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.
1) Everyone is "from a place of compassion." It's become trite to say that "everyone thinks they're the good guy," but this is important in understanding the nature of where we find ourselves. At least part of the driving force of every ideology is a sense that it is the "right thing to do." This neither qualifies nor entitles it to supremacy. Ideologies that have been arguably rooted in less tyrannical, restrictive, or "unkind" principles have fallen by the wayside simply because their adherents were poorer combatants or had lower rates of reproduction. There is no moral compass to which ideas prevail (there is a notion I'm working on that will be an essay at some point I'm calling "memetic inheritance" where I want to explore this).
2) You rhetorically ask, "should we hate the people?" Hate is as hate does- I love some people I used to hate, and I hate some people I used to love. Hate is a response, not a driving force, to me. I will stop hating someone the moment they no longer bear me ill will. I will stop loving someone the moment they betray my loyalty. I would say, "we should hate the people as long as we are hated, and no longer."
3) I do earnestly believe the best approach is to meet it with vigor and aggression. You correctly observed that the voices behind the movement are a minority- this is, therefore, a battle won by the audience. I do not advocate wielding vigor, aggression, and strength in the same manner as our opponents- we must be judicious and fair in our anger, but the audience must see that the other side are not meek, submissive, or cowed- the herd will follow the example. Taking people relentlessly to task for the things they say and do- if I had my way, the Doug Littles of the world would be reminded of their words EVERY SINGLE DAY in their every interaction as public figures until they apologize.
Someone should ask Mr. Little and Friends at every meeting and every conference for the rest of his days, "would you still like to destroy me, Mr. Little? Would you still like to crush my spirit and hollow out my soul to achieve perfect obedience? Would you still like to make my life miserable? Here's my baby who will not be vaccinated. When will you crush her, Mr. Little?" Don't lie, don't dissemble, don't use hysteria or hyperbole- the woke left does this. Simply be unrelenting and unapologetic and never, ever surrender or negotiate with terrorists.
DDH happens when people want roughly the same world and disagree about how to get there. We are very far from that at the moment. Its day will come. Today is not pretty.
"Someone should ask Mr. Little and Friends at every meeting and every conference for the rest of his days, "would you still like to destroy me, Mr. Little? Would you still like to crush my spirit and hollow out my soul to achieve perfect obedience?" <-- This.
That.
That every damn day, because it's that, the accountability thing, that has so sorely been missing from politics since forever.
Accountability, with no option of weaseling. I'd pay taxes for that.
I would literally pay taxes for that. But why even wait for taxes?
Our side should establish funds for people to actually follow around folks like this, confront them legally in extremely public settings like school board hearings etc., and remind the assembled audience the kind of monstrous shit they said and did.
We can organize our own damn vigilance committees. No GAO needed.
That sounds like a planny plan, and they're my favorite...
Steve Kirsch is the money-bags around here. There must be plenty of people unemployed from mandates who would relish a basic wage and the chance to make a difference. Mmm.
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!
2) I'm almost positive loving and hating people existed for quite a long time before a number of third-generation translations of primary source material were compiled, censored, and published as the Bible.
3) I know Cucamonga is real, and I was indeed referencing the train announcement, as it was a train metaphor. It is often used with my spelling to refer to a nonsense place, as in The Office. (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kookamunga). I'm sorry for my stupid colloquialism.
4) I'm aware Reagan lowered taxes in CA (before I was born). I probably should have been more precise: I meant nationally, year-over-year. (Editing it now for clarity.) I researched those bullet points VERY carefully because I was worried about making such sweeping statements- since we went off of metals-backed currency to full fiat- and the beginning of inflation as we know it- none of the variables I mentioned have ever gone down for all Americans.
I figured you knew about Cucamonga -- the respelling was just too perfect. And I trust your facts -- I know you are obsessive. That was why I brought up the Reagan reduction because it struck me as so improbable at the time. So the additional clarity is good all around.
Wish you had more exposure. I am sending your stuff around -- we'll see if we can find some more "victims" for you... :)
This is probably an experience most Americans younger than me didn't have: remember School Olympics? Or mock elections?
We had a mock Reagan/Mondale election at my public school (1-8th grade). We were all way too young to understand anything about it so most of us mainly just followed whatever our parents voted for. I appreciate that they wanted to expose us to the process and ritual so early, though, and being a precocious kid, it made me want to go out and read whatever I could understand at that age about Reagan (I intuited early that an uninformed vote was meaningless and wasted).
Despite being a strident lefty for much of my youth, I held a carved-out place of affection for Ronny my whole life, which only grew as I got mature enough to appreciate the long-term impact of his policies and lived through the fall of the Soviet Union.
Here in California we also had a couple of politicians named Jarvis and Gann who actually spearheaded a cap on property taxes as a percentage of the purchase price. (Stop the Rachet—-I want to get off kinda thing. I guess that was a time when a politician could actually conceive of benefitting themselves by actually benefitting the constituency. Quaint I know…
Hating can be very good, if it gets you to act. Good to you that is, not to the object of your hate necessarily, or good as in moral or ethical. Hating a state of being or a state of facts can also be conducive to changing them - that it may well segue into self-hate or hating other persons on some generalised principle is the inherent danger, but then what of love? The word "hate" in the preceding sentences can be replaced with love and the sentences still work, they even convey virtually the same message.
Because love and hate are like the faces of Janus: they share a body. They are not in opposition or even in conflict, rather they are complementary and complete each other. Indifference, apathy, and not feeling anything in a dispassionate way is in opposition to love&hate. Sometimes that s good too - sometimes it's bad. A teacher preaching about a political topic should be dispassionate in presentation of said topic, yet should be passionate about the subject as such; a surgeon should be passionate about the art of surgery yet dispassionate, clinical and unemotional during the act itself.
This all of course depends no only on personality and experience (and age), but also on cultural context: in some times and places, an act was criminal but no moral justification was provided except by implication due to the act being crminlaised in the first place - neither punishment nor act nor restitution was given moral(istic) qualities, only practical and pragmatic ones. The closest to moral was a religious element where the punsihment was made to resemble an act of atonement or contrition and the crime itself.
Comparing old germanic tribal laws to the mosaic laws, this stands out very clear: in mosaic law, the crime is a sin and both the victim of the crime and the god of Moses has been done wrong, and may demand and take compensation. In the germanic laws, only the victim of the crime has any claim, and that claim is always compensatory in nature, plus a little on top for the cost of making the case. In complete contrast, a religious crime - a sacrilege - would entail little or no physical compensation beyond the (ritual) killing of the perpetrator.
Ehm, where was I?
When the moral dimension enters our cultures' civil laws over the centuries, more and more crimes are seen more as failure of the person in itself and of itself, than the act itself being what is criminal and punishable. This then culminates with the advent of sociology and thus criminology driving the line of reason to its logical terminus: crime is the fault of society as a collective, for failing to provide options and opportunities for the criminal to make the (morally) right choices as envisioned, not by the majority culture, but the nomenklatura defining what words and terms mean, in a progressive manner. Which of course means that the meaning of words change more and more in an ever increasing tempo.
This lands us here, now, where we as societies do things because we do things. We imprison people based not on their acts as such but with a rethoric that they be remade into what they should have been according to soceity. We medicate to combat disease and death because that's the only thing we can do as a soceity (which simultaneously removes the burden of responsibility, blame and opportunity from the specific individual). We consciously and purposefully build non-voluntary financial and societal structures and hierarchies meaning every new generation develops along the evolutionary line "How to best fit in and manipulate the system as such" since sidestepping or stepping out of it or building your own isn't the easiest option (and all sorts of evolutionary - as in progressive -processes always picks the easiest path, as experienced by previous steps envisioning the current one). Meaning that what we who are 50+ years of age call narcissism and borderline sociopathy among the twentysomethings is just the new normal - because psychologically and sociologically speaking, normal is a quantative value only: what the majority approves, endorses, demands and tolerates is normal, no matter what the actual act is.
But what about technology?
Rikard's Iron Law of Tech: All available technology always gets used to the limit of its ability befire it is controlled or restricted.
The car preceded traffic lights, modern roads, speed limits, licenses and so on. Eventually, the measures of control are so many and appears as laws of nature to anyone born after their implementation that they start acting as constraints on further technological development and refinement. (The alternative path is that with very basic, very limited controls and checks, the thing itself is deveolped to its natural state of perfection - the scalpel, the knife and the axe or the shovel for instance, are all very difficult to improve on excepting even better alloys/materials.)
What that means is that all these electronic toys which enables control heretofore unseen this side of the pyramids being built, are already acting to constrain and hamper further development of better technology, without any grandmaster plan. Technologicla evolution follow the same pattern as biological one: if a life-form can dominate its environment it will do so, and then remake the environment to suit its needs, meaning improving creature comforts which removes selection pressure for further improvement of the organism itself, which eventually mean that when the once-dominant organism creates or encounter an existential threat it's never met before (or so long ago it no longer retain the necessary characteristics, not even the template for them) it can't compete. It might relocate, but there's a hard limit to that too.
Closer: I'll always treasure the reaction I got from a tutor, when as a teenager I was (among the rest of the class) told about the Prisoner's dilemma and my answer was "I kill the guard telling me this, and uses his keys to stage a jalibreak."
My mother told me that hating anyone is like scooping up acid in your bare hands to throw at someone. Even if they truly deserve acid in the face, it'll do you as much or more damage. Note: It's not anger. That's just the normal emotional response to egregious malfeasance. Mastering one's temper, is not the issue here.
Hatred is bad for you. Full stop.
Now if you really want to defy the Deity, the sentient moral Person who built everything (and knows all the cheat codes) for maximum self-interest be *indifferent* to other people. Guaranteed short-term win, and very tempting for me. Haters really are a better class of person.
Loving your enemies is a way to play the iterated prisoners dilemma and win big. If I get my library back I can dig out the explanation for the trick of it. It has to do with how one perceives one's own badness and goodness, one's perception of loving oneself.
Do unto others etc.
As ever, YMMV. Mind the gap.
TL'DR The mindset advice is fine, the strategy is weak. What is wanted is what the cult deprogrammers use.
"Bury a hich hiker..." LOL. I caught that, Guttermouth.
Great article. Great back and forth here too with the author you're examining. Hope the farm is going well, and I'll come out from Pittsburgh anytime you need me to help you collect chicken eggs...or bury a hitch hiker.
I wrote an article yesterday (first time since MAY) about the need to belong that, while not directly related to this, can tie in in certain ways. Metal inward spike pants people want to find other metal inward spike pants people, because even if they consider themselves outlaws, there still is an intrinsic need to belong to something, somewhere.
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.
A wonderful response. A few very brief replies:
1) Everyone is "from a place of compassion." It's become trite to say that "everyone thinks they're the good guy," but this is important in understanding the nature of where we find ourselves. At least part of the driving force of every ideology is a sense that it is the "right thing to do." This neither qualifies nor entitles it to supremacy. Ideologies that have been arguably rooted in less tyrannical, restrictive, or "unkind" principles have fallen by the wayside simply because their adherents were poorer combatants or had lower rates of reproduction. There is no moral compass to which ideas prevail (there is a notion I'm working on that will be an essay at some point I'm calling "memetic inheritance" where I want to explore this).
2) You rhetorically ask, "should we hate the people?" Hate is as hate does- I love some people I used to hate, and I hate some people I used to love. Hate is a response, not a driving force, to me. I will stop hating someone the moment they no longer bear me ill will. I will stop loving someone the moment they betray my loyalty. I would say, "we should hate the people as long as we are hated, and no longer."
3) I do earnestly believe the best approach is to meet it with vigor and aggression. You correctly observed that the voices behind the movement are a minority- this is, therefore, a battle won by the audience. I do not advocate wielding vigor, aggression, and strength in the same manner as our opponents- we must be judicious and fair in our anger, but the audience must see that the other side are not meek, submissive, or cowed- the herd will follow the example. Taking people relentlessly to task for the things they say and do- if I had my way, the Doug Littles of the world would be reminded of their words EVERY SINGLE DAY in their every interaction as public figures until they apologize.
Someone should ask Mr. Little and Friends at every meeting and every conference for the rest of his days, "would you still like to destroy me, Mr. Little? Would you still like to crush my spirit and hollow out my soul to achieve perfect obedience? Would you still like to make my life miserable? Here's my baby who will not be vaccinated. When will you crush her, Mr. Little?" Don't lie, don't dissemble, don't use hysteria or hyperbole- the woke left does this. Simply be unrelenting and unapologetic and never, ever surrender or negotiate with terrorists.
DDH happens when people want roughly the same world and disagree about how to get there. We are very far from that at the moment. Its day will come. Today is not pretty.
"Someone should ask Mr. Little and Friends at every meeting and every conference for the rest of his days, "would you still like to destroy me, Mr. Little? Would you still like to crush my spirit and hollow out my soul to achieve perfect obedience?" <-- This.
That.
That every damn day, because it's that, the accountability thing, that has so sorely been missing from politics since forever.
Accountability, with no option of weaseling. I'd pay taxes for that.
I would literally pay taxes for that. But why even wait for taxes?
Our side should establish funds for people to actually follow around folks like this, confront them legally in extremely public settings like school board hearings etc., and remind the assembled audience the kind of monstrous shit they said and did.
We can organize our own damn vigilance committees. No GAO needed.
That sounds like a planny plan, and they're my favorite...
Steve Kirsch is the money-bags around here. There must be plenty of people unemployed from mandates who would relish a basic wage and the chance to make a difference. Mmm.
Mmm.....
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!
Hot responses:
1) Hey, I started writing again last week!
2) I'm almost positive loving and hating people existed for quite a long time before a number of third-generation translations of primary source material were compiled, censored, and published as the Bible.
3) I know Cucamonga is real, and I was indeed referencing the train announcement, as it was a train metaphor. It is often used with my spelling to refer to a nonsense place, as in The Office. (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kookamunga). I'm sorry for my stupid colloquialism.
4) I'm aware Reagan lowered taxes in CA (before I was born). I probably should have been more precise: I meant nationally, year-over-year. (Editing it now for clarity.) I researched those bullet points VERY carefully because I was worried about making such sweeping statements- since we went off of metals-backed currency to full fiat- and the beginning of inflation as we know it- none of the variables I mentioned have ever gone down for all Americans.
Glad you liked it. :)
I figured you knew about Cucamonga -- the respelling was just too perfect. And I trust your facts -- I know you are obsessive. That was why I brought up the Reagan reduction because it struck me as so improbable at the time. So the additional clarity is good all around.
Wish you had more exposure. I am sending your stuff around -- we'll see if we can find some more "victims" for you... :)
My exposure to Reagan was as a very young child.
This is probably an experience most Americans younger than me didn't have: remember School Olympics? Or mock elections?
We had a mock Reagan/Mondale election at my public school (1-8th grade). We were all way too young to understand anything about it so most of us mainly just followed whatever our parents voted for. I appreciate that they wanted to expose us to the process and ritual so early, though, and being a precocious kid, it made me want to go out and read whatever I could understand at that age about Reagan (I intuited early that an uninformed vote was meaningless and wasted).
Despite being a strident lefty for much of my youth, I held a carved-out place of affection for Ronny my whole life, which only grew as I got mature enough to appreciate the long-term impact of his policies and lived through the fall of the Soviet Union.
Here in California we also had a couple of politicians named Jarvis and Gann who actually spearheaded a cap on property taxes as a percentage of the purchase price. (Stop the Rachet—-I want to get off kinda thing. I guess that was a time when a politician could actually conceive of benefitting themselves by actually benefitting the constituency. Quaint I know…
Hating can be very good, if it gets you to act. Good to you that is, not to the object of your hate necessarily, or good as in moral or ethical. Hating a state of being or a state of facts can also be conducive to changing them - that it may well segue into self-hate or hating other persons on some generalised principle is the inherent danger, but then what of love? The word "hate" in the preceding sentences can be replaced with love and the sentences still work, they even convey virtually the same message.
Because love and hate are like the faces of Janus: they share a body. They are not in opposition or even in conflict, rather they are complementary and complete each other. Indifference, apathy, and not feeling anything in a dispassionate way is in opposition to love&hate. Sometimes that s good too - sometimes it's bad. A teacher preaching about a political topic should be dispassionate in presentation of said topic, yet should be passionate about the subject as such; a surgeon should be passionate about the art of surgery yet dispassionate, clinical and unemotional during the act itself.
This all of course depends no only on personality and experience (and age), but also on cultural context: in some times and places, an act was criminal but no moral justification was provided except by implication due to the act being crminlaised in the first place - neither punishment nor act nor restitution was given moral(istic) qualities, only practical and pragmatic ones. The closest to moral was a religious element where the punsihment was made to resemble an act of atonement or contrition and the crime itself.
Comparing old germanic tribal laws to the mosaic laws, this stands out very clear: in mosaic law, the crime is a sin and both the victim of the crime and the god of Moses has been done wrong, and may demand and take compensation. In the germanic laws, only the victim of the crime has any claim, and that claim is always compensatory in nature, plus a little on top for the cost of making the case. In complete contrast, a religious crime - a sacrilege - would entail little or no physical compensation beyond the (ritual) killing of the perpetrator.
Ehm, where was I?
When the moral dimension enters our cultures' civil laws over the centuries, more and more crimes are seen more as failure of the person in itself and of itself, than the act itself being what is criminal and punishable. This then culminates with the advent of sociology and thus criminology driving the line of reason to its logical terminus: crime is the fault of society as a collective, for failing to provide options and opportunities for the criminal to make the (morally) right choices as envisioned, not by the majority culture, but the nomenklatura defining what words and terms mean, in a progressive manner. Which of course means that the meaning of words change more and more in an ever increasing tempo.
This lands us here, now, where we as societies do things because we do things. We imprison people based not on their acts as such but with a rethoric that they be remade into what they should have been according to soceity. We medicate to combat disease and death because that's the only thing we can do as a soceity (which simultaneously removes the burden of responsibility, blame and opportunity from the specific individual). We consciously and purposefully build non-voluntary financial and societal structures and hierarchies meaning every new generation develops along the evolutionary line "How to best fit in and manipulate the system as such" since sidestepping or stepping out of it or building your own isn't the easiest option (and all sorts of evolutionary - as in progressive -processes always picks the easiest path, as experienced by previous steps envisioning the current one). Meaning that what we who are 50+ years of age call narcissism and borderline sociopathy among the twentysomethings is just the new normal - because psychologically and sociologically speaking, normal is a quantative value only: what the majority approves, endorses, demands and tolerates is normal, no matter what the actual act is.
But what about technology?
Rikard's Iron Law of Tech: All available technology always gets used to the limit of its ability befire it is controlled or restricted.
The car preceded traffic lights, modern roads, speed limits, licenses and so on. Eventually, the measures of control are so many and appears as laws of nature to anyone born after their implementation that they start acting as constraints on further technological development and refinement. (The alternative path is that with very basic, very limited controls and checks, the thing itself is deveolped to its natural state of perfection - the scalpel, the knife and the axe or the shovel for instance, are all very difficult to improve on excepting even better alloys/materials.)
What that means is that all these electronic toys which enables control heretofore unseen this side of the pyramids being built, are already acting to constrain and hamper further development of better technology, without any grandmaster plan. Technologicla evolution follow the same pattern as biological one: if a life-form can dominate its environment it will do so, and then remake the environment to suit its needs, meaning improving creature comforts which removes selection pressure for further improvement of the organism itself, which eventually mean that when the once-dominant organism creates or encounter an existential threat it's never met before (or so long ago it no longer retain the necessary characteristics, not even the template for them) it can't compete. It might relocate, but there's a hard limit to that too.
Closer: I'll always treasure the reaction I got from a tutor, when as a teenager I was (among the rest of the class) told about the Prisoner's dilemma and my answer was "I kill the guard telling me this, and uses his keys to stage a jalibreak."
My mother told me that hating anyone is like scooping up acid in your bare hands to throw at someone. Even if they truly deserve acid in the face, it'll do you as much or more damage. Note: It's not anger. That's just the normal emotional response to egregious malfeasance. Mastering one's temper, is not the issue here.
Hatred is bad for you. Full stop.
Now if you really want to defy the Deity, the sentient moral Person who built everything (and knows all the cheat codes) for maximum self-interest be *indifferent* to other people. Guaranteed short-term win, and very tempting for me. Haters really are a better class of person.
Loving your enemies is a way to play the iterated prisoners dilemma and win big. If I get my library back I can dig out the explanation for the trick of it. It has to do with how one perceives one's own badness and goodness, one's perception of loving oneself.
Do unto others etc.
As ever, YMMV. Mind the gap.
TL'DR The mindset advice is fine, the strategy is weak. What is wanted is what the cult deprogrammers use.
I couldn't parse a lot of that, but I'm pretty good with myself.
Wise words
💃💥❤❤❤🌋 Excellent
More and more I find myself fascinated by the mantra of "I won't tolerate intolerance", or the statements we hear essentially to that effect.
I just cannot think of a more self-refuting, self defeating statement. For the life of me I cannot think of an analogy?
"Bury a hich hiker..." LOL. I caught that, Guttermouth.
Great article. Great back and forth here too with the author you're examining. Hope the farm is going well, and I'll come out from Pittsburgh anytime you need me to help you collect chicken eggs...or bury a hitch hiker.
I wrote an article yesterday (first time since MAY) about the need to belong that, while not directly related to this, can tie in in certain ways. Metal inward spike pants people want to find other metal inward spike pants people, because even if they consider themselves outlaws, there still is an intrinsic need to belong to something, somewhere.
https://bherr.substack.com/p/the-emotional-need-of-belonging