paying, and I'll keep doing it as long as you find the time and energy to talk to us. Thank you from Romania.
Beautifully written and expressed. You have a great talent and a great mind. I am happy to have found you and become a subscribing member. Keep up the great work!
There is a light of hope that I have been clutching since I found Substack and writers like you. I am getting the word out. My only fear is that Substack as a business succumbs to the money offering to be acquired by Blackstone and then get sucked into the corporatist globalist maw. It would be awesome if the Substack business structure was an ESOP or otherwise allowed some ownership shares to be offered to the content contributors.
Thank you for your beautiful descriptive critique of Washington DC and it’s debauched denizens. Writers are often insatiable readers, any book recommendations from you or my fellow commenters are most welcome. Thank you for your courage in writing these essays, and your prudence in using a nom de plume
And Taibbi wants to burn it all down, just like Rome. Which should work out just about as well. (Taibbi, like Greenwald, does nothing but scream CORRUPTION! at everyone, offering no solutions or paths forward. I gave up on both of them some time ago.)
As investigative journalists (the last investigative journalists?) Taibbi and Greenwald both play important roles in exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the establishment. It's not the same as proposing solutions. Quite often we need the awareness first before solutions can be developed.
They are muckrackers of the old school. It's worth keeping in mind that journalists who propose solutions tend to be self-declared ideologues who "know best" and which is one of the reasons why journalism has collapsed for it no longer reports news as opposed to just being a different kind of think-tank policy talking-heads reiterating the previously agreed viewpoints and consensus as news.
Exposing corruption is one thing, screaming insults is another. When Taibbi calls Obama "the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism", what good does that do?
Oh, and Taibbi also spent years insulting people who were warning about Russian aggressiveness, calling them tools of the Deep State and much worse. Then he had to backtrack when Putin brutally invaded Ukraine.
Matt Taibbi is hilarious, to wit, he described Trump’s desire for revenge as akin to that which motivates people “ to plant pipe bombs or start forest fires”
I love The Upheaval! Thank you for being here. All that you have said resonates deeply with me. Its why I come to the Stack. For some sanity. Your writing along with so many other wonderful and talented writers that I have found here actually gives me comfort in these troubling times.
Happy one-year anniversary to you contributing on Substack! Very optimistic piece today, including some instructive condemnation of DC to energize your readers. Together we move forward even as the political class accelerates in the opposite direction.
This morning I was reading your note to my wife and when I repeated verbally to her your observation that "The most important thing I'd like to try to express is the sense of meaning and joy that I've found comes from being free to write things that I believe to be true," it brought a surprise tear to my eye.
Our collective desire for writing and reading something close to the truth may be why more and more of us are breaking with the mental structures imposed on us and why we might, indeed, be about to begin a "genuine philosophical and political renaissance."
I don't even know how I found your writing, only a few weeks ago. I would be a paid subscriber if I were making more than $19/hr. Reading this post, I find myself so very glad for you, and I want you to know your writing helps increase my faith in my fellow Americans, and makes me considerably more hopeful about our nation. If things change economically for me for the better, I will certainly step up with more than words, and thank you too for encouraging us to speak up too.
in the recent interview by Alexander Beiner on the rebelwisdom.substack platform you mentioned China today being "a very low trust society, which is the case in almost every country that has endured communism".
What is the evidence for this? Have there been e. g. comparative investigations in, say the former GDR versus Western Germany?
This is based on my own experience in China, plus what I've heard from Eastern Europeans who lived under communism. I don't have any data on hand, and I don't know reliable data exists on this in China, since it is very hard to poll there. But if you look there have been many incidents like one in which a small child was injured in the road and left to die by passers by, as everyone passing by thought it was a scam or could otherwise get them in trouble. This has happened repeatedly. It's the same reason everyone in Russia drives with a dashcam.
Interesting that a collectivist system... collectivism as defined as ideological and political design to care for the collective ahead of the individual... would result in so much lack of trust in the behavior of the people within the collective. You would think it would be the opposite... that a system like the US designed to give preference to the individual and individual rights, would result in less trust and care for their fellow man. But it is the opposite. Now in the US that has been eroding... and maybe it is because the US has been moving incrementally to more collectivist model.
There is an old Russian saying that the workers would pretend to work and the bosses would pretend to pay them.
Collectivist systems have been shown to work well in small, tribalistic and highly homogenous societies. I lived in the UAE for a long time and one can describe the Emiratis as living in a collectivist system but the system is only for the tribe. Everyone else is excluded. It works in that particular model partly because everyone outside the tribe is an expat with one foot firmly outside the country and who will never get citizenship or permanent residency or access to the social benefits for the Emiratis. And countries like Scandinavia were known for being highly collectivist but they were also highly homogenous.
The challenge is whether the collectivist model works both as a societal model and a generator of social trust on a much bigger and much more diverse scale. The historical record suggests no. Not even China. And even Scandinavia is struggling to maintain the old collectivist social trust with a society starting to diversify with different groups of people. It probably has to do with when a society gets too big and diverse, to remain collectivist requires suppressing more and more of that same diversity, which introduces social tensions. China, for example, has plenty of ethnic minorities who are suppressed in favor of the national Han majority and the implementation of a single unified nationalism. And to keep it "working" requires a great deal of state suppression, including control of state media and news and results in a society where everyone knows they are being lied to all the time, and that immediately results in a low-trust environment.
Good post. I agree. Tribal culture homogeneity is the key to trust and cooperation that supports a more collectivist model. If you live in one house with two families there will be conflict for resources between the families more than there will be conflict within the family... usually.
The US has been a unique and perplexing study in non-forced cooperation with a highly culturally diverse population. The secret sauce had been open economic opportunity and income mobility. We were all in the culture of marketism. The pursuit of globalism combined with an explosion in population from out of control immigration has led to not enough economic opportunity for the population and now we are going culturally tribal in competition for those too few resources. We have also incrementally become more collectivist and the cracks of this looming failure are starting to show.
I was referred to your Substack by Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative. I have never read anything on here before nor have I ever subscribed to any online blog...until today. I read what you wrote on Aristotle's description of the democratized mob being akin to a monarch and it was this sentence that made me click the subscribe button:
""If you ever wonder why something you said that was fine 72 hours ago is now an unredeemably racist, sexist, excommunicable offense, it’s because the disembodied Swarm Pope, who leads the People’s Democratic Priesthood of All Believers, crowd-sourced it from the swirling Id of the mob on Twitter while you weren’t looking." What a great sentence! Authentic intellectualism combined with fresh, clever writing is rare and delightful. Thank you for your work!
I just found out I share a Substack birthday with Paul Kingsnorth, so here's a shout-out to him.
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/an-anniversary-gift
It's also National Beer Day and National Burrito Day! I'll be having both later ...
TY for a lotta things. Your essays are great, and the tip towards Paul Kingsworth has paid additional dividends. Can't thank You enough, Sir, for all You do.
I first came across your substack through a reference to it in the substack of a British writer, Ed West. The first essay I read was like having a glass of cold water thrown in my face, but in a good way. It was shock to the system to read something with a high degree of intellectual curiosity married with keenly sharp analysis and historical understanding. It did make you realize how much of that intellectual curiosity has been lost across the usual institutions from the media to higher education in the last 20 years. The pursuit of truth has collapsed, with all the implications that come with it.
Keep up the good job. I keenly look forward to your next essay. As a classic enlightenment liberal / small 'c' conservative living in a deeply blue bubble that's found himself suddenly, without warning it seems, on the wrong side of history, I will also say for all the moaning of the horrendous impacts of the social media age, one of the upshots is that it's also allowed for the disenfranchised resistance scattered across the world to find each other and enjoy each other's thoughts. Social media and technological advancement may have allowed a greater degree of totalitarian control, but it also makes resistance much easier, as substack shows.
I'm a big fan of Ed West. Good point on social media. I'm also divided in my opinion of it; on the one hand I despise Twitter, for example, but it is also home to many dissident voices, and the "mainstream" media would love nothing better than to have no alternatives other than themselves.
Wow, Thomas, is that second paragraph ever well written. Will them that arbitrate truth allow substack to continue? They are not fond of resistance.
Well, that is an important question. Substack's founders recently released a statement on their commitment to free speech: https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more
But that doesn't mean they won't be forced into cracking down anyway. I recently sent the following to Substack in an internal thread by writers on the platform, but maybe it should be an open letter:
Dear Substack:
Recently Substack has come under sustained political pressure to censor content published by authors on the platform. The recent statement of principles by Substack’s co-founders reaffirming a commitment to free speech was reassuring and appreciated by many authors here, including myself.
However, I note with significant concern the following facts about Substack’s business infrastructure:
Your digital payment processing is provided by Stripe.
Your web hosting infrastructure is provided by Amazon Web Services.
Your domain and internet security services are provided by Cloudfare.
If any one of these service providers were to cut off its business with Substack, your platform (and our content) would go dark overnight. And all three of these dominant service providers now have a well-established history of acting, both individually and in direct collusion with one another, to systematically deplatform emerging startup competitors and dissenting voices.
Therefore I write to ask, as a stakeholder with a material interest in the continued wellbeing of Substack and its business model, what steps Substack has taken or is considering taking to preemptively mitigate risk exposure by establishing relationships with alternative providers more aligned with Substack’s mission and values.
Thanks for that. So is substack safe(?) the answer is - hell no - one of these 3 companies could chicken out.
Some of the usual names have written screeds demanding substack be shut down for "misinformation." Are we surprised?
Surprised no, will they win, it remains to be seen.
I became a subscriber after reading the virtual v. physicals essay. It brought such clarity to the current divide and the gnostic essay was equally fantastic. Thank you for allowing these essays to be read without a subscription. I subscribed after being blown away by these posts.
Just don't stop. I have no doubt you're worth a thousand times the monthly dime I'm paying, and I'll keep doing it as long as you find the time and energy to talk to us. Thank you from Romania.
Beautifully written and expressed. You have a great talent and a great mind. I am happy to have found you and become a subscribing member. Keep up the great work!
There is a light of hope that I have been clutching since I found Substack and writers like you. I am getting the word out. My only fear is that Substack as a business succumbs to the money offering to be acquired by Blackstone and then get sucked into the corporatist globalist maw. It would be awesome if the Substack business structure was an ESOP or otherwise allowed some ownership shares to be offered to the content contributors.
Thank you for your beautiful descriptive critique of Washington DC and it’s debauched denizens. Writers are often insatiable readers, any book recommendations from you or my fellow commenters are most welcome. Thank you for your courage in writing these essays, and your prudence in using a nom de plume
Matt Taibbi, my hero, says:” modern Washington is Rome”
And Taibbi wants to burn it all down, just like Rome. Which should work out just about as well. (Taibbi, like Greenwald, does nothing but scream CORRUPTION! at everyone, offering no solutions or paths forward. I gave up on both of them some time ago.)
As investigative journalists (the last investigative journalists?) Taibbi and Greenwald both play important roles in exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the establishment. It's not the same as proposing solutions. Quite often we need the awareness first before solutions can be developed.
They are muckrackers of the old school. It's worth keeping in mind that journalists who propose solutions tend to be self-declared ideologues who "know best" and which is one of the reasons why journalism has collapsed for it no longer reports news as opposed to just being a different kind of think-tank policy talking-heads reiterating the previously agreed viewpoints and consensus as news.
Exposing corruption is one thing, screaming insults is another. When Taibbi calls Obama "the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism", what good does that do?
Oh, and Taibbi also spent years insulting people who were warning about Russian aggressiveness, calling them tools of the Deep State and much worse. Then he had to backtrack when Putin brutally invaded Ukraine.
Matt Taibbi is hilarious, to wit, he described Trump’s desire for revenge as akin to that which motivates people “ to plant pipe bombs or start forest fires”
I just don't get the notion that a comment like that is somehow "hilarious".
Clearly many people do, though, as Taibbi is raking in the bucks for dispensing such wondrous pearls of wisdom.
Advocacy journalism is nonsense.
Just because our system is so inbred and corrupt that there is no accountability is not their fault.
I could not possibly disagree with you more. They are both brilliant and they are doing yeomen work.
I love The Upheaval! Thank you for being here. All that you have said resonates deeply with me. Its why I come to the Stack. For some sanity. Your writing along with so many other wonderful and talented writers that I have found here actually gives me comfort in these troubling times.
Happy one-year anniversary to you contributing on Substack! Very optimistic piece today, including some instructive condemnation of DC to energize your readers. Together we move forward even as the political class accelerates in the opposite direction.
This morning I was reading your note to my wife and when I repeated verbally to her your observation that "The most important thing I'd like to try to express is the sense of meaning and joy that I've found comes from being free to write things that I believe to be true," it brought a surprise tear to my eye.
Our collective desire for writing and reading something close to the truth may be why more and more of us are breaking with the mental structures imposed on us and why we might, indeed, be about to begin a "genuine philosophical and political renaissance."
I always did like long-shots.
I don't even know how I found your writing, only a few weeks ago. I would be a paid subscriber if I were making more than $19/hr. Reading this post, I find myself so very glad for you, and I want you to know your writing helps increase my faith in my fellow Americans, and makes me considerably more hopeful about our nation. If things change economically for me for the better, I will certainly step up with more than words, and thank you too for encouraging us to speak up too.
I love that writing your Substack articles gives you the sense of breathing fresh mountain air.
Reading your columns gives me the same sense. I'm deeply grateful.
Dear Mr. Lyons,
in the recent interview by Alexander Beiner on the rebelwisdom.substack platform you mentioned China today being "a very low trust society, which is the case in almost every country that has endured communism".
What is the evidence for this? Have there been e. g. comparative investigations in, say the former GDR versus Western Germany?
This is based on my own experience in China, plus what I've heard from Eastern Europeans who lived under communism. I don't have any data on hand, and I don't know reliable data exists on this in China, since it is very hard to poll there. But if you look there have been many incidents like one in which a small child was injured in the road and left to die by passers by, as everyone passing by thought it was a scam or could otherwise get them in trouble. This has happened repeatedly. It's the same reason everyone in Russia drives with a dashcam.
Interesting that a collectivist system... collectivism as defined as ideological and political design to care for the collective ahead of the individual... would result in so much lack of trust in the behavior of the people within the collective. You would think it would be the opposite... that a system like the US designed to give preference to the individual and individual rights, would result in less trust and care for their fellow man. But it is the opposite. Now in the US that has been eroding... and maybe it is because the US has been moving incrementally to more collectivist model.
There is an old Russian saying that the workers would pretend to work and the bosses would pretend to pay them.
Collectivist systems have been shown to work well in small, tribalistic and highly homogenous societies. I lived in the UAE for a long time and one can describe the Emiratis as living in a collectivist system but the system is only for the tribe. Everyone else is excluded. It works in that particular model partly because everyone outside the tribe is an expat with one foot firmly outside the country and who will never get citizenship or permanent residency or access to the social benefits for the Emiratis. And countries like Scandinavia were known for being highly collectivist but they were also highly homogenous.
The challenge is whether the collectivist model works both as a societal model and a generator of social trust on a much bigger and much more diverse scale. The historical record suggests no. Not even China. And even Scandinavia is struggling to maintain the old collectivist social trust with a society starting to diversify with different groups of people. It probably has to do with when a society gets too big and diverse, to remain collectivist requires suppressing more and more of that same diversity, which introduces social tensions. China, for example, has plenty of ethnic minorities who are suppressed in favor of the national Han majority and the implementation of a single unified nationalism. And to keep it "working" requires a great deal of state suppression, including control of state media and news and results in a society where everyone knows they are being lied to all the time, and that immediately results in a low-trust environment.
Good post. I agree. Tribal culture homogeneity is the key to trust and cooperation that supports a more collectivist model. If you live in one house with two families there will be conflict for resources between the families more than there will be conflict within the family... usually.
The US has been a unique and perplexing study in non-forced cooperation with a highly culturally diverse population. The secret sauce had been open economic opportunity and income mobility. We were all in the culture of marketism. The pursuit of globalism combined with an explosion in population from out of control immigration has led to not enough economic opportunity for the population and now we are going culturally tribal in competition for those too few resources. We have also incrementally become more collectivist and the cracks of this looming failure are starting to show.
Thanks, interesting.
Here is a link to a study of international comparisons on civic honesty.
https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/05_july_2019/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=1502336#articleId1502336
I was referred to your Substack by Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative. I have never read anything on here before nor have I ever subscribed to any online blog...until today. I read what you wrote on Aristotle's description of the democratized mob being akin to a monarch and it was this sentence that made me click the subscribe button:
""If you ever wonder why something you said that was fine 72 hours ago is now an unredeemably racist, sexist, excommunicable offense, it’s because the disembodied Swarm Pope, who leads the People’s Democratic Priesthood of All Believers, crowd-sourced it from the swirling Id of the mob on Twitter while you weren’t looking." What a great sentence! Authentic intellectualism combined with fresh, clever writing is rare and delightful. Thank you for your work!
Keep up the good work N.S. Lyons.
I really enjoy your essays, where it seems new doors of knowledge are opened every single time.
So thanks for challenging, engaging and helping your readers in making sense of the current era.
You've given us all an incredible amount of food for thought. Thank you.
I found you via Rebel Wisdom, who I recommend to all Upheavalists