Alexander, whose role has been to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the Times, which, in the tweets of Srinivasan, Graham, and others, was enlisted as a proxy for all of the gatekeepers—the arbiters of what it is and is not O.K. to say, and who is allowed, by virtue of their identity, to say it. As Eric Weinstein, a podcast host and managing director at Peter Thiel’s investment firm, tweeted, “I believe that activism has taken over.” Here was the first great salvo in a new front in the culture wars.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Lewis-Kraus gets many details right, but I think he gets the theme wrong. If you were to buy into his narrative, you would come away thinking that the feud is because Silicon Valley types are very jealous of the status of people in the legacy media. There is some of that, but I think that the opposite is more prevalent.
I think of the conflict in Randian terms, as industrialists vs. moochers. The industrialists (not in the Rand sense of heavy industry, but in the contemporary sense of software eating everything) take pride in having shown an ability to build something. It might be as humble as a section of computer code that gets used. Or it might be as grand as a successful company, or two. The moochers have never built anything, and they are looking for other ways to assuage their egos and fight the zero-sum game of status. The moochers have found that social justice activism is a useful weapon for lowering the status of the industrialists.
Scott Alexander, Less Wrong, and the Intellectual Dark Web occupy a sort of Galt’s Gulch. They see the moochers as intellectually deficient. They are trying to uphold an old-fashioned value of scientific objectivity against the moochers’ assault of oppressor-oppressed framing.
UPDATE: Think of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan in this context. What is loose in the land is a religion that is animated by the thrill of identifying and persecuting heretics.
Taxation without representation.
We kick folks out of the economy because Fed taxes add cost to retail banking. The Antifas are confused, they really never voted for any of this stuff but it looks like they have to dedicate some 4-5% of income just to pay interest costs on it. They were not even born when we bailed out the Texas S&L fiasco. Their first real blunder was Obamacare, and at least that had balancing taxes, much to the chagrin of Dems.
Antifas are what we get when we promise the new economies of scale will be stable, and it is mostly not. Market size does not match scale and the loose agent sector grows as we increase the retail banking tax and shrink their future. It is truly unfair, taxation via the right to coin? Especially the central bankers lying and fake economic theory about inflating away those interest charges.
There are some distinctions to be made. First, yes, there is a potential that this is an Atlas Shrugged moment, but that makes several assumptions in favor of Ayn Rand that may not be warranted. The chief alternative is the ‘traditional values’ supporter.
‘Traditional values’ advocates favor the systems and groups of people who were proven to have been productive in the past, and lay credit at their feet for everything that was accomplished. Meanwhile, the ‘progressives’ lay the blame at their feet for everything that wasn’t accomplished, and for everything that seems unfair about the outcome. The libertarians believe that the credit should have gone to individuals who were shackled by the traditional community (but sometimes succeeded in spite of the frictions) and are being threatened/extorted or worse by the progressives. I think that someone once proposed three tribes in politics?
The industrialists need the workers. They can’t build railroads or skyscrapers by themselves from raw materials. Absent a society capable of executing on their visions, the visionaries are useless.
Do Ross Douthat’s ten thesis.
The main flaw in both this and Rand’s view was in never explaining how mobs of “intellectually deficient” moochers are so easily able to bully all these super competent people around, and grab power. There normally is a certain attractiveness to being able to explain things in coherent ways and accomplish things. There is something wrong with this narrative.
The thing that needs more discussion is the weakness of the “industrialists” in this drama, and maybe a bit less discussion of how scary the mobs are.
This one is easy, Tom. They are outnumbered.
Its not easy! They were outnumbered 50 years ago too. Why now?
No, Tom, they weren’t outnumbered 50 years ago.
I’m not sure what your reference is. Industrialists, elites, whatever you want to call those in charge or those leading actionable organizations, are ALWAYS heavily outnumbered by the needy.
I’d also point out that while the current social justice crowd certainly spends some time talking redistribution of resources, the main fear being expressed here is the impact on speech and ideas. They want to fundamentally remap power relationships in our society, not just get more for the public dole. Describing this as an attack of the “moochers” is a misreading of this situation.
Intellectually deficient isn’t the same as retarded.
Rand specifically calls out unlimited democracy as the problem. Enough people voting for being able to mooch results in people being increasingly able to mooch.
The other aspect is that as the mob grows, otherwise decent people start thinking it is reasonable, and become the self hating producers. Their guilt at effectively not being a moocher encourages them to both support the goals and policies of the moochers and condemn the producers who do not.
In the end it boils down to who is willing to stand up to the moochers, and so how many guns are pointing in each direction.
Really, all that is pretty clear in Rand’s work…
Galt’s Gulch required basically Star Trek technobabble magic to make it work.
In the real world, libertarians can’t even get Seasteading off the ground. Let alone cloaking devices, perfect lie detectors, or the rest.
It would be useful to understand how people manage to coordinate in order to gain and exercise power. After all, it’s not always a numbers game. If it were, the lords would not have ruled the serfs for so long.
Objectivism…doesn’t seem to be a way to do so. Of the few Objectivists I’ve known, it doesn’t even seem to be a good way to coordinate a family, let alone a movement. It’s telling that there are so few children in philosophical works including Rands, and yet that the next generation is largely what people are willing to fight and die for.
Rand told a fable. Any successful “moocher” movement in human history very quickly turned into an authoritarian klepto system. Any system that remained healthy found a way to re-center its social contract, not by force but by persuasion.
The “industrialists” are weak in social and political drama because they are focused on “industry”, not on “lobbying”, “rent-seeking”, or “outright theft”.
If you as “industrialists” just do your job, someone somewhere in government will find a way to demagogue by persecuting you. Microsoft learned that in 2000. Facebook is learning that today.
So “industrialists” end up focusing less on their business model, which after all is their comparative advantage and value add, and focusing more on lobbying to defend their business model from government action. Some “industrialists” find that they are actually pretty good at it and their business model changes to actively exploit government.
It seems these latter ones are the ones you admire since the other ones must be stupid? This is where I get lost.
In a competitive market, profit goes to zero. So if you want profits you need a monopoly or close to it. In the long run that means government, because nobody can remain a monopoly forever based solely on better business model. Hence, all Galts become Taggarts.
Hundreds of thousands of successful profitable enterprises beg to disagree.
In a competitive market, excess profit goes to zero. If there is no profit, no one does it, so there is a nonzero floor to the profit.
“excess profit goes to zero”
Sure.
You know who doesn’t have excess profit. Restaurants. As we all know, most fail in the first few years, and few last long term.
No excess profits = a pretty mediocre standard of living.
Hence why real world Randian Peter Thiel basically says competitive markets are for suckers.
If your a first mover and really talented in certain fields…you can maybe achieve monopoly or near monopoly power *for a time*. But never indefinitely. Perhaps not even in your working lifetime. Hence all these one time Galt’s go Taggart.
I can explain: The radical left has combined three things:
1) complete moral righteousness. They aren’t morally good people but they believe that they are intensely and quickly dismiss evidence that they are wrong.
2) an eagerness and willingness to seize and wield the power of institutions and government institutions in particular to advance their cause and damage their rivals.
3) a political coalition
Many liken today’s radical left to the Chinese Red Guard of the 1960s. I don’t think they are necessarily “intellectually deficient”. They are just fiercely convinced of their righteousness and eager to act on it.
The most successful entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily able to defend themselves from a Red Guard type attack.
The Red Guard were defeated not by arguments against them, but by the Red Army shooting them.
Realistically, can you imagine any other outcome?
The young belief this ideology more and more.
All competitive information and individuals will be silenced.
The voting demographics will become more and more filled with passive clients (minorities).
When they say they are on the “right side of history”, that is simply a mathematical fact in the sense of *power*.
So what is the pattern we should fear? Because moments like you describe either-
1. Very quickly give way to authoritarianism. Either a lefty wins, and becomes a dictator, or more often a righty plays the civilization/barbarism card and becomes a dictator.
2. A society calms down and corrects, like the US did after the sixties.
Take your pick.
What negates this logic to some extent, is that the time based services of healthcare providers who are well compensated, is also a secondary market which creates extensive demands on originating sources of wealth. But does that mean they are “moochers”?? Especially since so many “moochers” in society understandably seek access to their skills. Or, what if protectionism in the use of knowledge is actually a form of mooching?
“Silicon Valley types”, which, in the media’s reporting reduces down to mostly VCs and a few high profile executives are generally not at all jealous of the status of the legacy media. The attitude is generally more of “why does this person who hasn’t done anything substantial have such a large platform”?
The NYC media, for its part, doesn’t seem to understand why we don’t care that much about who they think is high-status vs low-status.
If they are upset with tech industrialists, why did my town have riots and looting at regular stores, restaurants and mom & pop shops?
Isn’t big tech woke, for the most part? Is it really the status of software engineers and tech entrepreneurs that have been lowered in society through this?
People are focusing in on all the social cancellation, which is indeed terrible. But that it going after the cape, not the matador.
People on the right have been calling progressivism a “political religion” for centuries and few would listen or believe it. But, as usual, just as the mainstream finally catches up to the nature of the challenge, the target has moved and devolved into something even more threatening and dangerous.
“Religion” was yesterday. True power worships only itself. Its only ritual is the production of it’s own degenerate form of pleasure.
The trouble is, heresy persecution, bad as it is, is the least of our problems. Decentralized enforcement by antagonistic mobs is a much bigger problem, but still not the main one.
Throughout history, infidels to the dominant faith have often been able to carve out a tolerable coexistence and modus vivendi, usually by being able to rely on polycentric approaches to law and community-based self-policing, in which it was known quite clearly what one ought to say or do to avoid rocking the boat unpinning the tolerant state of affairs.
Members of groups in the religious minority hewing to such practices were often permitted to rise to the very heights of prosperity, position, and status, gaining a regime’s favor and promise of protection and non-interference in matters of theology or education, on condition of their never stepping over the perfectly well-known lines.
But that’s our real trouble and huge problem.
No one can say where the lines are or will be in ten minutes, they change and escalate all the time, and the hammers seem to land in ways very much at odds with the publicly articulated values put out by the voluntary press secretaries desperately trying to spin the egregious abuses of the self-appointed inquisitors.
One can get by ok as a tamed heretic to a known thing, but not to an unknown thing. You can’t lead a blameless life if you don’t know from one day to the next what you’re going to be blamed for.
Worse, if the persecutions are *the point*, the thing that makes people feel the sadistic thrill of costless domination and punishment that means – in the way most fulfilling of core instincts – that one is higher status than one’s victims, then there *can be* no “religion”. It is not actually intellectually possible anymore. This is why Calvinball is not actually a game, because you cannot call something a game with justice if there are no stable rules and no way to win, because the other guy must *always lose* no matter what.
And upon realizing that it is both impossible and unnecessary to explain the game, people give up even trying, indeed, to the extent they still argue at all, it is only why they needn’t bother beyong the level of jargon gibberish mantras. We can literally watch this rapid slide happening in real time in front of our eyes when we occassionally raise them from our tear-soaked hands and dare to look.
It is one thing to try and redistribute wealth. (Old Left v 1.0) Another to redistribute positions throughout all the social hierarchies (New Left 2.0). Both of those can quite easily be intellectualized into doctrines of compelling secular religions with their attractive positive visions of The Good Society and associated constellations of apologetic rationalizations and justifications. And of course they have been.
But to the extent a Moscian political formula is mostly an elaborate cover story for the promise to deliver yet-unsatisfied wants to its clients, if it tries to redistribute social status more generally (Neo-Left 3.0), there is no actual way to do this but to allow those lower-status clients to feel the rush of being able to intimidate higher-status opponents, and to “justify” such monstrous behavior with some hand waving about the opponents being oppressors who are to blame for the sources of discontent of the clients, and who thus damn well deserve anything they having coming to them.
Despite all the intersectionality critical theory mumbo jumbo, there is no way to turn that into a “religion” any higher than the sanctification of envy and resentment and the excusal of indulging in all the ugliest lusts. There has been a whole century of people trying to explain why untempered liberalism contained within it the seed of its own demise, and now we finally get to witness the path of progress leading to regress.
As with any religion, the old progressive religion could advertise its positive vision through its artwork of propaganda (as in, “to propagate the faith”) which for two generations was the “The Smiling Multicultural Diversity Poster” manifested through various mediums. Hate eradicated, universal enligtenment to include enlightened approaches to all social challenges, people of every sort who are tolerant of each other’s differences and getting along in civil and harmonious coexistence, equal opportunity leading to equal dignity and a high floor for a standard of living for everyone, the state and its experts competently and rationally taking care of all the “Adulting” in life behind the scenes so people could share in the plenty and pursue self-actualization and fulfilment, etc. You know the drill.
Doesn’t it feel like that poster has been ripped down or papered over with new ones showing angry, brutal fists clenching rifles? The old poster was for self-consciously inviting and with a place for everyone, thus you might say, “inclusive”. The new poster is clearly only for those with the fists, and never those at the end of the barrel of the gun.
That’s why the current soft-criticism of cancel culture, “Oh well, you know, we always need some rules and norms, so there is always cancelling, and it’s just about who has power over whom,” is totally off-base. If the social dynamics of current political tensions are running on actual values and norms – some stable and identifyable set of lines not to cross – then that would be true. But that is not our situation. This is different. This is worse. *Much* worse.
Okay, maybe I should finally read Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976.
Definitely But, in a way, it’s even worse.
If everyone around is Han Chinese and the issue is about beliefs and behaviors, one can always renounce and covert, or lie and pay lip service, or signal superior fidelity. You may be penalized and publicly humiliated as a result of the privilege or class of your upbringing, but you are less likely to be singled out for things which you are literally powerless to remedy. Your past is an “immutable characteristic” too, but one you can at least try to repent of as you beg for mercy and forgiveness and commit to a different future.
But your blood is a different matter altogether. And Tom Wolfe’s final book was “Back to Blood” for a reason.
When that happens, peaceful disaggregation is maybe the least worst scenario. But there are worse, uglier scenarios; history is full of them.
Reading the linked article, this post, and Steve Sailer today,
https://www.unz.com/isteve/
the “religion” take on the dominant culture and Outgroup reaction seems to be a popular one but Sailer’s twist centered on race appears to come closest to the mark.
Three quarters of the Silicon Valley tech workforce are on H1B visas. I doubt that they are particularly invested in USA culture wars. The Silicon Valley oligarchs might be Randian in having Nee Zealand passports and remote bolt holes to escape the dystopia they are creating. And they are in power and reaping the benefits. Thiel is multiplying his fortunes with Palantir government contracts. Musk is the solar crony king milking tax subsidies for all that they are worth and pulling down big government contract money. Bezos’s Amazon (or “Alibaba-East” as I have heard it is calling CCP circles due to the global market splitting arrangement it has with Alibaba, similar press outlet mouthpieces, similar close ties to the CCP, and similar payola arrangements with think tanks and pundits) has the USPS doing delivery for it at a fraction of cost. Rand is turning in her grave at the notion that Bezos or any of the others is a Hank Rearden.
The religion aspect is interesting. In Judaism, I understand that in The Torah, Ezekiel speaks to punishing the son for the sins of the father:
“The word of Yhwh came to me: What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are blunted”? As I live, says the Lord Yhwh, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die.”
Roman Catholics have baptism for the forgiveness of sin as well as the sacrament of confession. Protestants look to God as “most loving,(t) gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin;(u) the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him;(w) and withal, most just and terrible in His judgments,(x) hating all sin,(y) and who will by no means clear the guilty.”
The new religion of our dominant culture rejects and condemns all such dogma and arrogates to its mullahs the power to condemn and punish those born in the sin of whiteness. The central organizing philosophical principle of all NYT subscribers and the like is that whites are bad, undeserving of mercy or forgiveness, and outside the protection of the law. If antifa, BLM, or other paramilitary terrorist groups affiliated with The Democratic Party want to look up FEC campaign contributions and burn down the homes and businesses of those who made the wrong choices, then that is perfectly acceptable because that is what Soros bought all those prosecutors and Attorneys General for anyway.
But I ramble. Read the Sailer.
Three quarters of the Silicon Valley tech workforce are on H1B visas.
Citation needed.
But I ramble. Read the Sailer.
What did you sound like before you read the Sailer?
1. Your citation: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens-make-up-nearly-three-quarters-of-silicon-valley-tech-workforce-report-says/
2. Before and after reading Sailer I sound like the same sentient, thoughtful, well-informed, critically analytic, free thinking advocate for rational virtue that I have always sounded like, thank you very much.
Foreign born does not meanH-1B. Got another?
I think Edgar wins this one Mike- if they are foreign born, they almost surely started out as H1Bs.
I just finished the article and… wow. My primary take away is “Never talk to the New Yorker, either.” The whole thing could be summed up as “If you have never said anything we might think you shouldn’t have, you have nothing to fear. Otherwise, you deserve what you get.”
What a deeply disappointing article.
I understand that there are extremists in the United States, in all areas of the political spectrum. That’s fine, and maybe that’s how it should be.
What I don’t understand is why US based organizations and institutions so easily cave-in to extremists.
1) They can not articulate why the extremist are wrong without using crime think.
2) There are not “institutions”. There are individuals part of organizations that want to use that organization to get what they want, and sometimes mobs help them do that or at a minimum they want to avoid being hurt by them.
One notable aspect: Bari Weiss, who is 36, described herself as part of an “older” group of “liberals” at the NYT. She was run out of town on a rail.
36? Older?
The NYT is being run the 20-something crowd?
I’m around the same age, and growing up I never was indoctrinated in Wokeism. I suppose I might has if I had a liberal arts major in some universities, but I didn’t and wasn’t exposed to this stuff.
But there were people that were exposed to this stuff, at least as far back as the 1990s when Politically Correct became a term.
Those people went on to educate the next generation. You say mostly mediocre people believe this stuff, but it’s an open joke that the Education degrees are all the bottom half of the college class.
So now 20 somethings have been taught Wokeism perhaps as early as Kindergarten by that first generation of acolytes, and to the extent they haven’t you can bet the next generation will.
There is a difference between someone who half learns this stuff as an adult and only half believes it vs someone that has it shoved down their throat from a young age. The LOGIC of Wokeism always demanded this nonsense, but since even its believers only half believed and it didn’t have the numbers necessary they always made lots of unprincipled exceptions to the religion.
There are a few possibilities. Occasionally it’s either fake resistance, “pushing on an open door”, or an insider consensus that it’s just not worth the PR risk.
But usually it’s the Internal Power Struggle. Indeed, the internal power struggle is so important, that usually the most obnoxious complaints and demands come from the inside, not the outside. That’s why the places one would expect to be the absolutely most woke institutions in our entire society don’t actually satisfy their insiders and instead produce the opposite effect as they are perpetually riven by this kind of acrimony in a welter of ceaseless accusations and mass hysterias.
Organizations are made of people in formal and informal hierarchies. Unless you are at the very bottom, there is always someone who is secretly gunning for your job and would be glad to take it and move up if the opportunity arose.
And this applies most of all to the leader at the very top. An organization as a whole can only be attached from the outside. But an individual leader can be stabbed in the front from outsiders, *and* stabbed in the back from insiders.
If the big boss resists a demand from the outside based on political maters which have become heavily moralized, this provides a perfect opportunity for insiders to use the outsider mob as allies to distinguish themselves and to *isolate* the big boss, and make it all personal.
The insider can signal that of course he agrees with the mob and is just as woke as them, and the problem is not the institution or organization at all which would gladly accede to their demands were if not for the stumbling block of old fuddy-duddy who is insufficiently woke.
The attack from the outside against in the institution is transformed by the insider back-stab into an attack against the big boss *as an individual* who is now an identifiable target who holding up all the progress. And now much easier to intimidate and ruin and cancel. Once this happens, the magic spell of a leader’s legitimacy is broken and it’s just a matter of time.
Every leader of every major organization is now very, *very* aware of this problem. They’ve seen other, more naive or less savvy leaders, get the axe and have their careers destroyed about it. And they can tell themselves – with perfect accuracy – that if they tried to fight the mob and end up getting replaced that their backstabbing successor will just give in to them anyway, so the act would be one of utterly futile career suicide.
So there’s just nothing else to do but find a way to give in that minimizes both the risk of internal exploitation of the situation into betrayal and insurrection, as well as the damage and cost to the institution’s interests.
That’s why they all give in all the time, and is part of the dynamic that keeps us sliding down the slippery slope, because the answer is the same every time. They want another inch, they’ll get another inch, and when they know they can do it again, they will.
It gets worse. Because every company is a juicy steak, and no one can afford to make themselves too conspicuously far away from the consensus. That is a tall nail that is going to get hammered. So, just as you don’t have to outrun the bear, just not be the slowest guy the bear is chasing, likewise every organization has an incentive to keep caving in to never be the least woke guy around, who feels hot, stinking bear breath blowing down his collar.
This is a kind of political market failure, an inability to coordinate leading to a race to the bottom and tragedy of the commons. The way you solve a political market failure is with an even more powerful political actor (the state, duh) making these moves too costly to consider. That gives all the big bosses the ability to thwart backstabbing insiders by signalling wokeness, but also the alibi they need to not give in, “Gee fellas, I’d love to, but sorry, my hands are tied!” Now the mob has to take on the state, and that’s a whole nuther ball of wax.
What grounds are there for hope that “the state” is going to rescue us from this spiral of insanity? The same dynamic you describe — has overwhelmed the Democratic Party, which is, after all, the majority party in the US and is likely to take over the federal government next year. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ main strategy in the face of the erosion of their base is to signal to their voters and donors among insecure, woke-adjacent corporate managers and suburbanites that they “get it.” As for Trump . . . need I say more?
Remember, as someone else said in another thread,
“I believe Caplan is being intellectually dishonest in praising Singapore along immigration and identity lines. They are ultra-nationalist, strengthening their preferred ethnic, racial, linguistic identity with the power of the state. It’s not white identity, but it’s that same mindset.”
If you look at Singapore elections, and PAP stays in power because the dominant Han vote for it overwhelmingly, and the two other ethnicities vote for their own parties. The PAP makes sure that the Han remain the dominant ethnicity through immigration policy, and thus they hold power.
It’s not very libertarian, but it’s very realistic. LKY stated that in multi-ethnic societies people for for their ethnicity rather then the greater good, and thus the only way to get good governance is for a dominate majority ethnicity to impose it on the rest whether they like it or not.
The PAP indeed uses libertarian knowledge in the crafting of their public policy, to the benefit of the Singaporean people. But they aren’t libertarian dogmatists. They borrow what makes sense and throw away the nonsense, like open borders.
My own evaluation of the USA case is that it’s already too late. The demographic realities have a live of their own at this point. If this was 1990s and we elected the Paleo’s then maybe things would be different.
I agree, it’s already too late, but, as recent events show, it would be too late even apart from racial/ethnic (as opposed to generational) demographic factors. Even if we stopped all immigration, and somehow got rid of the “undocumented” population (not happening, but this is a hypothetical), such a large minority of the white majority (and a majority of the professional/managerial class and all of the institutions they run) has either been brainwashed by this “anti-racist”/racist ideology, or intimidated into meek acceptance of it, that there is no way of stopping this train. Even if the Republicans somehow avoid a total wipe-out this November. The same dynamic is playing out in every Western European and Anglosphere country. It really does seem that Western Civilization is committing suicide.
Indoctrination of the young, ethnic shifts, and delayed/lower family formation are all part of the problem.
The PAP couldn’t maintain power if The Han all turned on each other either. It helps that the Han are much more of a real people than Whites (I think the fact that China was ruled by a non-Han ethnic group when the West encountered it played a roll in its being unable to resist).
Of course many people can see the obvious mathematical direction of things and are willing to get out ahead of it by betraying their own people.
I think the 60s radicals failed because the Silent Majority of family oriented white middle class turned against them. Liberals would have loved McGovern but he couldn’t win in a society like that. So they simply created one where he could win.
I don’t think demographic alone as enough (if they keep indoctrinating our young, they won’t be “our young”). But one can’t help but look at things like this and think it would help.
https://mk0brilliantmaptxoqs.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/if-only-x-voted.jpg
The American state, with its current version of democracy and personnel structure, is indeed neither willing nor able to play this role. Only the federal courts maintain some capacity and interest in doing this, and that’s because the judiciary is the most dictatorial branch of government. But they are mostly doing it in the wrong direction.
Indeed, it is a well-known strategy to invite a quasi-bogus lawsuit and throw the fight on purpose in an attempt to produce an order which provides precisely the kind of “Sorry, I’d love to, but my hands are tied by the court order!” alibi.
This is even better than a normal tied-hands alibi, because you can corroborate your claimed but suspect preferences with the proof of actual actions and behaviors, in that you went to some effort and cost to try to *fight* for the right to do something, and only didn’t do it because your efforts were defeated by somebody else too powerful to resist.
A particularly famous and important case which is kind of a high-water mark for this kind of nonsense was the Kansas City schools desegregation case of Missouri v. Jenkins, in the which the district was sued as the defendant, and then asked to take the side of the plaintiffs against *itself*, which was allowed! (Dunn’s “Complex Justice” is the best telling of the crazy tale, and if you want an example of a judicial dictator, here’s one who went so far as to impose his own taxes. Spoiler alert: it all ends up in total, wasteful, miserable failure on all fronts. I actually met that judge once a few years before he died, and you know what he was? Proud!)
This is the same thing that used to happen all the time to greater and greater levels of abuse and egregiousness in countless “consent decrees” between local jurisdictions and federal agencies, usually the Department of Justice. Some mayor wants to do something controversial, but it’s too politically risky, so he asks his friends in the administration to have DOJ “investigate” his city and initiate a prosecution for civil rights violations, and then they “negotiate a settlement” that magically always “compels” the mayor to do what he wanted to do in the first place, and then he tells his voters, “Look at that horrible DOJ forcing this on us! This is just terrible, but alas, we can’t fight it and get a better result, so my hands are tied.”
Mysteriously, for all the criticism of plea bargains and coercive pressure to get criminals to plead guilty, those advocates never, ever use the same logic to argue against the consent decree settlement practice, even though these cases are either just as coercive or completely fake! How strange!
This got so bad that when he was AG, Sessions tried to terminate and release several cities from their decrees, and the cities showed their hands by petitioning the judges to keep them under restrictions! As one of his last acts before getting #YourFired, he signed a principles and procedures memo that attempted to reign in the practice.
But the point is you can see the importance and utility of some entity being able to stop the tragedy of the commons and provide top cover and the alibi every leader needs to credibly claim they *can’t* give in. This is one of the core defenses of both the necessity and proper use of secure dictatorial authority in political theory.
If leaders actually cannot give in, not only does no one even try to “demand” it, it doesn’t even occur to them to be bothered about it in the first place.
People get the psychological cause-and-effect reversed, because this is how our own brains trick ourselves into thinking about how we arrive at our desires and emotions.
It’s the same with the Patellar reflex. Reflexes must be as fast as possible and there’s not enough time to send a message all the way from the knee to the brain, calculate a response, send it back, and then execute. So instead, the signal from the knee goes to one of your reflex-specific mini-brains in the lower ganglions of the spinal cord – which are kind of like RISC chips optimized to do this one thing really fast – and then head right back.
It’s only after the fact that the signals of these events get to the brain and that an individual shows any signs of awareness of it having happened. When you ask someone for their subjective beliefs about what happened, they will often say, “I felt the strike, and then reacted.” But actually, they reacted, and “felt” it later, and their brain put together the story in reverse.
This same reversal is the key to understand what actually happens in instances of outrage and anger and offense leading to confrontational behaviors. Below the level of conscious awareness, the brain picks up environmental cues and social signals and calculates than an opportunity for a socially-excused status move has arisen. It is *then* that the brain generates the necessary rationalization and turns on the appropriate emotional modules to create the intense feelings needed to signal intransigent determination and ensure sufficient follow-through to capitalize on the opportunity.
People only *feel* that they reacting “because” of some kind of objective amount of outrageousness in the very nature of some circumstance or event. But we know that’s not true because these feelings are wildly inconsistent even among nearly identical instances and cases. The same incident can provoke the most intense emotions or a completely blase and indifferent attitude, not depending on the details of the event itself, but on whether or not there such emotions are useful and likely to be effective in pursuing a goal which has suddenly become possible in the current social moment.
When the alpha gorilla is young, healthy, and strong, the others not only don’t try to take him on, they don’t even feel the urge, and are mostly “content” in their subordinate roles. We imagine barely suppressed seething in bitter resentment, but that’s our brains lying to us again, not how it actually works. When alpha-G gets older and weaker, it is only then that they suddenly get hot tempers, angry, violent, and start challenging him to confrontations.
If you aim at the king, you best not miss, and if you aren’t going to miss, you’ll aim at the king. Eventually the next strongest guy is strong enough to murder the top dog, is filled by this psychological mechanism with maximum blood-lust, and then he does it. And he will be murdered in turn, when his time comes around. Love’s not Creation’s final law, cause Nature’s red in tooth and claw.
The point is, when the opportunity is not there, neither are the negative emotions! The “peaceful content” is *real*, even when the objective circumstances and situation is exactly the same.
And *this* is the critically important social technology that states and similar institutions with power to do so use to calm the turbulent seas of potentially latent social tensions which are always only ever dormant or parturient. It is done in recognition that a particular Social Failure Mode is the result of a risky routine embedded into the firmware of every human brain. This routine is a feature-bug combo. You can’t afford to get rid of the feature, so there is no choice but to try to avoid those situations that execute the bug.
Good governance means that power is used, judiciously but firmly, to channel the natural competitive and ambitious urges of its subjects in pro-social directions, because otherwise those urges will spill over into anti-social directions.
For material competition, the analogy is to capitalism. If people want money, the state insists they must get it by providing goods and services to willing customers in an open and lawful marketplace. They are not allowed to steal the money, or defraud people, or sabotage their competitors. If there is a dispute, they are not allowed to poison their opponent, but instead must submit to a peaceful resolution by a neutral and disinterested arbitrator who (in theory) will follow rational procedures and apply predictable rules of decision. To win they game they must innovate and provide better value, activities which are pro-social because everyone benefits on average from the increase in social welfare.
When all the antisocial channels of material competition are blocked, this is exactly what entrepreneurs and companies do and how they focus their efforts and resources.
But human competitive urges are not at all limited to those involving material or commercial matters. Indeed, the material urge itself is merely a subordinate manifestation of the one true fundamental urge for social status. Parsimonious nature figured out a long time ago that it could organize and adaptively-optimize social dynamics using only one neat trick and mechanism, and only recently have we discovered the mathematical models which demonstrate its theoretical sufficiency in performing this function.
But just as in commercial competition, this status competition also always threatens to spill over into antisocial directions, the blocking off of which is the proper role of state power, at least, if you would like to live in a harmonious, pleasant, functional society.
The major way the state does this is to claim and enforce a monopoly on the ability to intimidate people and push them around, and then also to make the structure of ways to avoid getting pushed around predictable and stable enough for people to understand their left and right limits for behavior, now and in the future, so they can act and plan, instead of withdrawing from productive social interactions in terrified uncertainty about the possible consequences.
The question of how to get the state to consistently do this job well while not doing a lot of other terrible things modern states are tempted to do is important and deep but impossible to answer in brief. But that it should be performing the above function and is not presently doing so is clear enough to all perceptive and sane observers. A zoo without cages will shortly be empty of prey. And most animals are prey.
But a related question is whether a political ideology would even *allow* the state to perform this function as a legitimate government activity. If it would not, and it is the software on which the governance hardware is running, then it’s only a matter of time before it overclocks the chips into molten lumps.
In two excellent posts today, Ann Althouse also examines the religious nature of the dominant ideology:
“It’s generally bad etiquette to go beyond saying your religion is a source of joy and onto the topic of why someone else’s religion is dark and dreary and only makes life worse. But I’m trying to talk about religion substitutes, notably this “White Fragility” cult practice, which is snowballing in our country and on the verge of becoming a compulsory state religion..”
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-is-science-behind-white-fragility.html#more