A Response To A Lovely Fellow
Longform answers to recent Riggery Pokery posts
Pictured here: Guttermouth’s ancestors visiting the comment section of Riggery Pokery to engage in reasoned discourse.
Someone more productive than me made two recent posts that I think interlock more than might be obvious. My ideal response to them does, anyway.
He makes two conclusive statements/rhetorical inquiries:
...ultimately we need to find our way through this and to resist this push towards hating one another. We need more of “your views are clinically insane, having delusions of adequacy would be a significant step up for you, and there is no beginning to your talents - but I love you just the same” Trying to appreciate different perspectives really does matter
and
These insane perspectives are being forced upon us - if you don’t essentially agree with the sentiments you will be seen as morally deficient. It’s a deeply coercive and manipulative program. Here’s just a very small random sampling of some of the stuff I’ve collected in my online travels. None of it makes any sense whatsoever - yet this drivel has been given a kind of moral authority by the moral Blitzkrieg of the Leftwaffe.
There are two important forces at work in describing the latter, and this coalesces in my response to the former.
One is a broad concept called the "ratcheting effect," which is simply that a system that can only move unidirectionally (in this context, MORE restrictive, MORE surveillance, FEWER rights, etc.) is incapable of "rolling back" its excesses or even its failures.
Progressivism is this. It’s even in the name. There’s an implicit notion that there is a actual, directional “forward” along which progressivism advances that is not simply linear time itself but a perpetual, unidirectional march along a continuum of… er… progress. Everything you do is either progress or anti-progress. There is only one possible direction that qualifies as “forward,” and baby, we’re on that rail, and all you can do is slow or stop the train, but it ain’t going anywhere but Kookamunga.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m much smarter or more observant than other people, but this was something I’ve been worried about where almost every system of American society is concerned for a good long while now, even before COVID.
We have a number of systems with extremely powerful influences over our lives- systems that citizens have very polarized opinions about- that appear to work on a ratchet.
Has the rate of Federal income tax ever been reduced?
Have abrogations of our privacy and civil liberty, such as under the Patriot Act, ever been reversed? Has any general program of surveillance of American citizens been retired or discontinued, as opposed to being renewed and compounded by subsequent surveillance programs?
Has average rent as % of income per capita ever gone down?
Have the total number of national criminal codes (i.e., the specific behaviors that are considered ‘breaking the law’), year-over-year, ever gone down?
Has any speech or activity considered “hate” or “racist” ever been “unbanned”? Does the list of human expressions considered hateful get unidirectionally smaller, or larger?
Ratcheted systems have logical endpoints, though they usually reach a practical or functional endpoint that lies some distance before it. This is the stuff I started worrying about even when I was a little younger: hey, guys, eventually, we’ll be paying 100% income tax, all the remaining cash in our pocket will pay rent, literally all human behavior will be subject to criminal code, all speech will potentially be hate speech in a codified way, and we will have complete and total surveillance, of every aspect of human existence as technology and infrastructure allow.
It never gets better in total. It only gets worse.
Pictured here: a physical restraint system utilizing only half of its true potential.
Ratcheted systems only stop when they break or are broken- they NEVER appear, through my cursory pondering of modern history, to be “reformed” in such a way that allows reverse movement while the system continues to exist. They only appear to stop when they get destroyed (or collapse) and rebuilt.
This interlocks with an aspect of how virtue signaling works. Here's a video by sense/perception psychologist Mark Changizi:
If you don’t have time to watch, in a nutshell, his thesis is this: virtue signals exist to identify ingroup/outgroup identity. For example, “wearing pants in public” is a poor virtue signal: even if YOU are doing it to demonstrate some ideological principle, lots of other people are just doing it because people wear pants. It’s impossible to tell who are fellow Trouseroth worshippers like you- wearing pants to signal your piety- and who are just unbelievers who want to be in compliance with the “no pants, no service” sign at the liquor store.
No, if you want you and your fellow Trouserians to be able to identify each other at a distance, you have to do something that nonbelievers wouldn’t do by accident or as appropriation. You could put SPIKES on your pants! Now, you’ve successfully filtered nonbelievers wearing regular old pants, but oh, no, you’ve still got all these outlaw bikers and Norwegian death metal fans and Mad Max convention-goers wearing spiky pants for the WRONG REASONS, and you still can’t tell your fellow Trouserians apart from people on their way to a concert.
Finally, it hits you: pants with spikes on the inside! Excruciatingly painful. No one will wear these besides a true Trouserian!
Ah, but you’re screwed again: the inside-spikes are invisible! No one can see that you’re a Trouserian as long as your pants are on (which they must be!) Sure, you’re probably bleeding profusely from inside your spiky pants, but there are other possible explanations for that, like keeping stoats in your pockets or Biden shutting down all the feminine hygiene product factories and shipping our strategic maxi reserve to China.
The signal must be clearly visible and identifiable for what it is, and it must be something that nonbelievers would not want to copy for fun or for unrelated reasons.
Most religious clothing, like Trouseroth Two-Way Crotchspikes, accomplishes this, and that’s no coincidence: they’ve had centuries of evolution to dial in exactly the right visibility so people KNOW you’re not just into wearing impractical clothing and they have no desire to imitate it to piss off their dad or because it’s actually functional and stylish.
You will not see anyone wearing a burqa who isn’t an Islamic fundamentalist or who is taking advantage of the anonymity to commit a crime. You won’t see anyone wearing a yarmulke who isn’t a Jewish male, because there is secular headwear that actually does the job of covering/protecting/warming your entire head. You won’t see anyone wearing a MAGA hat who isn’t absolutely, positively a Trump supporter, or doesn’t mind being taken for one, with all the consequences this may entail for them.
Pictured here: This religious garb clearly and unmistakably identifies its adherents as virgins.
It’s also important that virtue signals don’t have to be external objects like clothing at all: they can be shibboleths and silly handshakes and tattoos and spoken language. The criteria is that they are A) Visible (everyone can see you doing it), B) Unambiguous (everyone knows you’re doing it for your intended reason and not another one), and C) Self-Selecting (no one would want to do it for anything other than your intended reason).
The twin principles of ratcheting systems and virtue signaling are how we have arrived at the current behavior and ideology of progressives (and other bad things going on right now, too). The requirements of membership in any group that views itself as countercultural (or that otherwise wants to clearly distinguish itself from a mainstream or other widespread group) will only get more stringent over time, never less, and the ingroup/outgroup nature of ideological factions mean those requirements will always be ridiculous, impractical, and/or costly (with ratcheting meaning they will be MORE ridiculous, MORE impractical, and MORE costly).
Fortunately, these principles assure the eventual self-destruction of any system with these qualities, especially if they’re both at the same time (which is, I think, the unique situation we find ourselves in here in the United States). No ratcheting system with ingroup requirements can ever get to full ratchet and live there.
Unfortunately,
1) depending on how big, organized, and resourceful the system is, they can go very far before this happens, and
2) when they do inevitably implode, it is never peaceful, clean, or without harm to bystanders because a) a large amount of power (in various states of matter including but not limited to money, social influence, and weapons) is released into the ecosystem all at once and b) lots and lots of people are typically hooked into such a system, even if they’re not in the ingroup, and suffer disruption to their environment and way of life even if they’re happy to see the system die.
Finally and ironically to Riggery’s first point:
we need to find our way through this and to resist this push towards hating one another.
Why?
I’ve been told quite a lot for a while now that the very idea of hate- of hateful thoughts even entering my head, let alone making their way into the outside world as regulated behavior (“hate speech” or “hate crimes”)- marks me as irreparably evil, requiring the reconstruction of my entire self. Are people who have committed actual crimes- who have killed, hurt, robbed, or sexually assaulted people- not motivated by “hate” my moral superior?
Also.
Ironically NOT in the post where he tells us to try to love each other, Riggery posts this example of a peak-COVID tweet:
If he’d written “The Leftwaffe” instead of “Lamenting and Dementing” when he’d collected image assets, I wonder if this juxaposition would have made him feel silly.
Here’s my take on this tweet. It isn’t unique. There are millions of them- tweets, comments, emails, letters put in mailboxes by neighbors and family members, final text messages, and so forth.
Every human imaginable feels love and hate, all the time, constantly, with varying intensity. Anyone who tells you they want to “end hate” or anything as ridiculous simply wants a MONOPOLY on hate- they want the state-approved right to hate YOU.
Punch, no punchbacks.
This man (who I’ve never met) hates everything I am, and as an individual, wants to destroy me utterly: to “break my spirit” so as to mold the hollow shell remaining into a compliant something that knows not to resist mandates.
He hates me. He wants to destroy me. Given the power to do so, he would.
Absent the belief that a deity wants me to love people that hate me- that want to CRUSH me and BREAK MY SPIRIT and make my life A TOTAL MISERY- what’s in it for me?
What does loving this person- or the hundreds of millions like him- benefit me?
“Well, you don’t have to accept mistreatment, or be friends with them, or hang out with them, just don’t hate them and try to love them.” What, exactly, is “love” worth in this equation, then?
This is like when a friend tells me “I owe you one” but then they won’t come over when I need help to slaughter a pig or bury a hitchhiker or unclog my toilet- exactly what is a “favor” from you worth?
What does “loving” Doug Little look like? Not wanting to retaliate? Not wishing the same upon him?
Seeing it from his point of view and empathizing with his fear of COVID and his desperation to do the things he thinks are necessary to keep the people he values safe?
I don’t want Doug anywhere near the power needed to do the things he wants to do to me. (He is a career politician, so this is not outside reality.)
I don’t want the millions or even billions of people who say things like Doug to be able to come for me and find me defenseless, or to steal whatever kind of life I’ve managed to craft for myself because they hate who I am and what I represent.
What’s more, I want justice for the people that HAVE already been sacrificed by the mob: the lost livelihoods, families, children, freedoms, futures.
I want punishment, I want retribution, I want revenge.
Failing that, I reserve the freedom to return their hate.
But I don’t have to hate someone or something to recognize it as a threat. I don’t hate a rabid raccoon, but you’d better believe I’m going to shoot it if it comes at me in my garage.
I don’t personally hate each and every person who thinks about me the way Doug Little thinks about me. But I don’t love them, either.
Love- and hate- are earned.
Everything else is just something we tell ourselves until we can’t.
Great article GM - and thanks for taking the time to critique my thoughts.
First off, I sense there may be a slight misconception about what I originally wrote. I had hoped the language and rhetoric I used when writing “your views are clinically insane, having delusions of adequacy would be a significant step up for you, and there is no beginning to your talents - but I love you just the same” would be a bit of a clue that it was not meant to be taken entirely literally.
If I had to catchphrase this I would probably say something like "debate, don't hate" (DDH)
But that's a very minor issue. What I think you've perfectly highlighted here is the issue of *strategy*. I think (I hope) it's clear from my writing that I'm implacably opposed to most of the "woke" nonsense that is squirting like a rancid stream of piss over everything these days. But what's the best way to combat that?
I posited in my article that DDH was the way forward, that the 'hate' needs to be toned down if we are to make any progress. It is, if anything, a very unfair stipulation because most of the hate seems to be coming from one direction - and, by and large, the "anti-woke" have not really succeeded by being rational, calm and objective and arguing from an evidence-based perspective.
I also think it's important to really try to understand where these crazy 'woke' ideas are coming from - even if it's only from the position of getting to know your 'enemy' better so that you can crush them. And make no mistake about it - these 'woke' insanities and inanities (like critical theory, gender ideology etc) need crushing if we're to have any kind of free and tolerable societies in the future.
These 'woke warriors' may be fired up from a place of compassion, but they're leading us into a totalitarian nightmare where every word, every phrase, every thought, every action, every gesture, every hairstyle and item of clothing, must be critically analysed and subject to approval from the woke inquisition.
I loved your framing of this as a ratchet. It's a more visceral image than a slippery slope which also carries the same sense, because it's hard to climb back up one of those too. One of the things that struck me as I was reading was how much this ties in to the notion of forgiveness - or rather the almost complete lack of it from the woke. There's no sense of giving people the benefit of the doubt for a clumsily-phrased statement - and there's almost no amount of forgiveness adequate to quell their rage and outrage when their shifting moral lines have been crossed. There is no going back, no redemption, no growth, no loosening of the thumbscrew.
It is a dangerous direction - and we should hate the ideas and hate the direction - but should we hate the people? Is that the best way to combat this?
I initially thought not - but then your article made me think again. What is the woke 'strategy'? Is it to argue with facts and figures and calm, reasoned debate? No, it's to lambast, to smear, to screech the loudest, to appeal to the emotion, to pile on the hate. It seems to have been very successful because this delirious drivel of wokewank is everywhere now - and everyone's afraid of stepping over the line and bringing the banshees down upon themselves.
Perhaps the best approach is to meet it head on with a similar degree of vigour and aggression and vitriol. The woke are not a majority - they just seem to be because they have captured institutions, governments and businesses. It makes normal people feel like the odd ones out - but perhaps we need to start making the woke feel like they're the odd ones out.
Ideally I still think the best thing is to DDH - but it takes two to tango and there's just no evidence on the woke side of things that they're even remotely prepared to do this in good faith.
GM, Thrilled to see you taking pen in hand again. This is a marvelous piece -- impactful, relatively concise, and even better -- spot on. I especially love your vision of the future (which I, too, figured out as a teenager long ago):
"hey, guys, eventually, we’ll be paying 100% income tax, all the remaining cash in our pocket will pay rent, literally all human behavior will be subject to criminal code, all speech will potentially be hate speech in a codified way, and we will have complete and total surveillance, of every aspect of human existence as technology and infrastructure allow."
And your insight that "loving everyone" is utter BS is deep. The same Good Book (if that is the source of loving everyone) also says "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". So that conversation is well worth bringing up.
Just a couple notes. Cucamonga is an actual city in Southern California (I once lived there) although your re-spelling may have been deliberate. Harks back to Jack Benny's "Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga" train announcement. And Ronald Reagan DID lower income taxes in California when he was Governor. The only time in my life I can remember them going down like that.
In any case, thanks for climbing back into the authorial saddle!