Why we might as well be speaking different languages when communicating across political divides. This essay was written in response to an article in Quillette entitled The Social Science Monoculture Doubles Down, which details how a lack of viewpoint diversity prejudices research.
A while back I wrote an essay on my Substack entitled Mapping the Mechanisms of Meaning in which I attempted to delineate between reciprocity (healthy) and status seeking (mostly unhealthy) as socially orientated urges and suggested that both were crucial in terms of morality. More properly, I suppose I should clarify by stating that I believe that our early urge towards reciprocity is central to the development of our moral instincts, and status seeking is a ‘hack’ which can undermine our personal morality subverting it the dehumanising influence of the group.
But that wasn’t the really interesting thing. The really interesting thing was that one of my readers noted they had come across a similar idea before and providing a link to an essay about an obscure French philosopher Alexandre Kojève who claimed to have discovered the core motivation which drove all complex human societies- the desire for recognition. His contention was that ‘human beings were not fundamentally motivated by a desire for knowledge, power, happiness, pleasure, or resources. They were driven by a desire for recognition. Rousseau had identified our comparative impulse as the root of social life and bemoaned our quest to appear worthy in the eyes of others. But Kojève was the first to theorize a politics built entirely around the demand for recognition by those who believe their identities have historically been marginalized or denigrated. His genius was not simply to describe the human desire for status and the hidden conflicts it generated across history. It was to trace the evolution of the human cry for recognition—from the Christian faith that gave birth to it, to the secular tyranny that will complete it.’
In the autumn of 1933, Alexandre Kojève announced to his class that history was over. He did not . . . . (from the article)
Setting aside wars between societies, which can occur for all manner of interests and reasons: from over territory and resources to ethnicity and religion, from an affront to national or tribal dignity to wars over religion or ideology, I think it’s an astounding insight into how intra-societal dynamics emerge. And from where I’m sitting is seems to me that as our material needs are met more and more, and we have the time to ponder luxury beliefs more, and espouse them, this instinct grows only stronger with the cornucopia which modernity affords.
At least a part this urge is benign, borne of reciprocity. We all have the desire to be of value to others. To teach, to give them the benefit of our experience, of hard lessons learned and insights gained. What parent hasn’t wanted to help their child to avoid the mistakes that they themselves made? What man hasn’t sat across the table from his girlfriend or significant other and ruefully realised he has fallen into the familiar pattern of providing advice rather than the sympathy which was not only expected, but required?
And mentoring can be a powerful tool. For the young and inexperienced it can be the first key step in realising a massive improvement in their future prospects, as the voice of experience shows them how to gain optimal value from their talents and abilities. Even the urge to convert can occasionally be more benign, based upon the needful desire to expand one’s own intellectual tribe, to make a new friend by connecting at a more profound level of interest.
But this instinct for recognition can have its darker side as well, because just as the discovery of shared interests and beliefs can create bonds of affinity, its opposite can cause offense and sow discord at a deeply personal level. Years ago, in a 1st year class in Philosophy, a particularly smart fellow student raised the observation that people tend to attach a very personal relevance to the ideas which they reason out or choose to believe, and can be quite offended when someone else looks at exactly the same information and forms a different opinion. In many ways, it’s as though you are calling their reasoning powers into question, and oddly, people can often get even more offended and personally affronted when you call into question their ethos and most deeply held belief than they might over their interpretation of particular set of empirical evidence- most likely because our beliefs are more intimate and precious to us, fundamental to us as self-evident proof of our moral nature.
And the problem is that the more than the media, the internet and then social media increased our connectivity to the world the more it strengthens this double-sided blessing and curse of both increased affinity and antipathy. On the one hand it strengthens the bonds of tribal loyalty and solidarity which surround ideals and ideologies, but on the other it magnifies our sense of alienation, outrage and the sense of otherness we feel when we encounter those who hold ideals which differ from our own.
What makes matters worse is the ability to share images, articles and thoughts about the opposing ideological tribe- it allows us to construct insane caricatures of the very worst examples of their tribe, as though we were collecting evidence for a criminal prosecution. At best it is a flimsy ad hominem, used for the purposes of a very personal dismissal , for othering and reputation damage as though Douglas Murray or JK Rowling really were transphobes just because they simply happened to disagree with the nuances of gender ideology, whilst also showing the greatest sympathy and compassion.
It may seem odd that I might term this personal damage ‘at best’, given that individuals can and have experienced threats of death and rape at these unsuccessful attempts at cancel culture, slander and reputation damage. But this is before one considers the worst case scenario in this emergent zeitgeist- the world in which we are living, more and more, by day. Put simply, it’s tearing our societies apart, fracturing them, causing all manner of actual violence and societal disintegration.
The occasional violence on the part of BLM protestors as well as the far more pervasive property damage, the perennial violence and intimidation by Antifa including setting fire at a mayors private residence and a police station with officers barricaded inside are a symptom of this disease- as is the Capitol Riot and even the grim tragedy of the Kenosha shooting with its fatal errors and failures of judgement on both sides. The cold civil war of the Culture War is getting hotter by the day.
Why is this happening? Because in refusing to recognise the claimed morally superior position of the other side, we have committed to the ideologically motivated desire to demonise the other side. Somewhere along the way, simple disagreements and partisan bickering developed into something far, far worse. One the one hand, we have Democrats obsessing over the fact that 74 million Americans voted for Trump which this more than reasonable Washington Post article puts into context, seemingly experiencing cognitive dissonance to the American political axiom that almost no one actually votes for a candidate, but votes against the other side- and that a vote for him was a vote against conventional political establishment. On the other side, many Republicans are actively talking about secession.
One of the reasons why I decided to become active in this space was because I wanted to know exactly what the fuck was going wrong with our Western cultures. I have always been a fairly close follower of the news and current affairs, even though I’ve never been particularly politically interested or committed. I’ve never felt the need, for example, to espouse my political position out in public or try to win people over to my political position, but at the same time I was always the type of sad little geek that used to sit up and general elections here in the UK, or read about the more detailed summaries of the Chancellor’s budget each year.
Critically, although I was an early adopter of the internet, I never really became hypnotised by social media. I still steadfastly refuse to carry a mobile phone, which may present problems with the advent of the pandemic, as well as the increasing frequency with which I find that the channels to register for discounts, promotions, rewards systems (which, when one includes payment method and careful shopping, can often easily add up to 25% off retail prices on weekly expenditures). I only really started using YouTube because of Bill Maher’s Overtime.
The thing is even YouTube’s algorithm sucks. I started out by noticing that their was content available for Engineering programming available and, crucially, the subject of economics (one of the key things which emerged on YouTube a few years back, was that conservatives tended to self-sort by an interest in economics, liberals by an interest in social issues). Contrary to what you may have heard or read YouTube doesn’t radicalise or push people towards the alt Right, in its current incarnation the algorithm actually pushes people towards partisan corporate media, as this Medium article amply demonstrates- but the other thing it is extraordinarily good at is feeding us is the intellectual equivalent of fast food.
We may yearn for informed debate, high quality high brow content and intelligent discussion, but because these segments are usually lengthier and require more of our attention and time, we end up clicking on the fast food 9 times out of 10, and leaving the intellectual gourmet feast for another time. All social media algorithms learn from this, and the chances are that there is a whole world of intellectual discourse out there that you would love, but which you will never see because it doesn’t match the debates and conversations which you’ve already watched!
So before I knew it I had fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole and my channel kept offering me Feminist Owned compilations, and I like a sucker I kept on clicking play on my remote. It didn’t last long- I got bored with the content quite quickly, and went back to watching content on climate change engineering (which I would heartily recommend for the purposes of optimism and mental health- start with Ocean Cleanup- it made me cry like a girl at a wedding). The point is that because the format of the Feminist Owned was a phenomenon which was unfamiliar to me, I was quick to recognise it, but for most people the gradually encroaching perception warping influence of the American media landscape (which is far worse than in other countries) along with the rapid growth in the reach of social media, has been rather like the boiled frog scenario- they haven’t noticed the temperature rising because it has only been happening slowly.
But my point would be that our choices of content and friends across social media is not just about living in an echo chamber or a bubble. In a very real sense it makes us own worst enemies, appealing to our tribal instincts and pushing the urge for recognition of own moral superiority and worth, to the extent that we not only want to see our opposition beaten, but also see them concede that they were wrong all along. To someone who was inexperienced in social media, the Feminist Owned compilations were a deeply disturbing experience, at once fascinating and addictive, but also jarring in the sense that it invited me to experience a vicarious thrill in seeing those with whom I disagreed rhetorically punished, humiliated and defeated.
And a more dilute yet pervasive instinct pervades our media. With television news it’s less immediately noticeable, built into the deliberate selection bias, the framing, the erection and demolition of strawman arguments- as though conservatives really did care more about taxes than governments ability to exert control over lives more than any other entity, or most liberals really did want to wipe away everything good about Western culture instead of simply wanting to create a society which is more open, inclusive and diverse.
In print media it is more recognisable. It’s to be found in phrases like ‘without evidence’ when there clearly is. One sees it all the time with all the heavily partisan fact-checkers. One frequent trick is to add a premise that was never claimed in the statement they are fact-checking. By then disproving the premise, they can brand the claim as mostly false. Another thing to look out for is the length of fact-check. If someone has to write an essay to convince you something is wrong, there is fair chance it isn’t, or at the very least, that the subject is disputable.
But we shouldn’t be too hard on the journalists, or at least the best of them. In many ways they are more susceptible to the polarisation which divides and invites us to demonise. For a start, it is often the only way for them to make a living in an increasingly precarious profession, and they are after all, just giving their audience exactly want they want. But more importantly, full social media immersion has become an essential part of the job. With the value of most media content continuing to fall in economic terms, journalists are expected to churn out more and more product. The need to keep up to date with the latest development on Twitter is crucial in a fiercely competitive field, so they hardly have the option of logging out of the delusion machine.
And because almost everyone they communicate with online seems to hold views within a band which may be broad, but is in no way encompasses the whole range of mainstream acceptable views, concepts from outside the range of normal experience can be jarring and foreign, as though they were from a dystopian future, or a past which some had hoped was consigned to history. A prime example of this relates to views on illegal immigration (or undocumented workers depending upon your viewpoint). Many would argue that the motivating factor behind anti-immigration sentiment is racial animus. It may well be a factor at the extreme fringe, but in the West those with high ingroup tend to base their distinctions upon cultural differences rather than ethnic ones- as witnessed by the Brexit vote against a set of white Eastern European nations which the British people have always held in the highest regard.
In this sense, Brexit was more about preserving British culture, which the socially conservative are always going to want to protect, regardless of the country, than it was about being against anyone in particular. We even see this affinity bias across cultures through shared languages, irrespective of race- with a Black American in an airport is more likely to be treated warmly by a white Brit than an Eastern European with a strong accent and limited vocabulary.
A liberal journalist would tend to scoff at the notion that sentiment against illegal immigrants is primarily driven by economic interest. But the evidence is quite clear- Australia has one the highest rates of foreign-born citizens in the world- far higher than America, at just above 30%- but one will see far less of the anti-immigration sentiment popular on the continent of Europe or in America, for the simple reason that when the Australian system of ‘Populate or Perish’ was set-up, it was designed specifically to protect the labour interests of blue collar workers, whilst simultaneously opening the door to anyone with a skill, knowledge or experience that the country desperately needed.
Similarly, when rather disdainful-of-Trump conservative historian Niall Ferguson gave a talk for Google Zeitgeist shortly before the 2016 election, he was clear and emphatic that when the four preceding instances of populist movements in America occurred, the rate of foreign born citizens rising above 14% was a key factor, but crucially the other basic requirement was an economic downturn, generating fears over economic scarcity. It might not be a coincidence that the 2008 financial crash seemed to precede much of our current political divisiveness, and Barrack Obama’s stance on immigration as Deporter-in-Chief was probably based upon the recognition that in order to be a unifier, he had to adopt a tough stance on immigration. Besides, we know that these fears of labour displacement and wage dilution are entirely justified. Immigration of all sorts tends to good for GDP and great for big business, but it hardly in the interest of blue collar workers.
Research from the pro-immigration website Migration Observatory (affiliated with Oxford University) proves it. Now, granted at first glance these effects may seem quite minor, until we consider that they are net- opportunities for both the more credentialed further up the economic ladder and for women. Illegal immigration in particular is likely to stir feelings of economic anxiety, for the simple reason that it disproportionately consists of working age males seeking blue collar work.
The problem is that most of us have trained ourselves to look at any issue first through the lens of partisan politics, and then through our very personal cognitive biases. We like to imagine base motives for other people having drastically different worldviews, for the simple reason that it allows us to remain comfortable with our own cherished belief system, never challenging our priors or facing our assumptions. More importantly, it quickly becomes a key weapon to be deployed when the political becomes personal- if we are desperately trying to convince a friend or acquaintance to not go over to the dark side, it is always handy to have a shorthand available to cast the opposition in the worst possible light.
And conservatives are just as quick to believe the worst as liberals are: conservatives are just as likely to believe in the myth that Leftists want to stick them in re-education camps as Leftists are to be comfortable with the headline Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. For the Left anything other than full-throated support for CRT is racist (the notion that race is the primary fulcrum of inequality in the West), whilst for conservatives, fed on a steady diet of white liberals getting hysterical over whiteness, CRT represents a direct attempt to indoctrinate their kids. Both would probably be surprised to learn that both Independents and Latinos are strongly against CRT in schools.
Perhaps the most divisive issue one could mention on this topic is Donald Trump himself. Like Andrew Yang, I see him as symptom, rather than the cause of all our partisan woes. But rather than simply placing the burden on the legacy of bad trade deals, automation for the absolute economic devastation experienced by roughly half the country (which probably accounts for about half of the destruction to blue collar lives and communities, with the other culprit being the corporate exploitation of labour competition from undocumented workers), I think the media landscape and, social media in particular, have been teaching is us to hate.
So far, Trump is one of three main topics on which it is almost impossible to have a sane discussion with, from anyone outside of our very specific set of deeply held opinions. It’s because in rare instances we tend to operate on the basis of an extreme form of cumulative confirmation bias. The other two are climate change and the science on SARS-CoV-2. Simply put, we each use different data collection points to support our position- so in the case of the pandemic, some people focus on excess mortality, others on pure case numbers. As we entrench ourselves in our beliefs, we continue to gather evidence which support us beliefs, whilst rejecting or minimising anything which refutes it. Conservatives have been collecting evidence of the media lying, mis-framing and taking Trump out of context to ‘prove’ he is a racist, just as long as liberals have been gathering a tally for indictment. Crucially, profoundly different understandings of the motives which underlie anti-immigration sentiment, has created in schism right down the middle of American society.
Even as early as 2010 there was a marked increase in the percentage of Americans who would be upset if their children married outside of their party. And subsequent research has shown that Americans of both parties are consistently more concerned about a loved dating outside their party than their race. In some ways this should reassure us, and act as a rebuttal to growing fears about a resurgence of racism in America, but in other ways it should be deeply alarming. And in case you didn’t think that social media was the culprit for disdain becoming hate, here is a convenient graph giving us a timeline for its use.
So first we have the 2008 financial crash which is guaranteed to generate very real fears over economic scarcity, especially amongst blue collar males. Then we have social media, with the recognition that the attention economy is largely driven by negative engagement, anger economics and outrage porn. But what was the third key ingredient in the run-up current Culture War? Simple, the steady stream of Police Shooting videos which first began to go mainstream in 2013.
For the Left, this was proof positive of an underlying system of structural racism. Believe it or not, at the time the more esoteric aspects of structural racism and white privilege were mostly confined to a few rarefied and obscure set of academic studies subjects. But for the college liberal searching for an explanation of these awful and upsetting tragedies, these theories seemed tailor made to fit the narrative, and with social media as a tool to disseminate this message- the ideology quickly spread across domains and the college campus, especially in elite four year colleges in the Ivy League and West Coast.
But for conservatives the opposite reaction was almost automatic. Contrary to popular opinion this was not about defending power interests, it was about very real cognitive differences. Conservatives share the same Moral Foundations as almost everyone else on the world. Only cosmopolitan liberals possess the care/harm and fairness/equality Moral Foundations to the exclusion of the other Moral Foundations. It’s because they are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich (by comparison to the rest of the world) and Democratic).
Virtually everyone else in the world has Loyalty/Ingroup, Sanctity/Purity and crucially in this case, as far as conservatives are concerned, Authority/Respect. Their cognitive wiring makes them more disposed to respect those in authority, and conservative ethos is predisposed to value law and order more than liberals, who have an almost instinctive distrust of authority. The distinction even extends to brain differences. In particular, conservatives tend to have larger amydalae, the part of the brain which regulates fear. In a typical example of liberals doing the labelling, this has been represented as conservatives being more fearful, but from a conservative viewpoint this might mean being more threat aware. The other important distinction is openness to new experience, the Big 5 Personality Trait most associated with a liberal outlook- it makes liberals more open to new ideas and intellectual frameworks, whilst conservatives are naturally more sceptical. This is also reflected in brain differences.
Everything stems from those police shooting or brutality videos, these cognitive differences and the enabling tool of social media. Liberals and leftists are naturally inclined to distrust of police and quickly broaden their observation of perceptions of systemic racial bias in policing to include a belief that disparities in policing were largely responsible for mass incarceration, when a fairer analysis would recognise that the media, politicians, punitive sentencing and removing discretion from the hands of judges and placing it solely in the hands of prosecutors, all played a far greater role in mass incarceration.
In fact we can prove it, because as the revolution of COMPSTAT and proactive policing spread throughout the advanced economies of the world, leading to similar massive reduction in violent crime first seen in America, policing methods changed- but levels of incarceration, particularly in Europe, didn’t really increase that much. It was the media manufacturing demand for action from politicians and prosecutors which led to mass incarceration, not methods of policing. Blame the politicians and the news anchors, not the police- on this particular score.
Meanwhile, conservatives were busy collecting their own diametrically opposed set of data. They looked at the total number of police in America and saw that those involved in shootings or brutality represented a tiny fraction. They looked at prison data and saw that roughly half of those in prison were there for violent crime, with a further 20% relating to property crime and saw that the narrative of the War on Drugs being responsible for mass incarceration was largely a fiction, at least from the 00s onwards.
Increasingly the Left saw America as a land possessed of systems and structures which were endemic racist and rooted in history and which needed dismantling, whilst the Right saw social justice agitation as a fundamental attack on a country which , despite deep flaws and human failings in its history, was worth preserving. Both were kneejerk responses predicated on neurological and cognitive differences.
At the same time, ticking away in the background, were the very real disparities in educational outcomes by race which had fed into huge differences of attainment in almost every other aspect of American life, from employment to income levels. Contrary to media narratives, this is not a matter of funding- apart from at the margins- and can be laid directly at the feet of the educational branch of academia which is in no way driven by science or empiricism.
We now know exactly how the human brain learns, it’s called cognitive load theory and it shows that kids need to learn the building blocks of knowledge, committing them to long-term memory, if they are to stand any chance of performing cognitively complex tasks in the future- but you wouldn’t know it from the styles of pedagogy taught or the theories perpetrated by educational academia. At the same time, there is now a wealth of data which suggests that structured low-level discipline (such as detentions), giving parents clear guidelines as to what they need to do to support their child’s education (particularly in relation to bedtime reading) and amazing headteachers which can implement a system of continuous improvement, can lead to almost miraculous seeming increases in educational attainment for poor, multi-ethnic kids from high crime neighbourhoods.
It might seem unfair that I would blame the Democratic Party for this failure. But in trying to defend teachers and Teaching Unions, they have let down other core constituencies under their care. And it’s not the teachers, it’s really not. From my experience talking with American teachers they are just as much victims of a system of bureaucratic ineptitude as the children themselves. There needs to be a major revolution in American K-12 education and this time it needs to be led by cognitive scientists and a panel of high performing headteachers, rather than educational theorists and bureaucrats.
To the liberal, these disparities between races are yet more proof of structural racism, to the conservative they are the best argument for charter schools and free market thinking within education. And it all adds to the widening gulf in our foundational thinking and the reason why we can no longer talk to each other on the rare occasion we venture outside our social media bubbles. To each side, the ideas of the other seem alien, beset with claims which appear so ludicrous at face value that it beggars belief that anyone might hold them- and the only way to make any sense of them at all is to go very deep into the structure of thought which produced them, which almost no one is incentivised to do.
Social media provides us with a ready made distributed network of human talent, where the smartest amongst us can always find ways to knockdown the arguments of the other side, defeating them in detail. A more generous approach might be to concede the occasional point and provoke discussion, but that is not what we are incentivised to do by social media, where the ingroup love flows from outgroup hatred. The format of most social media simply doesn’t support it and neither do the human dynamics- most are designed for brevity by nature, which in turn is reductive in terms of nuance. Social media rewards people for going out and finding the worst examples of the other sides behaviour, and invites us all to see each other not as people with legitimate opposing viewpoints, but increasingly, the enemy.
There are real examples of provable systemic racism to be found in affinity bias in hiring or the statistical hegemony which emerges spontaneously out of big data in the world of finance, lending and credit scores, irrespective of the fact that race may has been removed as a criteria. Bias may be coded into AI, but it is tiny dwarf by comparison to the mighty giant of collectivised data which casts a self-fulfilling prophetic shadow over the futures of many African Americans.
There are ways to fix the system. The British have instituted pupil referral units for behavioural kids which are far better at breaking the school-to-prison pipeline than the American approach, with the added benefit that those kept in school under the current American educational mandate, would not completely compromise and ruin the education of their often predominantly African American classmates. The current system fails at saving one kid, whilst ruining the future prospects of 30.
It’s a broken system which neither side can fix because they are both committed to ideological warfare. Each side is simply waiting for the other side to fuck up, papering over their own flaws and sweeping embarrassments under the carpet. And both sides will continue to fuck up, they really will- because not addressing the flaws in one’s own ideology, policies and belief structure is just as bad as failing to shoplift the best ideas that the other side has to offer, making them your own.
In the intellectual terrain encouraged by the social media landscape one side of the country is convinced that the other side of the country is trying to tear down everything good and decent about America and institute a socialist dystopia in its place. . A better argument would be to argue for the free market capitalist societies of Scandinavia, with their larger social safety nets. Meanwhile those on the Left are beginning to see fairly mainstream conservative thought as racist, or even evil- so intent on preserving the power structure of an endemically corrupt past system that they are against all progress. They simply don’t understand that the modern cornucopia we all rely upon is a fragile house of cards, which, if disrupted too much, has the potential to unleash unimaginable and horrific suffering.
At the same time, conservatives should at least become involved in the process of how to find ways to improve the material and economic prospect of America’s most disadvantaged, because by leaving this field to the Left they are robbing the debate of the ability of conservative scepticism to naturally filter out the most terrible ideas and refine and improve the best ones. There are plenty of ways in which conservatives could make a contribution, whether it is promoting the type of earlier vocational education which the American economy desperately needs or arguing for a reformed immigration system which attracts talent whilst simultaneously protecting American blue collar workers.
The one thing I would recommend above all else is to please read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. It will explain in relatively simple terms, why people can reach radically different conclusions despite being given the exact same evidence. For the most part, this is governed by socio-economics and childhood home environment- most particularly parental educational background- and even genetic and epigenetic differences play a role. Crucially, education cannot change it and neither can experience. But understanding it will at least afford you a better chance to persuade those with which you disagree.
This is not to say that culture and education cannot shift society, because they obviously can. But it needs to conform to a model of society which treats people equally regardless of race, sex, gender or sexuality, for the simple reason that the majority of any society will always possess ingroup, it’s a feature of status as much as socio-economics. In this light, if we want to avoid conflict, friction and civil strife it is better to minimise difference rather than accentuating them- because in a multi-ethnic society emphasising ethnic differences will always lead to conflict. Any other aspirational way of ordering society will backfire, for the simple reason that it ignores the often quite profound cognitive differences which separate those from affluent backgrounds from those with ordinary ones. It’s the sociological equivalent of trying to fit a square peg in a round whole.
Recognition is indeed a factor but I suspect we need to find a more precise factor. One can recognise someone in such a way that indicates a total lack of any value placed on the recognition. 'It's not rocket science' is a recognatory phrase but no one would say that it is a positive. Rather the reverse.
The concept I think relevant here is that of affirmation. The assignation of value to a particular position even if that position is disagreed with. When we affirm we not only recognise but also accept the validity of the other side. This to my mind is more important - validity means value.
The example of Hilary Clinton branding Trump supporters as 'deplorables' illustrates the point nicely. To her supporters it was an accurate comment but significantly negated any value the other side might have. They weren't 'wrong' (a judgement which assigns value to the other side) but just not worthy of consideration.
In all human relationships on both the macro and micro scales there is a desire to be valued. It does not necessarily mean to be elevated above all others (though it can lead to that) but the affirmation is important particularly in the current social media environment.
How do either of You factor in meditation as a Way of knowing?
I read "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and a mathematician. It's an academic approach that's supposedly geared to the layman. I think they missed their mark a fair bit, but I learned a lot about how the social sciences are getting so efft up, by having certain "acceptable" views that are being enforced. They also described, pretty well, how feminism, queer, race Critical THeories have gone off the rails. All this sounds like an academic problem, but the authors saw how these things have actually TAKEN over in society we live in.
If either of You are interested, I can inform You on how corporations are basically a kind of organism, A LOTTA systems can be looked at that Way.
For various reasons, I never got involved in social media. So I would summarize them as propaganda distributers for the masses, like mainstream media is to its consumers, right?
For a WHILE now, at least here in the U.S., the country has come to favor minority opinions/rights over majority opinions/rights. I think it was Sir Spencer who "said" that? So, right now, the only APPROVED narrative is one that is pro-Black, pro-CRT, pro-1619 Project, pro-BLM. I've been reading a little from Black conservatives who are NOT pro-ANY-a that "stuff."
I don't have any data, but I'm fairly sure that the majority of Black Racists are Caucasian. For the influencers, I gather, it's a billion-dollar industry. Fame, fortune, prestige, POWER. What's not to like to these people. As long as they can stamp out ANY and ALL opposition, and they've got a pretty good record going for them, all is well for the Black Racists. For being so decentralized, they're VERY well organized around the principle that anything pro-Black is good, anything of "whiteness" is bad.
The goal is two-fold. 1) Reparations. They may have trouble with that one. 2) Overthrowing Democracy. They actually have a better chance of that, because they're putting pressure on in the courts and have come close, and they're training the next generation of lawyers to be woke.
There's really only one flaw I can see in the plan: As long as the snowball is rolling down the hill unimpeded, it will only get bigger. But if a "rock" of opposition SHOULD rise up outta nowhere, they could have a serious problem. I think You both alluded to the fact that all this is based on scientific UN-facts. But You'll never convince a person, these days, with science. As a PRACTICAL matter. Just won't fly.
But one never knows. Rock COULD come outta nowhere, to everybody's surprise. I think that's the "reset" that was referred to. If the majority WERE to draw a line in the sand, it could get REAL ugly. But MIGHT turn out pretty ugly for the Black Racists, pretty fast. Never know unless it's tried.
I just finished Chapter 2 of "The Master...," Sir Geary.
The last few paragraphs summed up the thesis fairly well. A few sentences:
"However, as I also emphasised at the outset, both hemispheres take part in virtually all ‘functions’ to some extent, and in reality both are always engaged.
"Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance (left hemisphere) – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole (right hemisphere). These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself.
"But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create."
This would be a REAL reset WAY down the road, what he's "talking" about, but he isn't the man to get the job DONE. Or it would be a lot further ALONG than it is, being first published in 2009, right?
All that to say... Enjoyed reading You both. Thing about me is I never heard-a Stoic Religion until about a year ago. But mostly went by the philosophy of Epictetus, due to bizarre circumstances:
"Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible."
"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."
The advantage of this approach is it leaves You two, or anybody ELSE the freedom to respond or not, as they see fit. Either Way, that has nothing to do with ME. So I CAN'T be bothered one Way or t'other. WHy would ANYone want their JOY to rely on what somebody ELSE does, or doesn't do?
It doesn't pay, right? Hard discipline, which is impossible to perfect. But as far as controlling Your reaction to what goes on around You? Just takes practice, that one.
TYTY, for the reading pleasure, You guys! On to Chapter 3.
Online services and applications extend the influencing opportunities of traditional word-of mouth (WOM). Unlike traditional word-of-mouth, the online environment allows for special features such as anonymity in user-generated content. The personality of online users affects their motivation when creating such content. Specific online activities, such as the feedback on product ratings and participation in discussions in online forums, collectivise certain personality traits.
“The findings, based on an online survey with more than 16,900 completed questionnaires, indicate that opinion leaders in the online environment cannot be compared with traditional opinion leaders in terms of their articulation and personality structure. In regard to online activities with a high influencing potential, the results of moderated regression analyses show that persons with an introverted personality are more active as online opinion leaders due to the lack of social recognition they experience. The results have implications for how marketers should present incentive structures to address and integrate potential online opinion leaders, and how scholars should understand the role of opinion leaders in the online environment.”
Here’s a quote from Elsevier- Computers in Human Behavior
Volume 29, Issue 3, May 2013, Pages 997-1006
This study examines the roles of the gratifications sought and of narcissism in content generation in social media and explores the generational differences in motivations and in narcissistic personalities when predicting the usage of Facebook, blogs, and forums. Data were gathered from a probability sample of 596 social media users through a telephone survey in 2010. Factor analysis results showed that content generation using social media was satisfying five socio-psychological needs: showing affection, venting negative feelings, gaining recognition, getting entertainment, and fulfilling cognitive needs. In particular, people who used social media to meet their social needs and their need for affection tended to use Facebook and blogs. In contrast, when users wanted to air out discontent, they often turned to forums. Results also showed that exhibitionists seemed to use social media to show affection, express their negative feelings, and achieve recognition. The study found no generational differences in using Facebook and blogs as a means to satisfy social needs or the need for affection. However, differences in patterns of social media usage were found among Baby Boomers with different narcissistic personalities. The paper includes a discussion of the study’s limitations and suggestions for future research.
In short. Social media are good platforms for narcissists to exert control over self-presentation. • Net Geners are more comfortable and enthusiastic with all forms of social media. • All generations agree forums the preferred social medium for gaining recognition. • Facebook and blogs are normally used for social needs and need for affection. • Forums are preferred to air out discontent and to release negative feelings.
Years ago, in a 1st year class in Philosophy, a particularly smart fellow student raised the observation that people tend to attach a very personal relevance to the ideas which they reason out or choose to believe, and can be quite offended when someone else looks at exactly the same information and forms a different opinion. In many ways, it’s as though you are calling their reasoning powers into question, and oddly, people can often get even more offended and personally affronted when you call into question their ethos and most deeply held belief than they might over their interpretation of particular set of empirical evidence- most likely because our beliefs are more intimate an precious to us, fundamental to us as self-evident proof of our moral nature.
I find this profoundly interesting and disturbing in what I and many must be observing in others. It is a very modern trend in its severity. We have managed to attach our very deepest individuality and personal value system and personalised it to numerous current events and subverted politics. There used to be the concept that politics and religion were not fine mealtime conversations. The idea of course being that these topics are by nature contentious. Intellectuals versed in theoretical objectivity may indeed revel and delight in going toe-to toe and sharpening their argument, but those without this mindset of enjoyable disagreement are best in practice to leave it off the table.
Formerly we took our education of deep issues from institutional scholars. We may have browsed articles and journals and gone on to devour further publications, but be that as it may; the intellectual knowledge was largely kept within the intellectual community with the skillset of containing it academically for digestion and contextualisation and certainly not one of dissemination. That is we trusted real experts.
Over the the past quarter century we are seeing the messenger system and particularly via the MSM and social media outlets, propagate the narrative into the social fabric of both the self and the condition of identity. That is we have introduced arguments into society that actually are especially hard to escape and incredibly difficult to avoid. To make matters worse they have become focal talking points and not surprisingly so either as they are infectious of our everyday lives. They are now attached to our politics and this is a dangerous development.
Politicising everyday life means that any and everybody attaches themselves to the greater self-serving narrative. We’ve introduced CRT, identity politics, ramped up special cause issues, immigrated theologically and culturally opposing religions, created wokism, policing free speech and we’ve done it in lockstep with a policy of victim culture and the focus of giving more than particular emphasis to the special causes and with applied emphasis on subverting policies toward minority interests over the majority interests; giving way to a feeling of frustrated disenfranchisement by the majority in favour of the few. This is a huge slap in the face for all those citizens that afforded charity to such minority causes and is now beginning to sow discord.
One of the aspects of jumbling and bagging all these modern maladies together is the rather peculiar effect of giving rise to personal expertise. The caveat is that it’s mostly second hand gossip via multi-misinformation narrative and it hijacks very successfully most everybody and in a kind of quasi-hierarchical credentialized way. Not only are people searching meaning from the mass-information conflict, but they are being indoctrinated via algorithms that are particularly enticing to their ingroup preferences and then projecting via different degrees of influence via their financial and personal success worth and further influencing their peers. It can create a form of submission. Imagine for one second the very individualistic identity attachments of so much misinformation taken as fact and how it becomes part of everyday conversation and add in the actual fact that we are all in a form of disagreement due to our individual lived experience identity perception over such a large expanse of propagated narrative and we can see how the value of our individual thoughts is chastised and submitted hierarchically from the highest power of influence. It perpetuates a credentialized society and thus the highest and brightest of minds are denigrated and the average Joe with no pedigree in academia is just an added confusion to the narrative. Everybody has become an expert on everything and heterodoxy is as rare as rocking horse shit.
Another amazing post man. I'm putting this up on my FB, assuming that's cool. Hopefully someone from my friends list finds their way to your stuff. I keep telling my conservative friends that they can watch you school me on some issues, assuming they'd be dying to see that happen in real time, but so far, no takers. I'm gonna have to edit your stuff down a bit to share in class, simply in terms of vocab and conceptual complexity, at times, but I'll let you know how to students reply to some of your more provocative ideas.
I focus on individual liberty over group force and control to make individuals submit.
When liberty cannot be maintained, then it must be by a clear law that applies to all equally (and thus cannot target any group for "special" breaks or punishments).
These will give you the best economic results. These will give you the best social outcomes. Those who purport that they can force others to better outcomes are liars and tend to promote some gain in economics or social order while ignoring the harmful side effects.
Argh... ALWAYS mistakes. If You don't know ANYTHING about "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist, the quote below won't make ANY sense.
He's a brain scientist who's done 20 years research on left and right hemispheres of the brain. He's laying OUTSTANDING case that these two hemispheres are involved in just about EVERYTHING we think, say, or do. Perceive the world and ourselves.
But they have two ENTIRELY different WAYS of perceiving the world. That's what the research points to, as far as Sir Iain knows. Ten years of further research doesn't seem to have poked any holes in his theory. And, in a nutshell, his idea is that the right, holistic, empathic hemisphere, which is BIGGER along most of the length of the brain, should be relied on.
As opposed to how EVERYBODY's been trained how to think, almost exclusively by the left hemisphere. The last half of the book will point out how efft up the world's societies are, as a result of this. There's almost NOTHING in this book that I'll disagree with. I'd bet MONEY on it, and I'm NOT a bettin' man. (Chapter 3 looks to be interesting. On "Language, Truth and Music."
Hi, Mr. Johansen. Although I don't always agree with you on everything, I like your topic selection and writing--I plan to put it on my "rounds", so to speak. Your work put me in mind of Dan Kahan (Cultural Cognition) and Jonathan Haidt. You may also find Aristotelian/Thomistic psychology interesting: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74d658bt.
Recognition is indeed a factor but I suspect we need to find a more precise factor. One can recognise someone in such a way that indicates a total lack of any value placed on the recognition. 'It's not rocket science' is a recognatory phrase but no one would say that it is a positive. Rather the reverse.
The concept I think relevant here is that of affirmation. The assignation of value to a particular position even if that position is disagreed with. When we affirm we not only recognise but also accept the validity of the other side. This to my mind is more important - validity means value.
The example of Hilary Clinton branding Trump supporters as 'deplorables' illustrates the point nicely. To her supporters it was an accurate comment but significantly negated any value the other side might have. They weren't 'wrong' (a judgement which assigns value to the other side) but just not worthy of consideration.
In all human relationships on both the macro and micro scales there is a desire to be valued. It does not necessarily mean to be elevated above all others (though it can lead to that) but the affirmation is important particularly in the current social media environment.
This to Sir Spencer and Sir Geary:
How do either of You factor in meditation as a Way of knowing?
I read "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and a mathematician. It's an academic approach that's supposedly geared to the layman. I think they missed their mark a fair bit, but I learned a lot about how the social sciences are getting so efft up, by having certain "acceptable" views that are being enforced. They also described, pretty well, how feminism, queer, race Critical THeories have gone off the rails. All this sounds like an academic problem, but the authors saw how these things have actually TAKEN over in society we live in.
If either of You are interested, I can inform You on how corporations are basically a kind of organism, A LOTTA systems can be looked at that Way.
For various reasons, I never got involved in social media. So I would summarize them as propaganda distributers for the masses, like mainstream media is to its consumers, right?
For a WHILE now, at least here in the U.S., the country has come to favor minority opinions/rights over majority opinions/rights. I think it was Sir Spencer who "said" that? So, right now, the only APPROVED narrative is one that is pro-Black, pro-CRT, pro-1619 Project, pro-BLM. I've been reading a little from Black conservatives who are NOT pro-ANY-a that "stuff."
I don't have any data, but I'm fairly sure that the majority of Black Racists are Caucasian. For the influencers, I gather, it's a billion-dollar industry. Fame, fortune, prestige, POWER. What's not to like to these people. As long as they can stamp out ANY and ALL opposition, and they've got a pretty good record going for them, all is well for the Black Racists. For being so decentralized, they're VERY well organized around the principle that anything pro-Black is good, anything of "whiteness" is bad.
The goal is two-fold. 1) Reparations. They may have trouble with that one. 2) Overthrowing Democracy. They actually have a better chance of that, because they're putting pressure on in the courts and have come close, and they're training the next generation of lawyers to be woke.
There's really only one flaw I can see in the plan: As long as the snowball is rolling down the hill unimpeded, it will only get bigger. But if a "rock" of opposition SHOULD rise up outta nowhere, they could have a serious problem. I think You both alluded to the fact that all this is based on scientific UN-facts. But You'll never convince a person, these days, with science. As a PRACTICAL matter. Just won't fly.
But one never knows. Rock COULD come outta nowhere, to everybody's surprise. I think that's the "reset" that was referred to. If the majority WERE to draw a line in the sand, it could get REAL ugly. But MIGHT turn out pretty ugly for the Black Racists, pretty fast. Never know unless it's tried.
I just finished Chapter 2 of "The Master...," Sir Geary.
The last few paragraphs summed up the thesis fairly well. A few sentences:
"However, as I also emphasised at the outset, both hemispheres take part in virtually all ‘functions’ to some extent, and in reality both are always engaged.
"Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance (left hemisphere) – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole (right hemisphere). These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself.
"But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create."
This would be a REAL reset WAY down the road, what he's "talking" about, but he isn't the man to get the job DONE. Or it would be a lot further ALONG than it is, being first published in 2009, right?
All that to say... Enjoyed reading You both. Thing about me is I never heard-a Stoic Religion until about a year ago. But mostly went by the philosophy of Epictetus, due to bizarre circumstances:
"Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible."
"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."
The advantage of this approach is it leaves You two, or anybody ELSE the freedom to respond or not, as they see fit. Either Way, that has nothing to do with ME. So I CAN'T be bothered one Way or t'other. WHy would ANYone want their JOY to rely on what somebody ELSE does, or doesn't do?
It doesn't pay, right? Hard discipline, which is impossible to perfect. But as far as controlling Your reaction to what goes on around You? Just takes practice, that one.
TYTY, for the reading pleasure, You guys! On to Chapter 3.
Online services and applications extend the influencing opportunities of traditional word-of mouth (WOM). Unlike traditional word-of-mouth, the online environment allows for special features such as anonymity in user-generated content. The personality of online users affects their motivation when creating such content. Specific online activities, such as the feedback on product ratings and participation in discussions in online forums, collectivise certain personality traits.
“The findings, based on an online survey with more than 16,900 completed questionnaires, indicate that opinion leaders in the online environment cannot be compared with traditional opinion leaders in terms of their articulation and personality structure. In regard to online activities with a high influencing potential, the results of moderated regression analyses show that persons with an introverted personality are more active as online opinion leaders due to the lack of social recognition they experience. The results have implications for how marketers should present incentive structures to address and integrate potential online opinion leaders, and how scholars should understand the role of opinion leaders in the online environment.”
Here’s a quote from Elsevier- Computers in Human Behavior
Volume 29, Issue 3, May 2013, Pages 997-1006
This study examines the roles of the gratifications sought and of narcissism in content generation in social media and explores the generational differences in motivations and in narcissistic personalities when predicting the usage of Facebook, blogs, and forums. Data were gathered from a probability sample of 596 social media users through a telephone survey in 2010. Factor analysis results showed that content generation using social media was satisfying five socio-psychological needs: showing affection, venting negative feelings, gaining recognition, getting entertainment, and fulfilling cognitive needs. In particular, people who used social media to meet their social needs and their need for affection tended to use Facebook and blogs. In contrast, when users wanted to air out discontent, they often turned to forums. Results also showed that exhibitionists seemed to use social media to show affection, express their negative feelings, and achieve recognition. The study found no generational differences in using Facebook and blogs as a means to satisfy social needs or the need for affection. However, differences in patterns of social media usage were found among Baby Boomers with different narcissistic personalities. The paper includes a discussion of the study’s limitations and suggestions for future research.
In short. Social media are good platforms for narcissists to exert control over self-presentation. • Net Geners are more comfortable and enthusiastic with all forms of social media. • All generations agree forums the preferred social medium for gaining recognition. • Facebook and blogs are normally used for social needs and need for affection. • Forums are preferred to air out discontent and to release negative feelings.
Years ago, in a 1st year class in Philosophy, a particularly smart fellow student raised the observation that people tend to attach a very personal relevance to the ideas which they reason out or choose to believe, and can be quite offended when someone else looks at exactly the same information and forms a different opinion. In many ways, it’s as though you are calling their reasoning powers into question, and oddly, people can often get even more offended and personally affronted when you call into question their ethos and most deeply held belief than they might over their interpretation of particular set of empirical evidence- most likely because our beliefs are more intimate an precious to us, fundamental to us as self-evident proof of our moral nature.
I find this profoundly interesting and disturbing in what I and many must be observing in others. It is a very modern trend in its severity. We have managed to attach our very deepest individuality and personal value system and personalised it to numerous current events and subverted politics. There used to be the concept that politics and religion were not fine mealtime conversations. The idea of course being that these topics are by nature contentious. Intellectuals versed in theoretical objectivity may indeed revel and delight in going toe-to toe and sharpening their argument, but those without this mindset of enjoyable disagreement are best in practice to leave it off the table.
Formerly we took our education of deep issues from institutional scholars. We may have browsed articles and journals and gone on to devour further publications, but be that as it may; the intellectual knowledge was largely kept within the intellectual community with the skillset of containing it academically for digestion and contextualisation and certainly not one of dissemination. That is we trusted real experts.
Over the the past quarter century we are seeing the messenger system and particularly via the MSM and social media outlets, propagate the narrative into the social fabric of both the self and the condition of identity. That is we have introduced arguments into society that actually are especially hard to escape and incredibly difficult to avoid. To make matters worse they have become focal talking points and not surprisingly so either as they are infectious of our everyday lives. They are now attached to our politics and this is a dangerous development.
Politicising everyday life means that any and everybody attaches themselves to the greater self-serving narrative. We’ve introduced CRT, identity politics, ramped up special cause issues, immigrated theologically and culturally opposing religions, created wokism, policing free speech and we’ve done it in lockstep with a policy of victim culture and the focus of giving more than particular emphasis to the special causes and with applied emphasis on subverting policies toward minority interests over the majority interests; giving way to a feeling of frustrated disenfranchisement by the majority in favour of the few. This is a huge slap in the face for all those citizens that afforded charity to such minority causes and is now beginning to sow discord.
One of the aspects of jumbling and bagging all these modern maladies together is the rather peculiar effect of giving rise to personal expertise. The caveat is that it’s mostly second hand gossip via multi-misinformation narrative and it hijacks very successfully most everybody and in a kind of quasi-hierarchical credentialized way. Not only are people searching meaning from the mass-information conflict, but they are being indoctrinated via algorithms that are particularly enticing to their ingroup preferences and then projecting via different degrees of influence via their financial and personal success worth and further influencing their peers. It can create a form of submission. Imagine for one second the very individualistic identity attachments of so much misinformation taken as fact and how it becomes part of everyday conversation and add in the actual fact that we are all in a form of disagreement due to our individual lived experience identity perception over such a large expanse of propagated narrative and we can see how the value of our individual thoughts is chastised and submitted hierarchically from the highest power of influence. It perpetuates a credentialized society and thus the highest and brightest of minds are denigrated and the average Joe with no pedigree in academia is just an added confusion to the narrative. Everybody has become an expert on everything and heterodoxy is as rare as rocking horse shit.
Another amazing post man. I'm putting this up on my FB, assuming that's cool. Hopefully someone from my friends list finds their way to your stuff. I keep telling my conservative friends that they can watch you school me on some issues, assuming they'd be dying to see that happen in real time, but so far, no takers. I'm gonna have to edit your stuff down a bit to share in class, simply in terms of vocab and conceptual complexity, at times, but I'll let you know how to students reply to some of your more provocative ideas.
I focus on individual liberty over group force and control to make individuals submit.
When liberty cannot be maintained, then it must be by a clear law that applies to all equally (and thus cannot target any group for "special" breaks or punishments).
These will give you the best economic results. These will give you the best social outcomes. Those who purport that they can force others to better outcomes are liars and tend to promote some gain in economics or social order while ignoring the harmful side effects.
Argh... ALWAYS mistakes. If You don't know ANYTHING about "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist, the quote below won't make ANY sense.
He's a brain scientist who's done 20 years research on left and right hemispheres of the brain. He's laying OUTSTANDING case that these two hemispheres are involved in just about EVERYTHING we think, say, or do. Perceive the world and ourselves.
But they have two ENTIRELY different WAYS of perceiving the world. That's what the research points to, as far as Sir Iain knows. Ten years of further research doesn't seem to have poked any holes in his theory. And, in a nutshell, his idea is that the right, holistic, empathic hemisphere, which is BIGGER along most of the length of the brain, should be relied on.
As opposed to how EVERYBODY's been trained how to think, almost exclusively by the left hemisphere. The last half of the book will point out how efft up the world's societies are, as a result of this. There's almost NOTHING in this book that I'll disagree with. I'd bet MONEY on it, and I'm NOT a bettin' man. (Chapter 3 looks to be interesting. On "Language, Truth and Music."
As I posted to Your Quillette reply to "Mrs. Dalloway:" TYS! (Long story. Means "thank You SIR!")
Enjoyed IMMENSELY! TYTY.
Hi, Mr. Johansen. Although I don't always agree with you on everything, I like your topic selection and writing--I plan to put it on my "rounds", so to speak. Your work put me in mind of Dan Kahan (Cultural Cognition) and Jonathan Haidt. You may also find Aristotelian/Thomistic psychology interesting: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74d658bt.