I think the perception of patriarchy is only a symptom of a broader phenomenon- civilizational atomisation. I’m not saying that imbalanced power dynamics do not exist- but rather that people focus on power at the risk of ignoring a far important factor- the gradual and inexorable loss of personal agency.
It’s being going on for a very long time. It probably began with industrialisation (which was a boon for alleviating poverty, but at the cost of longer term community integrity), but underwent its first step change with the rise of mass media propaganda in the thirties. There have been a number of other step changes along the way, some gradual, some sudden, the growth of the bureaucratic state and the triumph of economies of scale resulting in the emergence of vast corporations. The social media revolution is only the latest in a long line of innovations which have tried to fit individuals into their new role as embodiments of homo economicus.
I couldn’t find the psychological system I was looking for, but it’s an approach which asks the individual to look at every aspect of their life- friends, family, career, spirituality, environment, hobbies & interests, etc- and asks them to evaluate the level of control they feel over each area of their life. Most people (myself included) tend to find that they are focusing on one specific aspect of their lives (career) over which they have little or no actual control.
It’s little wonder that people turn to politics or power theories as an outlet for their distress- the modern world has robbed us of agency and control by programming us to monomaniacally focus on one specific area of our lives. It’s taught us not to focus on things which bring real value to our lives, our human connections.
Worse still, the system programs us to seek out protagonists, culprits for our loss of agency, when in reality almost everyone feels this lack of control, loss of agency, and it’s acceleration as the atomisation only compounds. With social media, the stage is set for endgame, a Manichean struggle in which competing power groups seek to deprive each other of perceived power, making the loss of agency both universal and existential for everyone. It’s why the tribal war politics has reached the status of a Cold Civil War- both sides see the other side as an existential threat to what little agency and control they still feel in their own lives.
This is not to say that male violence isn’t an omnipresent threat for women or that racism doesn’t exist, but we need to look far deeper into what ails us and recognise the ways in which the system has been programming us for societal conflict and collapse. It also doesn’t mean that extending the power of politics into every aspect of the economy isn’t going to end in total economic collapse, as it has done every other time in history it’s been tried. But still, we need to look deeper into the reasons why we fight. Has our civilizational distress at our mounting loss of agency caused us to neglect the basic mechanisms of a functional society and economy?
This very short essay came about as a result of a reply to
> I couldn’t find the psychological system I was looking for, but it’s an approach which asks the individual to look at every aspect of their life
But men are expendable. The best of us focus our whole energy on something heavy and try to move it. But civilization benefits from our achievements. The best of us have no time for happiness or 'balance', we have mountains to climb. Think of the absolute commitment of the great scientists. Einstein once said that he couldn't answer the question whether he was happy or not and it made no difference because it wasn't even relevant to his life. You could say he was atomized but that's exactly what he was designed to be. And we have General Relativity.
Industrialization, initially, did nothing to allieviate poverty. Conditions for workers were terrible and it took a combination of government regulation and trade unions (and I am by no means a fan of unions) to win decent conditions for workers.
To my mind the concept of personal agency is a recent invention though. The greater number of people have always been happier with being directed. Here I share Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor's view. People don't necessarily want agency. You and me might do so but most don't.
The issue to my mind revolves around narcissism. This is becoming more and more prevalent. Anyone can claim victimhood and the means of measurement are irrational. However, things are actually getting better. Counter-intuitively violence is actually down and societies are safer than before.
That's a valid point. In fact this is one of those cases of shocking synchronicity. I was just making the argument in a private forum that Left-shift narcissism is by no means isolated to the West. In China, we see the 'Lying Flat' phenomenon. In South America, other than indigenous people, the main proponents of green extremism which wipes out economic progress are almost all the children of the privileged.
I went as far as calling it an epiphenomenon. The debate actually arose from the Left-shift towards progressivism amongst American Jews and younger Asians (Asian American ingroup is shifting towards a lack thereof). As I checked into my Susbstack, literally my last post on thread was causation:
'To be fair to the Chinese people, their government helped make this problem far more acute. The one child policy was always going be a recipe for narcissism. Having siblings is a huge advantage in terms of future emotional wellbeing.
Personally, I think it’s a huge part of the problem. Economic development equals fewer kids per family and fewer kids per family equals a society which is more self-involved.'
I am. Former shop steward who once lead a wildcat walkout. It's an ugly, stupid, wasteful and brutal way of conducting industrial relations, but under capitalism it's the only way to lift workers out of poverty -- most of the time tho some countries have come up with better ideas.
> The greater number of people have always been happier with being directed.
There is still this default assumption that people want to be 'free'. No, they don't. They want to be kept safe. America founded itself on the notion that Liberty was the goal, and for a long time, so it was. Nomo. The average progressive doesn't even know what 'Liberty' means anymore, it's a word they never speak.
In many ways Ray, you've hit the nail on the head. Christopher is right. By almost every metric Westerners are better off today, than they were forty or twenty years ago. The only exception would be America, where the 'Deaths of Despair' epidemic has reversed some positive trends, particularly in life expectancy (the pandemic makes the problem appear less of a problem, but life expectancy trends began to decline very slightly, mostly for men, around 2014).
Here's the thing. The data shows that our increased material abundance, the better and cheaper products, haven't made us any happier- in fact, it's quite the reverse. All of this points to the fact that in terms of personal agency, or psychic profits, people gain far greater value from economic security than they do from incrementally better standard of living.
Here's the final issue. There are two main causes of divorce and relationship breakdown. The first is financial worries. The second is time management and an inability to make 'quality time'. The irony is that economic insecurity actually increases bad personal financial management. In 2008, I looked at the data in the UK. For the most part people quickly economised in many areas. Foreign holidays actually grew. Women's shoes experienced quite significant growth. For many, 'retail therapy' is a very real coping strategy.
Cheaper, certainly, but better? Seems to me everything I buy now is junk. I'd much rather own half as much stuff if it could be worth owning. I'm something of a repair man and the things people ask me to fix -- the quality is disgusting.
> people gain far greater value from economic security than they do from incrementally better standard of living.
It depends on the product. TV's are certainly better. Computers. Coffee makers. With tools it depends. Laser levels are an improvement. Some of the drills are leaps and bounds above their predecessors, even though they may not be as resilient- particularly with regard to chargeable battery packs. Fuse boxes are a lot better- the circuit breaker point on older fuse boxes will prevent your house burning down, but it won't stop the current killing you. It's well worth an investment of around 1,000 USD. But you are generally right- a lot of what passes for tools these days are shit.
Yeah, that's a nice list. Hafta admit, life would not be worth living without my DeWalt cordless tools. Dunno about coffee makers tho, or microwaves or ... nuts, the worst is big appliances -- washing machines, etc -- steel like tin foil, metal screws that just fall off. Only a couple of years ago my faithful 25 year old IBM keyboard finally died. Been thru three since. Monitors -- they might not last very long but they are cheap and the quality of the display is just fantastic. Yup, you have me at a draw.
Speaking of narcissism a certain Cult led by a religiously and culturally illiterate barbarian (who is also an extreme in-your-face example of NARCISSUS in thought word and action) thrives on the trope of exploiting many peoples very real sense of frustration and anger
Sure, I’m not really a fan of Donald Trump, but I don’t think he’s Hitler either. The problem is he’s a response to a very real problem with elite culture. You and I are like the lintel in Doric architecture. When we travel abroad we love to immerse ourselves in every aspect of a new and exciting culture,
But most people in the Western world are like the columns. It’s not a matter of education or experience- there really are actual brain difference- particular in the amygdala and the areas of the brain responsible for processing new information. The majority of people in the West want to live in culturally homogenous communities, and will self-segregate by choice even in the absence of economic reasons for doing so.
This doesn’t mean that multiracial societies cannot thrive and exist- because the do. But it does mean that multicultural societies need to be glued together with a common core of social etiquette, customs and the metaculture of national identity. It doesn’t mean that people have to give up their music, their food or even religion as a personal matter, but it does mean that they have to compromise to the culture they are joining.
The myth is thinking that people have high ingroup through choice, or that they can change it. Any cursory read of the literature will tell you that ingroup is fixed pretty early in childhood. If it comes as any consolation, there is significant latitude for change through the generations. Unfortunately, the extreme cultural Left is doing exactly the worst thing in this regard, by separating kids into identity groups (although obviously it’s debatable whether this is fringe movement or more widespread).
The other thing is that ingroup preference doesn’t necessarily lead to outgroup hostility. The problem is we’ve seen this triggered in two ways. First, economic insecurity. It’s not by accident that the forerunner of MAGA emerged after 2008. I’m drawing a complete blank- I can’t even remember the Right-wing equivalent of Occupy!
Anyway, the second trigger is procedural unfairness. People are wired for fairness rather than equality. This means that compensatory unfairness is always going to be seen as a bad thing by a large portion of the population, even if it designed to redress a historical injustice, like affirmative action or discriminatory practices in hiring.
Here’s the thing. Equality is only an abstract concept even for the Left. They took students in the countries which had gone furthest along the social progressive axis, in the Nordic Model countries. They divided people into pairs and gave them a Maths test and then gave them $10 per correct question, and asked them to divide it.
For the most part, they found the students rewards success and punished failure. If one kid got five questions right and the second kids got only two questions right, then the second kid would be lucky to get $10. The test was replicated repeatedly, with the same results.
The problem is that the Left gave up on racial equality in educational outcomes. Here in the UK, we’ve managed to almost completely close the gap. One of the key factors (although there were many) was the recognition that kids from more difficult backgrounds needed stricter schools. In one of our higher performing London inner city schools, the Brampton Manor Academy (which regularly outperforms Eton in exam results) 30 minutes detentions are handed out for being one late, and all students are required to carry an activity book. They also outperform Eton in Oxbridge placements, and are located in the 2nd poorest borough in London.
The other thing is the actual economic argument. There is a difference between GDP and income levels per person. Tighter labour market work in two ways. First, they force employers to raise wages. Second, over time they force companies to invest in the equipment and technology in order to make their employers labour more productive and valuable. It’s a little known aspect of the pre-Eighties low immigration landscape that the rate of productivity gain per year was twice that of the period which has followed.
This doesn’t mean that immigration should be shutdown. Far from it- Australia with it’s points-based system has twice the rate of foreign-born citizens than most of the rest of the West. But it’s all immigration which doesn’t compete with the blue collar class in most ways. They did open it up a while back, particular with regard to construction, with the predictable result that Australia has begun to see more in the way of populism.
The tragedy of it all is that the people running Trump’s Project 2025 are the Heritage Foundation- if he does get elected it will be yet more economic neoliberalism destroying the blue collar class. They’ll abolish government bureaucracies. They’ll deal with divisive culture war issues, in the same arbitrary and ideological fashion as the Left (the best way to deal with the trans issue is through the civil system, with those medicalised or not medicalised able to sue the extremes out of existence).
But what they won’t do is fundamentally reform the system so that the type of highly cognitive and highly educated labour that America really needs continues aplenty, whilst completely blocking blue collar labour so that Black, Brown and White kids from poorer background can enter the trades and construction and earn decent money, free from the competition of unlimited labour supply in which the employer holds all the cards.
But what is Western culture (in particular really all about?
Ordinary religion, ordinary science, and ordinary culture seek to experience, to know, to gain and advantage with respect to, and gain control over what is mysterious, what is unknown, what is threatening. Such ordinary religion, ordinary science, and ordinary culture want to achieve absolute power for human beings. The quest for power or control over the unknown is the collective egoic pursuit (or aggressive search) of mankind, in the midst of, and on the basis of, the universal human reactions of fear, sorrow and anger - of the universal denial of unconditional relational love.
To affirm, as the now dominant Western "culture" of scientific materialism does, that all of space-time is merely materiality (limited , dying, and, effectively dead) i itself an aggressive affirmation of power, a collective cultural manifestation of a dissociative disposition that is merely afraid, narcissistically self-absorbed, and deeply depressed by sorrow and anger.
There is nothing wrong with material abundance, other than some of the trade-offs (in a moment). As to scientific materialism I agree. I think science took a serious wrong-turn when, to use a Cartesian frame of reference, it discounted the ideal, in the ideal vs. physical conceptualisation of reality, in the belief that the mind is merely a fluke of the material body and brain.
For a while now, I’ve been planning to write a sci fi novel. One of the concepts I’m keen to introduce is the idea of a Newtonian gap- a necessary phase in a civilisation’s progress which involves discarding dogma and critically unexamined received wisdom. My theory is something went wrong with us- as a species we have too much hubris, we resort to strawmen to dismiss the spiritual and the divine.
And we are now learning that some in physics now see that some form of consciousness is necessary for the universe to exist, never mind the beyond astronomical odds to which a universe must be fine-tuned, for life to exist at all. Could it be that the less cluttered minds of our forebears were able to grasp and connect to something through intuition and attunement, which we are wrong to dismiss out of hand? Probably.
But back to material abundance. There is a great old BBC4 documentary which compares the yearning for natural grandeur found in both French Impressionism and Japanese wood block prints. It’s by Dr James Fox. What’s remarkable is that on opposite sides of the world, two art movements in entirely different cultures were experiencing exactly the same moment, a sonorous and wistful mourning for the natural grandeur, at the same time that the cities they had moved to were at least freeing them from semi-permanent malnutrition and a life of back-breaking toil.
And that was only the tip of the iceberg. The disruption to normal human relations which cities represent is as profound today, as it was in yesteryear. Surveys show that people who live in cities are generally far less happy than those who live in smaller communities and rural areas. It’s one of the things which makes Left-leaning politics more appealing in cities.
It’s a form of psychological transference- people feel the apathetic misery caused to themselves by their urban stranger-filled environments, and they project it onto the world. It makes them feel that the world requires radical change, when the real thing which requires changing is their individual location and human connectedness.
If governments really wanted to help people they would develop short-range rail so that more people could live in small villages. The era of the city as a hub for office workers is over. Instead cities should become hubs for the arts, leisure and entertainment. By carrot and stick, Amazon be encouraged to provide a low cost service to people who want to set-up boutique shops selling handmade chocolates and gentleman’s outdoor haberdashery (eg).
He have a chance to adapt to a more humanistic form of cultural context. I’m not really a fan of suburban sprawl either, but there is distinction between suburban sprawl and villages and towns which are not tasteless in their ubiquity and make a far more efficient use of land, in terms of providing compact housing with adequate gardens.
I think your premise is a bit off base. Was there any “civilization” before “patriarchy”? These terms are so historically intertwined and full of ideological presuppositions that it seems impossible that patriarchy could itself be a “sympstom” of “civilizational” atomization.
Broadly speaking, I agree with your point about ideological presuppositions. It was a quick and short essay, fired off as a first draft. I should have at least included a paragraph about the role of healthy paternalistic processes imparted by communities in functional societies almost universally (although even in the few examples of successful matriarchal societies, teenage boys were quickly bundled off to male society for socialisation when puberty hit).
In most ways Industrialisation was an unalloyed boon for humans everywhere it happened. The economic graphs on PPP are quite clear about the direction of travel over the past two hundred years. What was not good was the erosion of mainly rural communities. The socialisation of teenage boys was, in most communities, an activity undertaken by older men as a group effect.
The feminists were right about the importance of social construction. The thing they got wrong was the TYPE of social construction which was important. Males are biologically aggressive as a rule. The critical point is the extent to which different cultures tried to engender self-control and how successful they were at the enterprise.
The best work which has been done on the subject was by Professor Richard Tremblay by studying chronic physical aggression in children. His work mainly looks at the issue at an individual behavioural level, by his work can also be extrapolated out to the sociocultural and historical layers.
Urbanisation involved a shift from stronger communities to the nuclear family. That would be fine, if not for the fact that it removed the mitigating tendency of the community to step-in, in the event of absent, abusive or neglectful fathers. Some of the earliest instances of maladaptive communal behaviour patterns pointing the breakdown of paternalism are to be found in the Irish American community, historically. Data is obviously scant from the period in looking for modern metrics to assess such things, but some evidence is to be found by looking at the use of orphanages as a stopgap measure.
Basically, the rise of the nuclear family was one of the first signs of cultural atomisation. The key observation is this: if one looks at the data collected by Raj Chetty then what one finds is that the greatest predictor of upward social mobility for boys it is the percentage of fathers in the home at a community level. Other data from Criminology supports the same conclusion. Parenting is at best a weak force when compared to peer group socialisation, especially during the teenage years. It's why every parent of a teenage boy dreads the thought of their boy falling in with the wrong crowd. Fathers at a collective, community level seem to be able to mitigate against the maladaptive influence of bad peer groups for boys. At least a part of it is fathers acting as an unofficial social safety net, pushing their sons towards 'high prole' occupations in the trades.
FWIW, you and Ray back at Quillette turned me on to a lot of these urgent social issues way before any of my other lefty friends started to notice that their intellectual framework is increasingly creaky.
Is it 'locus of control' that you are describing Geary? Internal (I can control this outcome) vs. external (this outcome is predetermined for me, I can't control it)?
Or is this more about the choice of prioritizing one aspect of life over others (in which, I don't know that one).
Locus of control was trendy in education before DEI took completely over, and it's a valuable framework for mental health work. The worst case scenario is a sort of 'learned helplessness' which I think could be likened to chronic depression. The person who has given up, because nothing they do matters anyway'.
The irony of this being replaced by DEI is that DEI reinforces these external loci of control at the expense of internal loci. It's institutional - therefore unavoidable, inescapable.
I hadn't heard the term 'civilizational atomisation' before, but I describes a trend I've been observing too.
The declining state of mental health across WEIRD countries is undeniable right now. I think you nicely described one of the major causes - the loss of agency.
One of the original writers re the atomization of Western culture ( or what remained of it at the time) and the all-the-way-down-the-line cultural consequences of such was Erich Fromm.
Re the topic of Freedom he wrote two books which were specifically about such, namely:
At a tangent, I had a quick look online and a part of description tallied with something I had heard about young men on a Diary of a CEO podcast, but relating more to the individual, rather than cultural layer (I think it was Dr K.). Apparently, a lot of the troubles of young men stem from repeatedly attempting to join peer groups, but getting rejected. I can’t remember the exact term.
For a start, this just shows the damage social media and concept creep education in areas like bullying have done to the younger generations (I fall into the middle of Gen X). Previous generations learned emotional resilience because we socialised normally during the teens years, and weren’t subject to too protective parenting, or school environments which sought to protect us from the normal peer group status jostling for pecking order.
But I think there is a broader point with regard to community. Of course, many people still have the comfort of family, but culture as community has largely fallen by the wayside. It’s a lack of roots embedded in reciprocal relationships which are only semi-voluntary by virtue of proximity that is lacking.
There is a lot to be said for being forced by necessity to get along with people with which, by preference, one would necessarily choose as acquaintances. Work is different. Work has a goal and is generally mechanistic in its pursuit of outcomes- a transactional trade-off.
I also think stranger danger has a profound effect. It planted the seed of the Manichean mindset in kids. It’s why so many of them are convinced that life is a battle between good and bad people, when its mostly a battle between terrible ideas and moderately good ones.
I think it's Circles of Influence, Concern and Control. When I was in CBT counselling my counsellor basically used a variant which included a list of ten areas as a metric. The ones I remember are family, friends, job role/position, politics, spiritual life, maybe geography, etc. I was asked to rate each on a scale of one to ten as to how much control or influence I felt over the particular area. The point was to teach me to 'worry about the things I can control and not the things I can't'. It was a good exercise.
My point would be this- there are several cultural obsessions in the West which are by default those that make people feel a lack of agency, as though they have no control or influence. Climate probably rates at the top, followed by politics (or public policy), but compound this with finding yourself in a job working for a large corporate organisation, or a workplace ruled over by government mandate (such as anything in the public sector), and people are bound to feel powerless, with significant responsibilities but no power of authority to change things, and many people feel as though they are living in a personal dystopia. Only through a perceptual shift to the personal, recognising those things within a person's spheres of influence and control, can people begin to realise that the world is actually much better than they think and many things (but not all) lie within the reach, in terms of the agency they feel.
I think the worst aspect of this is that it creates what amounts to political OCD- because people feel so little control in their own lives, they seek to assert control over the lives of others though politics. It's fundamentally the wrong approach- persuasion and the provision of 'fear-free' unbiased knowledge which doesn't rest in the realm of the debatable is the best answer, because it doesn't deprive others of any additional lost control or influence. Plus, we need to remember incentives- carrot, not stick. Why aren't people given up to three days additional annual leave by their employers for adopting social responsible means of getting into work (including ride sharing)? The government and the corporations claim they support change on climate, why don't they put their money where their mouth is? On the information front, riding a school bus to school is actually good for kids (except in cases of chronic and repeated bullying). Although often unpleasant, all those social interactions, peer social jostling and negotiations build emotional resilience. Yet many parents still drive their kids into school. With better information about childhood social development, many parents could probably be persuaded to push their kids to take the bus.
Anyway, how are you mate? I hope you've landed on your feet after your troubles a while back?
Hey man, I am okay. Still working on ways to push back against all these DEI initiatives. They are like, literally toxic.
CBT is a great skills / practical choices based approach for many people with distressing thoughts, but it won't address the issues you raise. No way you can 'reframe' something - a lack of agency - in a way that makes it less shitty to have a lack of agency.
Have you read Gabor Mate at all? I only recently discovered the guy, and while the 'myth of normal' might be a touch too progressive for you in some of the core beliefs, it's the single most impactful social science work i've ever encountered. He looks at the roll of trauma in health outcomes, both physical and mental.
Jonathan Haidt has talked at length about 'procedural fairness', but he has, as yet, not produced a book on the subject. I haven't read Gabor Mate- yet- but I am familiar with his work and have seen him on podcasts.
Two things on the agency issue. Yes, climate change is real. There is a provable hockey stick effect. However, most of the effects to date have been minor positives (increased crop yields, reverse desertification, fewer deaths from heat vs. cold deaths. etc, etc). The IPCC still uses RCP 8.5 for its 'business as usual' scenario, which is an outright lie. Can you really foresee a future where we give up both nuclear and big hydro and convert our cars to coal.
On race, what people ignore is the issue of white awkwardness/guilt. It's toxic. It accounts for a huge amount of the remaining discrimination which still exists. Most people know shit, even if their knowledge is only of value in a transitionary sense, and those who advise not listening to older white men, rob themselves of the ability to ever be the slightest bit capable. Just ask Disney+, CNN or all the other failing media outlets.
Structural racism does exist, but it comes in a form which most find unpalatable- a recent Harvard Business Review took the position that it's not really racist to avoid hiring Black people in customer facing roles if you believe that your customers might stop coming to your place of business. Me- I've worked customer facing roles, though not in hospitality so much, if you think I would hold back from preventing a Black person from adding 50% in tips to their income by being polite, professional- and yes, positively servile- then you've got another thing coming.
So you've become subject to an absolutist pathological bureaucracy. It's one of the major sources of unhappiness in the West. As stated, the source I mentioned in my article said that roughly 75% if people who worked for small businesses were happy. The thing I didn't mention was that the main culprit with larger organisations is human resources. It doesn't necessarily need to be DEI- just people who are singularly incapable of doing anything of value.
I really used to take the piss out of them in my old job. They could do nothing because I was business critical. I sympathise- you are so obviously an exceptional teacher- it's just such a shame they've managed to insert themselves between you and your students. Have you thought about moving to Singapore? I have several former teacher friends making a mint out there as private tutors or working with exceptionally small class sizes.
Alcohol-based addiction issues aren't a problem out there- provided you've sought treatment. Hiring agencies are sympathetic to DEI based issues which result in downstream consequences- they are keen to relocate well-trained talent to a thriving economy. Education from qualified Anglosphere teachers is seen as a 'branded good'.
Perhaps pastures new would be an idea- better than being subject to an ideological Gestapo.
Hey man, great reply, and thanks for the kind words!
TBH, I don't really believe in a scenario in which a black public facing person is a liability.
Not here in Toronto.
Likely not in my hometown where I grew up. Did you see us in the news? Belleville Ontario. We had 11 opiate ODs in an hour last week. Big news here.
I'd rather just reject the premise that race is this central issue outright.
I still see a role for myself here in Toronto, but I have thought about going back overseas to teach for sure.
hey, probably this is off your radar, but there's been a recent scandal in education - the TDSB, my board, just released - and then pulled - a policy document. the conservative minister of education object to it's polarizing nature.
> I couldn’t find the psychological system I was looking for, but it’s an approach which asks the individual to look at every aspect of their life
But men are expendable. The best of us focus our whole energy on something heavy and try to move it. But civilization benefits from our achievements. The best of us have no time for happiness or 'balance', we have mountains to climb. Think of the absolute commitment of the great scientists. Einstein once said that he couldn't answer the question whether he was happy or not and it made no difference because it wasn't even relevant to his life. You could say he was atomized but that's exactly what he was designed to be. And we have General Relativity.
Industrialization, initially, did nothing to allieviate poverty. Conditions for workers were terrible and it took a combination of government regulation and trade unions (and I am by no means a fan of unions) to win decent conditions for workers.
To my mind the concept of personal agency is a recent invention though. The greater number of people have always been happier with being directed. Here I share Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor's view. People don't necessarily want agency. You and me might do so but most don't.
The issue to my mind revolves around narcissism. This is becoming more and more prevalent. Anyone can claim victimhood and the means of measurement are irrational. However, things are actually getting better. Counter-intuitively violence is actually down and societies are safer than before.
That's a valid point. In fact this is one of those cases of shocking synchronicity. I was just making the argument in a private forum that Left-shift narcissism is by no means isolated to the West. In China, we see the 'Lying Flat' phenomenon. In South America, other than indigenous people, the main proponents of green extremism which wipes out economic progress are almost all the children of the privileged.
I went as far as calling it an epiphenomenon. The debate actually arose from the Left-shift towards progressivism amongst American Jews and younger Asians (Asian American ingroup is shifting towards a lack thereof). As I checked into my Susbstack, literally my last post on thread was causation:
'To be fair to the Chinese people, their government helped make this problem far more acute. The one child policy was always going be a recipe for narcissism. Having siblings is a huge advantage in terms of future emotional wellbeing.
Personally, I think it’s a huge part of the problem. Economic development equals fewer kids per family and fewer kids per family equals a society which is more self-involved.'
> (and I am by no means a fan of unions)
I am. Former shop steward who once lead a wildcat walkout. It's an ugly, stupid, wasteful and brutal way of conducting industrial relations, but under capitalism it's the only way to lift workers out of poverty -- most of the time tho some countries have come up with better ideas.
> The greater number of people have always been happier with being directed.
There is still this default assumption that people want to be 'free'. No, they don't. They want to be kept safe. America founded itself on the notion that Liberty was the goal, and for a long time, so it was. Nomo. The average progressive doesn't even know what 'Liberty' means anymore, it's a word they never speak.
In many ways Ray, you've hit the nail on the head. Christopher is right. By almost every metric Westerners are better off today, than they were forty or twenty years ago. The only exception would be America, where the 'Deaths of Despair' epidemic has reversed some positive trends, particularly in life expectancy (the pandemic makes the problem appear less of a problem, but life expectancy trends began to decline very slightly, mostly for men, around 2014).
Here's the thing. The data shows that our increased material abundance, the better and cheaper products, haven't made us any happier- in fact, it's quite the reverse. All of this points to the fact that in terms of personal agency, or psychic profits, people gain far greater value from economic security than they do from incrementally better standard of living.
Here's the final issue. There are two main causes of divorce and relationship breakdown. The first is financial worries. The second is time management and an inability to make 'quality time'. The irony is that economic insecurity actually increases bad personal financial management. In 2008, I looked at the data in the UK. For the most part people quickly economised in many areas. Foreign holidays actually grew. Women's shoes experienced quite significant growth. For many, 'retail therapy' is a very real coping strategy.
> the better and cheaper products
Cheaper, certainly, but better? Seems to me everything I buy now is junk. I'd much rather own half as much stuff if it could be worth owning. I'm something of a repair man and the things people ask me to fix -- the quality is disgusting.
> people gain far greater value from economic security than they do from incrementally better standard of living.
No doubt. It brings out the socialist in me.
It depends on the product. TV's are certainly better. Computers. Coffee makers. With tools it depends. Laser levels are an improvement. Some of the drills are leaps and bounds above their predecessors, even though they may not be as resilient- particularly with regard to chargeable battery packs. Fuse boxes are a lot better- the circuit breaker point on older fuse boxes will prevent your house burning down, but it won't stop the current killing you. It's well worth an investment of around 1,000 USD. But you are generally right- a lot of what passes for tools these days are shit.
Yeah, that's a nice list. Hafta admit, life would not be worth living without my DeWalt cordless tools. Dunno about coffee makers tho, or microwaves or ... nuts, the worst is big appliances -- washing machines, etc -- steel like tin foil, metal screws that just fall off. Only a couple of years ago my faithful 25 year old IBM keyboard finally died. Been thru three since. Monitors -- they might not last very long but they are cheap and the quality of the display is just fantastic. Yup, you have me at a draw.
Speaking of narcissism a certain Cult led by a religiously and culturally illiterate barbarian (who is also an extreme in-your-face example of NARCISSUS in thought word and action) thrives on the trope of exploiting many peoples very real sense of frustration and anger
I am of course referring to the MAGA cult.
Sure, I’m not really a fan of Donald Trump, but I don’t think he’s Hitler either. The problem is he’s a response to a very real problem with elite culture. You and I are like the lintel in Doric architecture. When we travel abroad we love to immerse ourselves in every aspect of a new and exciting culture,
But most people in the Western world are like the columns. It’s not a matter of education or experience- there really are actual brain difference- particular in the amygdala and the areas of the brain responsible for processing new information. The majority of people in the West want to live in culturally homogenous communities, and will self-segregate by choice even in the absence of economic reasons for doing so.
This doesn’t mean that multiracial societies cannot thrive and exist- because the do. But it does mean that multicultural societies need to be glued together with a common core of social etiquette, customs and the metaculture of national identity. It doesn’t mean that people have to give up their music, their food or even religion as a personal matter, but it does mean that they have to compromise to the culture they are joining.
The myth is thinking that people have high ingroup through choice, or that they can change it. Any cursory read of the literature will tell you that ingroup is fixed pretty early in childhood. If it comes as any consolation, there is significant latitude for change through the generations. Unfortunately, the extreme cultural Left is doing exactly the worst thing in this regard, by separating kids into identity groups (although obviously it’s debatable whether this is fringe movement or more widespread).
The other thing is that ingroup preference doesn’t necessarily lead to outgroup hostility. The problem is we’ve seen this triggered in two ways. First, economic insecurity. It’s not by accident that the forerunner of MAGA emerged after 2008. I’m drawing a complete blank- I can’t even remember the Right-wing equivalent of Occupy!
Anyway, the second trigger is procedural unfairness. People are wired for fairness rather than equality. This means that compensatory unfairness is always going to be seen as a bad thing by a large portion of the population, even if it designed to redress a historical injustice, like affirmative action or discriminatory practices in hiring.
Here’s the thing. Equality is only an abstract concept even for the Left. They took students in the countries which had gone furthest along the social progressive axis, in the Nordic Model countries. They divided people into pairs and gave them a Maths test and then gave them $10 per correct question, and asked them to divide it.
For the most part, they found the students rewards success and punished failure. If one kid got five questions right and the second kids got only two questions right, then the second kid would be lucky to get $10. The test was replicated repeatedly, with the same results.
The problem is that the Left gave up on racial equality in educational outcomes. Here in the UK, we’ve managed to almost completely close the gap. One of the key factors (although there were many) was the recognition that kids from more difficult backgrounds needed stricter schools. In one of our higher performing London inner city schools, the Brampton Manor Academy (which regularly outperforms Eton in exam results) 30 minutes detentions are handed out for being one late, and all students are required to carry an activity book. They also outperform Eton in Oxbridge placements, and are located in the 2nd poorest borough in London.
The other thing is the actual economic argument. There is a difference between GDP and income levels per person. Tighter labour market work in two ways. First, they force employers to raise wages. Second, over time they force companies to invest in the equipment and technology in order to make their employers labour more productive and valuable. It’s a little known aspect of the pre-Eighties low immigration landscape that the rate of productivity gain per year was twice that of the period which has followed.
This doesn’t mean that immigration should be shutdown. Far from it- Australia with it’s points-based system has twice the rate of foreign-born citizens than most of the rest of the West. But it’s all immigration which doesn’t compete with the blue collar class in most ways. They did open it up a while back, particular with regard to construction, with the predictable result that Australia has begun to see more in the way of populism.
The tragedy of it all is that the people running Trump’s Project 2025 are the Heritage Foundation- if he does get elected it will be yet more economic neoliberalism destroying the blue collar class. They’ll abolish government bureaucracies. They’ll deal with divisive culture war issues, in the same arbitrary and ideological fashion as the Left (the best way to deal with the trans issue is through the civil system, with those medicalised or not medicalised able to sue the extremes out of existence).
But what they won’t do is fundamentally reform the system so that the type of highly cognitive and highly educated labour that America really needs continues aplenty, whilst completely blocking blue collar labour so that Black, Brown and White kids from poorer background can enter the trades and construction and earn decent money, free from the competition of unlimited labour supply in which the employer holds all the cards.
But what is Western culture (in particular really all about?
Ordinary religion, ordinary science, and ordinary culture seek to experience, to know, to gain and advantage with respect to, and gain control over what is mysterious, what is unknown, what is threatening. Such ordinary religion, ordinary science, and ordinary culture want to achieve absolute power for human beings. The quest for power or control over the unknown is the collective egoic pursuit (or aggressive search) of mankind, in the midst of, and on the basis of, the universal human reactions of fear, sorrow and anger - of the universal denial of unconditional relational love.
To affirm, as the now dominant Western "culture" of scientific materialism does, that all of space-time is merely materiality (limited , dying, and, effectively dead) i itself an aggressive affirmation of power, a collective cultural manifestation of a dissociative disposition that is merely afraid, narcissistically self-absorbed, and deeply depressed by sorrow and anger.
There is nothing wrong with material abundance, other than some of the trade-offs (in a moment). As to scientific materialism I agree. I think science took a serious wrong-turn when, to use a Cartesian frame of reference, it discounted the ideal, in the ideal vs. physical conceptualisation of reality, in the belief that the mind is merely a fluke of the material body and brain.
For a while now, I’ve been planning to write a sci fi novel. One of the concepts I’m keen to introduce is the idea of a Newtonian gap- a necessary phase in a civilisation’s progress which involves discarding dogma and critically unexamined received wisdom. My theory is something went wrong with us- as a species we have too much hubris, we resort to strawmen to dismiss the spiritual and the divine.
And we are now learning that some in physics now see that some form of consciousness is necessary for the universe to exist, never mind the beyond astronomical odds to which a universe must be fine-tuned, for life to exist at all. Could it be that the less cluttered minds of our forebears were able to grasp and connect to something through intuition and attunement, which we are wrong to dismiss out of hand? Probably.
But back to material abundance. There is a great old BBC4 documentary which compares the yearning for natural grandeur found in both French Impressionism and Japanese wood block prints. It’s by Dr James Fox. What’s remarkable is that on opposite sides of the world, two art movements in entirely different cultures were experiencing exactly the same moment, a sonorous and wistful mourning for the natural grandeur, at the same time that the cities they had moved to were at least freeing them from semi-permanent malnutrition and a life of back-breaking toil.
And that was only the tip of the iceberg. The disruption to normal human relations which cities represent is as profound today, as it was in yesteryear. Surveys show that people who live in cities are generally far less happy than those who live in smaller communities and rural areas. It’s one of the things which makes Left-leaning politics more appealing in cities.
It’s a form of psychological transference- people feel the apathetic misery caused to themselves by their urban stranger-filled environments, and they project it onto the world. It makes them feel that the world requires radical change, when the real thing which requires changing is their individual location and human connectedness.
If governments really wanted to help people they would develop short-range rail so that more people could live in small villages. The era of the city as a hub for office workers is over. Instead cities should become hubs for the arts, leisure and entertainment. By carrot and stick, Amazon be encouraged to provide a low cost service to people who want to set-up boutique shops selling handmade chocolates and gentleman’s outdoor haberdashery (eg).
He have a chance to adapt to a more humanistic form of cultural context. I’m not really a fan of suburban sprawl either, but there is distinction between suburban sprawl and villages and towns which are not tasteless in their ubiquity and make a far more efficient use of land, in terms of providing compact housing with adequate gardens.
I think your premise is a bit off base. Was there any “civilization” before “patriarchy”? These terms are so historically intertwined and full of ideological presuppositions that it seems impossible that patriarchy could itself be a “sympstom” of “civilizational” atomization.
Broadly speaking, I agree with your point about ideological presuppositions. It was a quick and short essay, fired off as a first draft. I should have at least included a paragraph about the role of healthy paternalistic processes imparted by communities in functional societies almost universally (although even in the few examples of successful matriarchal societies, teenage boys were quickly bundled off to male society for socialisation when puberty hit).
In most ways Industrialisation was an unalloyed boon for humans everywhere it happened. The economic graphs on PPP are quite clear about the direction of travel over the past two hundred years. What was not good was the erosion of mainly rural communities. The socialisation of teenage boys was, in most communities, an activity undertaken by older men as a group effect.
The feminists were right about the importance of social construction. The thing they got wrong was the TYPE of social construction which was important. Males are biologically aggressive as a rule. The critical point is the extent to which different cultures tried to engender self-control and how successful they were at the enterprise.
The best work which has been done on the subject was by Professor Richard Tremblay by studying chronic physical aggression in children. His work mainly looks at the issue at an individual behavioural level, by his work can also be extrapolated out to the sociocultural and historical layers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOAi-yyGSJ4&t=2171s
Urbanisation involved a shift from stronger communities to the nuclear family. That would be fine, if not for the fact that it removed the mitigating tendency of the community to step-in, in the event of absent, abusive or neglectful fathers. Some of the earliest instances of maladaptive communal behaviour patterns pointing the breakdown of paternalism are to be found in the Irish American community, historically. Data is obviously scant from the period in looking for modern metrics to assess such things, but some evidence is to be found by looking at the use of orphanages as a stopgap measure.
Basically, the rise of the nuclear family was one of the first signs of cultural atomisation. The key observation is this: if one looks at the data collected by Raj Chetty then what one finds is that the greatest predictor of upward social mobility for boys it is the percentage of fathers in the home at a community level. Other data from Criminology supports the same conclusion. Parenting is at best a weak force when compared to peer group socialisation, especially during the teenage years. It's why every parent of a teenage boy dreads the thought of their boy falling in with the wrong crowd. Fathers at a collective, community level seem to be able to mitigate against the maladaptive influence of bad peer groups for boys. At least a part of it is fathers acting as an unofficial social safety net, pushing their sons towards 'high prole' occupations in the trades.
FWIW, you and Ray back at Quillette turned me on to a lot of these urgent social issues way before any of my other lefty friends started to notice that their intellectual framework is increasingly creaky.
Glad to see you are still a voice of reason guys!
Is it 'locus of control' that you are describing Geary? Internal (I can control this outcome) vs. external (this outcome is predetermined for me, I can't control it)?
Or is this more about the choice of prioritizing one aspect of life over others (in which, I don't know that one).
Locus of control was trendy in education before DEI took completely over, and it's a valuable framework for mental health work. The worst case scenario is a sort of 'learned helplessness' which I think could be likened to chronic depression. The person who has given up, because nothing they do matters anyway'.
The irony of this being replaced by DEI is that DEI reinforces these external loci of control at the expense of internal loci. It's institutional - therefore unavoidable, inescapable.
I hadn't heard the term 'civilizational atomisation' before, but I describes a trend I've been observing too.
The declining state of mental health across WEIRD countries is undeniable right now. I think you nicely described one of the major causes - the loss of agency.
One of the original writers re the atomization of Western culture ( or what remained of it at the time) and the all-the-way-down-the-line cultural consequences of such was Erich Fromm.
Re the topic of Freedom he wrote two books which were specifically about such, namely:
The Fear of Freedom, and Escape From Freedom.
At a tangent, I had a quick look online and a part of description tallied with something I had heard about young men on a Diary of a CEO podcast, but relating more to the individual, rather than cultural layer (I think it was Dr K.). Apparently, a lot of the troubles of young men stem from repeatedly attempting to join peer groups, but getting rejected. I can’t remember the exact term.
For a start, this just shows the damage social media and concept creep education in areas like bullying have done to the younger generations (I fall into the middle of Gen X). Previous generations learned emotional resilience because we socialised normally during the teens years, and weren’t subject to too protective parenting, or school environments which sought to protect us from the normal peer group status jostling for pecking order.
But I think there is a broader point with regard to community. Of course, many people still have the comfort of family, but culture as community has largely fallen by the wayside. It’s a lack of roots embedded in reciprocal relationships which are only semi-voluntary by virtue of proximity that is lacking.
There is a lot to be said for being forced by necessity to get along with people with which, by preference, one would necessarily choose as acquaintances. Work is different. Work has a goal and is generally mechanistic in its pursuit of outcomes- a transactional trade-off.
I also think stranger danger has a profound effect. It planted the seed of the Manichean mindset in kids. It’s why so many of them are convinced that life is a battle between good and bad people, when its mostly a battle between terrible ideas and moderately good ones.
I think it's Circles of Influence, Concern and Control. When I was in CBT counselling my counsellor basically used a variant which included a list of ten areas as a metric. The ones I remember are family, friends, job role/position, politics, spiritual life, maybe geography, etc. I was asked to rate each on a scale of one to ten as to how much control or influence I felt over the particular area. The point was to teach me to 'worry about the things I can control and not the things I can't'. It was a good exercise.
My point would be this- there are several cultural obsessions in the West which are by default those that make people feel a lack of agency, as though they have no control or influence. Climate probably rates at the top, followed by politics (or public policy), but compound this with finding yourself in a job working for a large corporate organisation, or a workplace ruled over by government mandate (such as anything in the public sector), and people are bound to feel powerless, with significant responsibilities but no power of authority to change things, and many people feel as though they are living in a personal dystopia. Only through a perceptual shift to the personal, recognising those things within a person's spheres of influence and control, can people begin to realise that the world is actually much better than they think and many things (but not all) lie within the reach, in terms of the agency they feel.
I think the worst aspect of this is that it creates what amounts to political OCD- because people feel so little control in their own lives, they seek to assert control over the lives of others though politics. It's fundamentally the wrong approach- persuasion and the provision of 'fear-free' unbiased knowledge which doesn't rest in the realm of the debatable is the best answer, because it doesn't deprive others of any additional lost control or influence. Plus, we need to remember incentives- carrot, not stick. Why aren't people given up to three days additional annual leave by their employers for adopting social responsible means of getting into work (including ride sharing)? The government and the corporations claim they support change on climate, why don't they put their money where their mouth is? On the information front, riding a school bus to school is actually good for kids (except in cases of chronic and repeated bullying). Although often unpleasant, all those social interactions, peer social jostling and negotiations build emotional resilience. Yet many parents still drive their kids into school. With better information about childhood social development, many parents could probably be persuaded to push their kids to take the bus.
Anyway, how are you mate? I hope you've landed on your feet after your troubles a while back?
Hey man, I am okay. Still working on ways to push back against all these DEI initiatives. They are like, literally toxic.
CBT is a great skills / practical choices based approach for many people with distressing thoughts, but it won't address the issues you raise. No way you can 'reframe' something - a lack of agency - in a way that makes it less shitty to have a lack of agency.
Have you read Gabor Mate at all? I only recently discovered the guy, and while the 'myth of normal' might be a touch too progressive for you in some of the core beliefs, it's the single most impactful social science work i've ever encountered. He looks at the roll of trauma in health outcomes, both physical and mental.
Jonathan Haidt has talked at length about 'procedural fairness', but he has, as yet, not produced a book on the subject. I haven't read Gabor Mate- yet- but I am familiar with his work and have seen him on podcasts.
Two things on the agency issue. Yes, climate change is real. There is a provable hockey stick effect. However, most of the effects to date have been minor positives (increased crop yields, reverse desertification, fewer deaths from heat vs. cold deaths. etc, etc). The IPCC still uses RCP 8.5 for its 'business as usual' scenario, which is an outright lie. Can you really foresee a future where we give up both nuclear and big hydro and convert our cars to coal.
On race, what people ignore is the issue of white awkwardness/guilt. It's toxic. It accounts for a huge amount of the remaining discrimination which still exists. Most people know shit, even if their knowledge is only of value in a transitionary sense, and those who advise not listening to older white men, rob themselves of the ability to ever be the slightest bit capable. Just ask Disney+, CNN or all the other failing media outlets.
Structural racism does exist, but it comes in a form which most find unpalatable- a recent Harvard Business Review took the position that it's not really racist to avoid hiring Black people in customer facing roles if you believe that your customers might stop coming to your place of business. Me- I've worked customer facing roles, though not in hospitality so much, if you think I would hold back from preventing a Black person from adding 50% in tips to their income by being polite, professional- and yes, positively servile- then you've got another thing coming.
So you've become subject to an absolutist pathological bureaucracy. It's one of the major sources of unhappiness in the West. As stated, the source I mentioned in my article said that roughly 75% if people who worked for small businesses were happy. The thing I didn't mention was that the main culprit with larger organisations is human resources. It doesn't necessarily need to be DEI- just people who are singularly incapable of doing anything of value.
I really used to take the piss out of them in my old job. They could do nothing because I was business critical. I sympathise- you are so obviously an exceptional teacher- it's just such a shame they've managed to insert themselves between you and your students. Have you thought about moving to Singapore? I have several former teacher friends making a mint out there as private tutors or working with exceptionally small class sizes.
Alcohol-based addiction issues aren't a problem out there- provided you've sought treatment. Hiring agencies are sympathetic to DEI based issues which result in downstream consequences- they are keen to relocate well-trained talent to a thriving economy. Education from qualified Anglosphere teachers is seen as a 'branded good'.
Perhaps pastures new would be an idea- better than being subject to an ideological Gestapo.
Hey man, great reply, and thanks for the kind words!
TBH, I don't really believe in a scenario in which a black public facing person is a liability.
Not here in Toronto.
Likely not in my hometown where I grew up. Did you see us in the news? Belleville Ontario. We had 11 opiate ODs in an hour last week. Big news here.
I'd rather just reject the premise that race is this central issue outright.
I still see a role for myself here in Toronto, but I have thought about going back overseas to teach for sure.
hey, probably this is off your radar, but there's been a recent scandal in education - the TDSB, my board, just released - and then pulled - a policy document. the conservative minister of education object to it's polarizing nature.
https://www.scribd.com/document/707539270/Facilitating-Critical-Conversations
you want to see DEI run amock? check out the objectives section of this thing. or the sources. anywhere you look, really, just evidence of BS.
I'd love to hear your thoughts if that's of interest to you.
More true than many may recognize. Answering this in an essay as comments are just that.