I regularly spar with the sort who claim that no one was harmed by covid jabs, no child has been sterilized or sexually mutilated by trans "therapy", America is purely racist/white supremacist and we need to throw out the Constitution, Putin stole the 2016 election and we need to destroy Russia, and I am a bigot, misogynist fascist liar.
But then I remember, I do not regularly spar with the sort who think if we just get gov out of the way fossil energy will be cheap and affordable for eternity, there will be no pollution, stratospheric income inequality isn't a problem with or without government, and might is always right.
I guess because the former is the current authoritarian, existential, apocalyptic threat.
a few months a go i came across the 'sigma male' and was amazed to discover that humans all fall into pretty uniform behaviours. i thought i was quite unusual, unique but no, theres a whole bunch of us that all behave the same. we are rare enough that i dont know any others in person
the problem at the moment is the numbers, there are way too many that fit into this emotional moral thinking that you described and not enough critical thinkers. sometimes people are called sheep and some get upset by this but i cant find a better description
Hume was a particularly entertaining one, the arch-sceptic whose scepticism progressively undermined scepticism. I always thought this line from one of his later dialogues was mostly directed to his younger self:
‘Whether your scepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt, if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall’
I also like Hume's point of (roughly) "You get so skeptical that you don't know if anything is real, but then you go down to the pub, drink and talk with your friends, and then everything seems ok again."
It's been a while since I read much Hume, but I got the distinct feeling that he was having a bit of a mental breakdown there for a while in school, and you could read it in real time.
I think it was probably an intellectual turmoil more than a mental health crisis: on his account he loved his time in France (where the Treatise was written). There is a real tension in the Treatise though between the sheer arrogant certainty of his tone and the scepticism of his position though.
I do think it's a shame his history of England is basically treated as a footnote. I think his contemporaries had a point in treating it as his best work. As far as I know, it has not even been available in print for years (my copy is ancient); but it's Hume the man, not the arrogant genius boy.
Fair point. I suppose what I mean is sort of summed up by the phrase “thinking yourself into a hole”. I think the proper psych term is “catastrophizing” but the idea is over thinking things till you are depressed and mentally horrified about the implications enough that you can’t get out. Until you do go out, hang out with your (hopefully not similarly inclined friends) have a good time, and then everything seems ok again. I don’t know how much of that is psychological vs just a thing humans can do to themselves, but I’ve been there and feel for Hume. I wonder how much Smith, who mentions the supreme value of friends and company but not the lows Hume hints at, was prone to the same thing, or if his examples were second hand from Hume and others.
On his account at the start of the History, he was of such a naturally cheerful temper that he quickly bounced himself back even from the Treatise sinking like a stone on publication. I think he exaggerates, but the core rings true to me - his authorial voice has a jocular ease that I don't think is completely artificial.
Complete speculation, but he was a probably a fluid enough thinker (contrast: Kant) to think himself out of holes fairly quickly. I don't think he had the right cognitive style to maintain catastrophising: no intellectual attachment to the concept of self or to any fixed categories at all, and very little visible metaphysical anxiety about that (contrast: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and friends).
"I know my readership trends older, but if anyone here is younger and childless and has any inclination at all to bear children, my qualified advice is DO IT."
I'm def in the "older" bracket but dating a younger woman who very much wants a child and it's awoken in me a desire to have one as well. Wish me luck and godspeed as we potentially launch an amazing and challenging journey.
My daughters opened my eyes to myself and the world. It’s like watching a little fractal of myself and my husband run around. I learned more about the world and myself through watching how I react to my children and my husband. Best of luck to you
To teach is no different from being a carpenter. It has set and specific goals, which are tangible and objectively measurable.
If or when teaching is changed from "how" and "what" to "ought, must and shall" it's no longer teaching but fostering or indoctrinating (in the sense of teaching a doctrine).
Obviously, in some subjects it is far easier to keep these separate - my go-to example being shop class (called woodcrafting here): there is no way to hammer a nail [insert -ism/religion of choice here], there's only the correct way and the plethora of incorrect ways to do it.
I'd argue teaching today is returning to what it was for centuries: a cadre of clerics teaching and indoctrinating acolytes in orthodox dogma and actual skills, to the detriment of science, actual reason and logic.
It's too bad it's not returning to its roots instead.
Regarding crazy political factions and feeling like you are the only sane person in the middle of them: Smith makes a similar point in TMS, about how the wise and judicious person is never so ignored and outcast as in times of factional strife. People don't want to hear about what might be true, they want to hear about how their team is RIGHT and the other team is BADWRONG.
So you aren't being THAT much of a special snowflake, and to the extent you are, the Adam Smith pattern snowflake is a pretty good one :D
For a variety of reasons, the time we inhabit has become very binary. Tech/programming is one’s and zeros - binary. A program works or it doesn’t work. This binary system and its thinking has bled into our society. Simultaneously, technology has given us the ability to see and learn more than any other time in our history. In addition we can connect with all sorts of people and sources of information from all walks of life, professions, disciplines. (There are some similarities with the invention of the Gutenberg press, mass education, etc.).
All these matters have significantly altered the information hierarchy and, most importantly, the control of that hierarchy.
As a result of the binary thought process that advances technology or the loss of control of the information hierarchy or the initial shock of having so much information available to us, binary thinking has overwhelmed us. An instinctual response to too much stimulus is fight or flight. Translation, overwhelmed by all the information available, we shut down and seek a binary solution. This person is bad. This person is good.
Our sociopathic overlords who previously controlled information undoubtedly encourage this processing because if we could move past this place our societal structure will change (ie their value/power will be greatly diminished).
If we are able to move past our natural instincts and apply critical thinking to our problems, it seems likely that the benefit of all this connectivity and information would yield better community based solutions. It is important to take in that community based solutions are anathema to society’s current power dynamic but are the optimal tool for solving problems and allowing individuals to flourish. It seems to me that this Substack community is a great example of people of all types of expertise sincerely examining an issue, tolerating different perspectives, and moving toward some type of cohesion.
As these forums succeed, one should expect the old hierarchy to respond throwing more uncertainty at us (economics, military conflict, etc.) and withdrawing access to information and connectivity. The current disconnection we feel (no one really understands me, I am like no one else) is a result of the collapse of the old system and the slow growth of the new one.
I worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley for 39 years, and we had a much more cynical view of things. "There's always one more bug" was one of our sayings. Programs are deceptive: they may appear to work much of the time, but in fact they're riddled with bugs and never work perfectly.
Which leads me to GM's comment about Google Docs losing an entire article: this, unfortunately, can be expected with something as complex as a cloud-based word processing system. Of course, Google would probably say that Docs is safe and effective, and that side effects (like death of a document) are so rare as to be essentially non-existent. They'll fix this for sure with the next booster -- I mean upgrade.
My wife's grandma died last week out in Happy Valley (Warrior's Mark more specifically) near State College, PA. So we were just up there commiserating with the surviving family. Well there and New Columbia where her dad and siblings live.
Husband is a software engineer, huh? Me too. General Dynamics Mission Systems recently bought out our entire company. By January my badge and paychecks will say "GDMS" if they don't cut me loose. Doubt it though. We do some pretty complicated shit. In fact, my code has been on a bird that was in the news recently. No, not that one, the one before it.
Been back to martial arts training since last November. Found a great bunch of guys from the extended family up in DC. That along with a new car on order from the factory, gonna be a great year coming up. I have great expectations.
Bank, schmank. Plenty of 4-5% brokered CDs out there with nearly zero risk. Treasuries have been pretty decent lately too. Got a pile of 13-week T-bills. Looking for some small denomination gold.
Lot of compassion in the Gutter today, for yourself and others; this is beautiful and poignant. I was thinking, before you got to falling on the sword, what a treasure your brother is and how much sense it makes to live as a family especially with a farm. I have only a good-sized yard to maintain and I'm overwhelmed. I just gave away my last four chickens (maybe to my chicken-guy's buddy and maybe to the wild rooster who lives behind the library--don't ask, don't tell is our agreement). So for the first time in 15 yrs I'm chickenless and also, this week, an empty nester or free bird as my friend says.
The plan, though, is that my newlywed daughter and hubbie will move into the house in 1-2 yrs and I'll make the Garaj Mahal into my home. They hope to raise a family and I hope that works for them. It's already a relief to not feel that maintaining everything will always be up to me.
But my point was going to be this: can't we recruit some fine woman who'd be an asset to your household/ menagerie with aspirations to be a breeder? Using your brother as bait? My non-PC recommendation is think outside the (white) box. My youngest is dating a Latino guy whose parents, brother and sister all had babies at 19. Her observation is that, while we white folks agonize endlessly over whether we can afford to have kids, want to have kids or even deserve to have kids, their perspective is "babies happen." And you deal with it.
She and her boyfriend, btw, are 24 and she's not in that mindset and has introduced the sister to Planned Parenthood. But she appreciates the way that everyone in his family just pitches in. And surely there are many other cultures who aren't as neurotic as we are. All of them?
Brothermouth is very happy remaining single at this point, has no interest in having children, and I don't feel the need to "lure a breeder" to my home to be an asset to my household simply because I cannot be one.
Recommending interracial dating is "non-PC" these days? I thought it was about as PC as you can get.
Update on my chickens--the chicken guy took one onstage at a comedy show last night, made a couple of lame jokes and then said she needed a home. A buddy came up after the show and has a coop at a rental. He thought it was just the one and was stoked that it was four. We'll see if he's as stoked with the mean non-laying cuckoo maran but hopefully the two Americaunas will make up for it!
I regularly spar with the sort who claim that no one was harmed by covid jabs, no child has been sterilized or sexually mutilated by trans "therapy", America is purely racist/white supremacist and we need to throw out the Constitution, Putin stole the 2016 election and we need to destroy Russia, and I am a bigot, misogynist fascist liar.
But then I remember, I do not regularly spar with the sort who think if we just get gov out of the way fossil energy will be cheap and affordable for eternity, there will be no pollution, stratospheric income inequality isn't a problem with or without government, and might is always right.
I guess because the former is the current authoritarian, existential, apocalyptic threat.
I'm old enough to remember when the right was seen as an authoritarian, existential, apocalyptic threat, too.
Which I suppose, we are both probably young enough to see the script flip again.
I suspect we will. Probably sooner than either of us expect.
I resemble your remarks.😆
Don't take it personal, I probably still would have voted for you :)
a few months a go i came across the 'sigma male' and was amazed to discover that humans all fall into pretty uniform behaviours. i thought i was quite unusual, unique but no, theres a whole bunch of us that all behave the same. we are rare enough that i dont know any others in person
the problem at the moment is the numbers, there are way too many that fit into this emotional moral thinking that you described and not enough critical thinkers. sometimes people are called sheep and some get upset by this but i cant find a better description
It's nothing new. Hume caught sight of it much closer to the start of our societal rationality-idolatry:
'Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.'
Yep. Nailed it.
I'm sure there were particularly smart canaries in cages from the very day after the Enlightenment.
Hume was a particularly entertaining one, the arch-sceptic whose scepticism progressively undermined scepticism. I always thought this line from one of his later dialogues was mostly directed to his younger self:
‘Whether your scepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt, if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall’
Nihilism always seems very close at hand, if your eyes are open.
I also like Hume's point of (roughly) "You get so skeptical that you don't know if anything is real, but then you go down to the pub, drink and talk with your friends, and then everything seems ok again."
It's been a while since I read much Hume, but I got the distinct feeling that he was having a bit of a mental breakdown there for a while in school, and you could read it in real time.
I think it was probably an intellectual turmoil more than a mental health crisis: on his account he loved his time in France (where the Treatise was written). There is a real tension in the Treatise though between the sheer arrogant certainty of his tone and the scepticism of his position though.
I do think it's a shame his history of England is basically treated as a footnote. I think his contemporaries had a point in treating it as his best work. As far as I know, it has not even been available in print for years (my copy is ancient); but it's Hume the man, not the arrogant genius boy.
Fair point. I suppose what I mean is sort of summed up by the phrase “thinking yourself into a hole”. I think the proper psych term is “catastrophizing” but the idea is over thinking things till you are depressed and mentally horrified about the implications enough that you can’t get out. Until you do go out, hang out with your (hopefully not similarly inclined friends) have a good time, and then everything seems ok again. I don’t know how much of that is psychological vs just a thing humans can do to themselves, but I’ve been there and feel for Hume. I wonder how much Smith, who mentions the supreme value of friends and company but not the lows Hume hints at, was prone to the same thing, or if his examples were second hand from Hume and others.
On his account at the start of the History, he was of such a naturally cheerful temper that he quickly bounced himself back even from the Treatise sinking like a stone on publication. I think he exaggerates, but the core rings true to me - his authorial voice has a jocular ease that I don't think is completely artificial.
Complete speculation, but he was a probably a fluid enough thinker (contrast: Kant) to think himself out of holes fairly quickly. I don't think he had the right cognitive style to maintain catastrophising: no intellectual attachment to the concept of self or to any fixed categories at all, and very little visible metaphysical anxiety about that (contrast: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and friends).
Yes!
I think in many cases a persons "belief" schemata is just their fears being drawn to a groups dogma/creed "rules" and then just gets lodged there
When it comes to truth, I suspect it’s out there but we’ll never fully reach it.
The tribes currently sparing think they have found it, and that error makes them dangerous.
This forever.
"I know my readership trends older, but if anyone here is younger and childless and has any inclination at all to bear children, my qualified advice is DO IT."
I'm def in the "older" bracket but dating a younger woman who very much wants a child and it's awoken in me a desire to have one as well. Wish me luck and godspeed as we potentially launch an amazing and challenging journey.
Fantastic news. Do it!
My daughters opened my eyes to myself and the world. It’s like watching a little fractal of myself and my husband run around. I learned more about the world and myself through watching how I react to my children and my husband. Best of luck to you
That’s such a special thing to read. Thank you so much!
Congrats to HM. Here’s hoping for the atypical startup experience.
Calling them a "startup" is perhaps inaccurate, they have (AFAIK) been active for about 5 years now, but remain small and agile by choice.
They have a very similar vibe to me as the place he DID originally work at, which was absolutely a startup from ground zero.
Fair enough.
I’ve had two startup experiences that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Oh, and if you listened to the song at the end, my answer: The Rolling Stones. And I married a Beatle.
Me = The Rolling Stones. Married to The Moody Blues. (Although, not younger.) 😒
To teach is no different from being a carpenter. It has set and specific goals, which are tangible and objectively measurable.
If or when teaching is changed from "how" and "what" to "ought, must and shall" it's no longer teaching but fostering or indoctrinating (in the sense of teaching a doctrine).
Obviously, in some subjects it is far easier to keep these separate - my go-to example being shop class (called woodcrafting here): there is no way to hammer a nail [insert -ism/religion of choice here], there's only the correct way and the plethora of incorrect ways to do it.
I'd argue teaching today is returning to what it was for centuries: a cadre of clerics teaching and indoctrinating acolytes in orthodox dogma and actual skills, to the detriment of science, actual reason and logic.
It's too bad it's not returning to its roots instead.
you just randomly popped into my head, still alive and well i hope?
Hey brother! Sure am. Feeling really close to talking myself back onto here.
Been good?
up and down just as life always is, glad your well
get your foul mouth back on here! :)
Regarding crazy political factions and feeling like you are the only sane person in the middle of them: Smith makes a similar point in TMS, about how the wise and judicious person is never so ignored and outcast as in times of factional strife. People don't want to hear about what might be true, they want to hear about how their team is RIGHT and the other team is BADWRONG.
So you aren't being THAT much of a special snowflake, and to the extent you are, the Adam Smith pattern snowflake is a pretty good one :D
For a variety of reasons, the time we inhabit has become very binary. Tech/programming is one’s and zeros - binary. A program works or it doesn’t work. This binary system and its thinking has bled into our society. Simultaneously, technology has given us the ability to see and learn more than any other time in our history. In addition we can connect with all sorts of people and sources of information from all walks of life, professions, disciplines. (There are some similarities with the invention of the Gutenberg press, mass education, etc.).
All these matters have significantly altered the information hierarchy and, most importantly, the control of that hierarchy.
As a result of the binary thought process that advances technology or the loss of control of the information hierarchy or the initial shock of having so much information available to us, binary thinking has overwhelmed us. An instinctual response to too much stimulus is fight or flight. Translation, overwhelmed by all the information available, we shut down and seek a binary solution. This person is bad. This person is good.
Our sociopathic overlords who previously controlled information undoubtedly encourage this processing because if we could move past this place our societal structure will change (ie their value/power will be greatly diminished).
If we are able to move past our natural instincts and apply critical thinking to our problems, it seems likely that the benefit of all this connectivity and information would yield better community based solutions. It is important to take in that community based solutions are anathema to society’s current power dynamic but are the optimal tool for solving problems and allowing individuals to flourish. It seems to me that this Substack community is a great example of people of all types of expertise sincerely examining an issue, tolerating different perspectives, and moving toward some type of cohesion.
As these forums succeed, one should expect the old hierarchy to respond throwing more uncertainty at us (economics, military conflict, etc.) and withdrawing access to information and connectivity. The current disconnection we feel (no one really understands me, I am like no one else) is a result of the collapse of the old system and the slow growth of the new one.
"A program works or it doesn’t work."
I worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley for 39 years, and we had a much more cynical view of things. "There's always one more bug" was one of our sayings. Programs are deceptive: they may appear to work much of the time, but in fact they're riddled with bugs and never work perfectly.
Which leads me to GM's comment about Google Docs losing an entire article: this, unfortunately, can be expected with something as complex as a cloud-based word processing system. Of course, Google would probably say that Docs is safe and effective, and that side effects (like death of a document) are so rare as to be essentially non-existent. They'll fix this for sure with the next booster -- I mean upgrade.
Let's say Google Docs cloud storage is safe and effective 99.99% for of files uploaded.
So how many millions of lost documents would that make per week, globally?
I often tease my brother who was a software troubleshooter before he switched tracks for an academic career in geology, by asking:
"If elevators worked as well as computer programs, would you use them?"
"Hell no!"
I worked in computers too, and I'm old-school enough to never trust anything completely to the cloud.
As for a program working or not, that depends on how you define "working".
My wife's grandma died last week out in Happy Valley (Warrior's Mark more specifically) near State College, PA. So we were just up there commiserating with the surviving family. Well there and New Columbia where her dad and siblings live.
Husband is a software engineer, huh? Me too. General Dynamics Mission Systems recently bought out our entire company. By January my badge and paychecks will say "GDMS" if they don't cut me loose. Doubt it though. We do some pretty complicated shit. In fact, my code has been on a bird that was in the news recently. No, not that one, the one before it.
Been back to martial arts training since last November. Found a great bunch of guys from the extended family up in DC. That along with a new car on order from the factory, gonna be a great year coming up. I have great expectations.
Bank, schmank. Plenty of 4-5% brokered CDs out there with nearly zero risk. Treasuries have been pretty decent lately too. Got a pile of 13-week T-bills. Looking for some small denomination gold.
Cheers!
It's been All Quiet on the Eastern (Pennsylvania) Front. Everything OK with you, Guttermouth?
Thank you JHHDDS, I came here to ask the very same question. Started missing the guttertalk over the weekend and decided today that I am concerned...
Beuller? Beuller?
Lot of compassion in the Gutter today, for yourself and others; this is beautiful and poignant. I was thinking, before you got to falling on the sword, what a treasure your brother is and how much sense it makes to live as a family especially with a farm. I have only a good-sized yard to maintain and I'm overwhelmed. I just gave away my last four chickens (maybe to my chicken-guy's buddy and maybe to the wild rooster who lives behind the library--don't ask, don't tell is our agreement). So for the first time in 15 yrs I'm chickenless and also, this week, an empty nester or free bird as my friend says.
The plan, though, is that my newlywed daughter and hubbie will move into the house in 1-2 yrs and I'll make the Garaj Mahal into my home. They hope to raise a family and I hope that works for them. It's already a relief to not feel that maintaining everything will always be up to me.
But my point was going to be this: can't we recruit some fine woman who'd be an asset to your household/ menagerie with aspirations to be a breeder? Using your brother as bait? My non-PC recommendation is think outside the (white) box. My youngest is dating a Latino guy whose parents, brother and sister all had babies at 19. Her observation is that, while we white folks agonize endlessly over whether we can afford to have kids, want to have kids or even deserve to have kids, their perspective is "babies happen." And you deal with it.
She and her boyfriend, btw, are 24 and she's not in that mindset and has introduced the sister to Planned Parenthood. But she appreciates the way that everyone in his family just pitches in. And surely there are many other cultures who aren't as neurotic as we are. All of them?
Brothermouth is very happy remaining single at this point, has no interest in having children, and I don't feel the need to "lure a breeder" to my home to be an asset to my household simply because I cannot be one.
Recommending interracial dating is "non-PC" these days? I thought it was about as PC as you can get.
Update on my chickens--the chicken guy took one onstage at a comedy show last night, made a couple of lame jokes and then said she needed a home. A buddy came up after the show and has a coop at a rental. He thought it was just the one and was stoked that it was four. We'll see if he's as stoked with the mean non-laying cuckoo maran but hopefully the two Americaunas will make up for it!
Nice re-homing!
I had to cut back on all my fun reads because life went to hell in a handbasket.
IDK what made me think of you today.
I hope you are well. God bless you, kiddo.
Very much the same.
Thanks for thinking of me. Blessings to you. <3
That last bullet point, on tribalism. So perceptive. Thank you.