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Javier E

The Party Still Decides - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-party-still-decides.html

demagogue party nomination gop 2016 culture responsibility

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As Donald Trump attempts to clamber to the Republican nomination over a still-divided opposition, there will be a lot of talk about how all these rules and quirks and complexities are just a way for insiders to steal the nomination away from him, in a kind of establishment coup against his otherwise inevitable victory.
  • We can expect to hear this case from Trump’s growing host of thralls and acolytes. (Ben Carson, come on down!) But we will also hear it from the officially neutral press, where there will be much brow-furrowed concern over the perils of party resistance to Trump’s progress, the “bad optics” of denying him the nomination if he arrives at the convention with the most delegates, the backlash sure to come if his uprising is somehow, well, trumped by the party apparatus.
  • Americans speak and think in the language of democracy, and so these arguments will find an audience,
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  • But they cut against the deeper wisdom of the American political tradition. The less-than-democratic side of party nominations is a virtue of our system, not a flaw, and it has often been a necessary check on the passions
  • That check has weakened with the decline of machines, bosses and smoke-filled rooms. But in many ways it remains very much in force — confronting would-be demagogues with complicated ballot requirements, insisting that a potential Coriolanus or a Sulla count delegates in Guam and South Dakota, asking men who aspire to awesome power to submit to the veto of state chairmen and local newspapers, the town meeting and the caucus hall.
  • Goldwater and McGovern were both men of principle and experience and civic virtue, leading factions that had not yet come to full maturity. This made them political losers; it did not make them demagogues.
  • Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He’s an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren’t Goldwater or McGovern; they’re figures like George Wallace and Huey Long, with a side of the fictional Buzz Windrip from Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.” No modern political party has nominated a candidate like this; no serious political party ever should.
  • Denying him the nomination would indeed be an ugly exercise, one that would weaken or crush the party’s general election chances, and leave the G.O.P. with a long hard climb back up to unity and health.
  • But if that exercise is painful, it’s also the correct path to choose. A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own. And there is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party.
  • What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold. Because he’s loud and rich and famous, because he’s run his campaign like a reality TV show, because he’s horribly compelling and, yes, sometimes even right, Trump has come this far without many endorsements or institutional support, without much in the way of a normal organization
  • So in Cleveland this summer, the men and women of the Republican Party may face a straightforward choice: Betray the large minority of Republicans who cast their votes for Trump, or betray their obligations to their country.For a party proud of its patriotism, the choice should not be hard.
  • Ross, you got to the right conclusion, but you still can't bring yourself to connect all the dots. The disease is not Donald Trump. He's merely a symptom, albeit a malignant one. Rather, it is the party itself (and its enablers) that is sick unto death. Why not come clean and admit that you set sail on a pirate ship and now find yourself lost at sea?
  • Ross, you act as though Trump threatens to become the GOP's first "man unfit for office". In fact, the House and Senate are full of them.Please feel free to defend the "fitness" of Tom Cotton, Louis Gohmert, Jim Inhofe, Trey Gowdy and countless others. This is what your party has become. It's far, far worse than just Trump.
  • Oh, "the passions that mass democracy constantly threatens to unleash." As if Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Dick Armey -- in the service of Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and the Kochs et al. -- hadn't spent the last 40 years whipping up nasty passions and unleashing the beast. Well, now it's got you.
  • if you really want to go down an anti-democratic path to wrest the power from the people, be careful where that path takes you. You may be in for some blowback even worse than the blowback you're seeing now, in the form of Trump, from the right wing's years of fomenting ethnic animosity and pitting the working man against himself. Be careful about removing the last fig leaf of democracy. I can think of a place where a form of patriotic, faith-based, big-nation, orderly "democracy" has been perfected. That place is Vladimir Putin's Russia.
  • The other three Republican candidates stood there on that stage after Trump was reviled as a fraud and a con-man and repeated their pledge that they would support him if he won the nomination.Patriotism indeed!!
  • Ross Douthat's eloquent stop-Trump plea to what's left of the Republican party deserves to be taken seriously, not jeered at. Let's hope he's listened to, especially on the right.
  • So Mr. Douthat, your only answer to the candidacy of DT is for your Party to commit ritual suicide.But it is probably too late. to do the honorable thing. Your candidates and other Party leaders have committed to supporting him if he gains the nomination. and how can you deny the monster you have created. His lust for power is no different than that of Ted Cruz or Carl Rove who lords it over anyone who steps out of line.
  • An honest appraisal.Next week, maybe you could do an honest assessment of how the Republican Party strayed so far from its agenda.Those of us on the Left already know the answer to that question.You claim to be of the Party and the Faith that finds redemptive value in acknowledging personal transgressions. We look forward to Part Two.
  • my bet is, and its as good as anybody's for now, is that if elected (after the laughing and hand-wringing was over) is he'd cut deals on taxes on 1%, create jobs, global warming, start multiple trade wars and stop immigration of muslims. And I'm OK w/that.
  • Ross,We are a minority of commenters, but many applaud you. We have all made mistakes and should reflect upon them, but what is important now is for Americans to band together in order to stop a threat to the life of our Republic.
  • "That toothpaste is never going back in the tube."(I screenshot the exchange for my FB and Twitter page.)Even now, Chris Matthews, who interrupts everyone; didn't interrupt Trump.More disturbing? Reporters ignore Trump grading questions! If Trump doesn't like a question he attacks. Reporters respond by turing into slack-jawed statutes.But when Trump decides to answer, it's never with plausible detailsHard follow ups? Never happen.So make no mistake; the reason for the monster is media.The Republican Party is secondary.We need a dozens of Rachel Maddows.God help us.
  • Lets first put the blame where it belongs, considering Trump is a wholly, media-created monster. For six months all media invested not one Moment, digging in and reporting on Trump's background. For six months all media didn't earn their salaries as the political show pundits. each and every one, sat around desks saying,"Well, Trump *is* entertaining," and "I can't believe he gets away with that" as media continued allowing Trump to ignore questions. CBS's Les Moonves is on the record saying,"Trump may not be good for the country, but's he's very good for TV."Next, Joe Scarborough entered with his daily slobber over Trump's greatness; becoming an unofficial advisor, as MSNBC and NBC executives continued looking the other way. When I asked Chuck Todd about any chance of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, (for the good of the country) would bring back the Fairness Doctrine, Chuck said,
  • Block him and the Party is torn apart. Too bad that when the Democrats should be nominating their strongest candidate they are left with a flawed "congenital liar" and a fringe leftist. If they can only get someone like Biden to run, they'll take back the Senate, and maybe even the House. Otherwise, they're taking a hell of a chance
Javier E

Trump is the GOP's Frankenstein monster. Now he's strong enough to destroy the party. -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html

gop frankenstein politics US demagogues populism paranoid party

shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.
  • Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers
  • Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified.
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  • Thus Obama is not only wrong but also anti-American, un-American, non-American, and his policies — though barely distinguishable from those of previous liberal Democrats such as Michael Dukakis or Mario Cuomo — are somehow representative of something subversive.
  • We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the Revolution.
  • Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power.
  • So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
  • Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.
  • Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker
  • Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements; the persistent call for nullification of Supreme Court decisions; the insistence that compromise was betrayal; the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition — that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at?
Javier E

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Jordan B. Peterson) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/3fb0b43be56b260e2a28c47e9e49819f

philosophy religion mythology social science history lifelong learning

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?
  • “I’ve got some good news…and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”
  • Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”
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  • the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
  • And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way.
  • Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.
  • Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops, had been a Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he did say damn and bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone listened, with fascination on their faces, because he was in fact addressing questions of concern to everyone at the table.
  • unlike many academics who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or corrected him he really seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind of folksy way, “Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked something, laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for him, a dialogic process.
  • for an egghead Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with applications to everyday life: business management, how to make furniture (he made much of his own), designing a simple house, making a room beautiful (now an internet meme) or in another, specific case related to education, creating an online writing project that kept minority students from dropping out of school by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on themselves,
  • These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.
  • I was drawn to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a great books education, and who not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance. But he also did illuminating statistical research on personality and temperament, and had studied neuroscience. Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was also an outlier in being the only member of the research-oriented Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.
  • Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago, shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives, must face something we do not understand.
  • The brilliance of the book is in his demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.
  • this is why many of the rules in this book, being based on Maps of Meaning, have an element of universality to them.
  • We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?
  • And he felt he had to understand the ideologies that drove totalitarian regimes to a variant of that same behaviour: killing their own citizens.
  • Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
  • Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
  • Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
  • To understand ideology, Jordan read extensively about not only the Soviet gulag, but also the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. I had never before met a person, born Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened in Europe to the Jews, and who had worked so hard to understand how it could have occurred.
  • I saw what now millions have seen online: a brilliant, often dazzling public speaker who was at his best riffing like a jazz artist; at times he resembled an ardent Prairie preacher (not in evangelizing, but in his passion, in his ability to tell stories that convey the life-stakes that go with believing or disbelieving various ideas). Then he’d just as easily switch to do a breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies. He was a master at helping students become more reflective, and take themselves and their futures seriously. He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written. He gave vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-revealing, even of his own vulnerabilities, and made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious stories.
  • Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering.
  • chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
  • focused on triumphant heroes. In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely discussed in a psychology class or textbook.
  • Jordan
  • views of his first YouTube statements quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But people have kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need. And that is because alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.
  • the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.
  • morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical…
  • The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a…
  • So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and…
  • for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can…
  • That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an…
  • And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually…
  • professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “…
  • They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears…
  • The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was…
  • Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something…
  • By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no…
  • Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called…
  • Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are…
  • But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral compass,…
  • So, right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies…
  • Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself
  • so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with. They sign up for a humanities course, to study the greatest books ever written. But they’re not assigned the books; instead they are given…
  • (But the idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay…
  • For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.
  • Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and values (…
  • it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.
  • given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly deceives the one who wears it.
  • Far better to integrate the best of what we are now learning with the books human beings saw fit to preserve over millennia, and with the stories that have survived, against all odds, time’s tendency to obliterate.
  • these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.
  • Jordan’s message that each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.
  • if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.
  • And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.
  • Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes, Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs.
  • Freud never argued (as do some who want all culture to become one huge group therapy session) that one can live one’s entire life without ever making judgments, or without morality. In fact, his point in Civilization and Its Discontents is that civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.”1 In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.
  • I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act.
  • I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come
  • to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.
  • Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine.
  • Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.
  • As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction,
  • Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
  • For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that’s much better than happiness.
  • trying to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.
  • People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.
  • Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.
  • It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone
  • There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued.
  • We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
  • Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.*2 We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.
  • So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places:
  • loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.
  • In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
  • While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the twentieth century.
  • I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual.
  • It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
  • How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world.
  • We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.
  • the alternative—the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless
  • individual—is clearly worse.
  • a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.
  • We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.
  • I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.
  • RULE 1   STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK
  • Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply, territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost.
  • It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent11—and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.
  • This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal.
  • Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top.
  • The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.
  • dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.
  • evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation. Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time. That theory, as stated, appears to account for the continual alteration of life-forms over the eons.
  • But there’s an additional question lurking under the surface: what exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? What exactly is “the environment” to which animals adapt?
  • Nature “selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is “fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.
  • But nature, the selecting agent, is not a static selector—not in any simple sense.
  • As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit one that is deadly.
  • Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly (music
  • It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest.
  • It is also a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically.
  • Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague.
  • It is because of the existence of such things, of course, that we attempt to modify our surroundings, protecting our children, building cities and transportation systems and growing food and generating power.
  • this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.
  • It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years.
  • The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.
  • We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.
  • The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.17 It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.
  • The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources.
  • It will leave you far more likely to live, or die, carelessly, for a rare opportunity at pleasure, when it manifests itself. The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.21
  • If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive
  • You can delay gratification, without forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen.
  • Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body, with its various parts,
  • needs
  • to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
  • It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day?
  • The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars,
  • I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.
  • Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy.
  • There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.
  • If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge.
  • With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves. If you can bite, you generally don’t have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.
  • Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of
  • individuals who are genuinely malevolent.27
  • I have had clients who were terrified into literally years of daily hysterical convulsions by the sheer look of malevolence on their attackers’ faces. Such individuals typically come from hyper-sheltered families, where nothing
  • terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland wonderful (or else).
  • When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise,
  • There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
  • even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school28—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number.
  • the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.
  • Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space.
  • If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression.29
  • To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.
  • It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
  • So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
  • Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.
  • RULE 2   TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING
  • People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That
  • It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves?
  • To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel).
  • those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.
  • Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person.
  • subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real—ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.
  • In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality.
  • The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters
  • the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.
  • Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time,
  • It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
  • Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.
  • Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.
  • Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.
  • But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.
  • In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we
  • understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.
  • When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make, and the same place you visit, when the company you work for starts to fail and your job is placed in doubt.
  • Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand.
  • Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.
  • Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances.
  • Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.32 After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.
  • Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice.
  • Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,34 living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent.
  • This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.
  • The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have been…
  • the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are…
  • Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were…
  • From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A…
  • as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective…
  • “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with…
  • when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere…
  • Our most…
  • category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and…
  • Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary…
  • Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.
  • In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road.
  • Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.
  • Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.40
  • Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”
  • Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect.
  • And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act.
  • The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
  • We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.
  • To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.
  • Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both.
  • you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
  • The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm.
  • The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake.
  • We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls.
  • The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within.
  • I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no
  • business being there.”50
  • Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.
  • What does it mean to know yourself naked
  • Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what they first saw was themselves.
  • In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God.
  • Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.
  • He tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s merely descriptive.
  • women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.
  • then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
  • Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.
  • so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself?
  • Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?
  • We know how we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited. We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we understand only too well. We can torture them—literally—slowly, artfully and terribly. That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the knowledge of Good and Evil into the world.
  • Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.
  • with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin.
  • Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?
  • The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.
  • The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned.
  • Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters.
  • here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil.
  • The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean?
  • And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.
  • Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted
  • We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
  • If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures.
  • If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for.
  • We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.
  • Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent, impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it.
  • It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable.
  • But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill.
  • Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude, betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-conscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of others.
  • To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves.
  • I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.”
  • The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions.
  • If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs.
  • there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else.
  • you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others.
  • metaphorically speaking, there is also this: you have a spark of the divine in you, which belongs not to you, but to God. We are, after all—according to Genesis—made in His image.
  • We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.
  • In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running.
  • It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal, everyday people accomplish
  • You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.
  • To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not “what would make you happy.”
  • You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself?
  • You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.
  • You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
  • Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your
  • own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that.
  • You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence.
  • That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.
  • RULE 3   MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU
  • It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it’s not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and Air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us tried to organize. Doing anything wasn’t cool.
  • When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new, better ruts, with people aiming at better things. I thought this was just a natural development. I thought that every person who moved would have—and want—the same phoenix-like experience.
  • What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or, worse, perhaps, unwilling) to move or to change their friendships and improve the circumstances of their lives? Was it inevitable—a consequence of their own limitations, nascent illnesses and traumas of the past?
  • Why did he—like his cousin, like my other friends—continually choose people who, and places that, were not good for him?
  • perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past
  • People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.
  • It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly…unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?
  • People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone.
  • it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper. The distinction is difficult even for the person who is wanting and needing and possibly exploiting.
  • When it’s not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.
  • But Christ himself, you might object, befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes. How dare I cast aspersions on the motives of those who are trying to help? But Christ was the archetypal perfect man. And you’re you.
  • How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?
  • The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
  • maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace. Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.
  • Or maybe you have no plan, genuine or otherwise, to rescue anybody. You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier.
  • You know it. Your friends know it. You’re all bound by an implicit contract—one aimed at nihilism, and failure, and suffering of the stupidest sort.
  • Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable.
  • Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well).
  • It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation.
  • failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal and deception require no explanation. It’s not the existence of vice, or the indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy.
  • Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today,
  • Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.
  • I am not saying that there is no hope of redemption. But it is much harder to extract someone
  • from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch. And some chasms are very deep. And there’s not much left of the body at the bottom.
  • Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The
  • none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.
  • Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?
  • You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you.
  • It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.”
  • Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person.
  • RULE 4   COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY
  • IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor.
  • Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.
  • No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
  • We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything.
  • People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition.
  • It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health.69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined:
  • Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening.
  • There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
  • Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action.
  • Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse. To do anything at all is therefore to play a game with a defined and valued end, which can always be reached more or less efficiently and elegantly.
  • We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: “success” or “failure.” You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing.
  • There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.
  • there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games—
  • if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. I
  • and athletic pursuits. You might consider judging your success across all the games you play.
  • When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary.
  • As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically speaking, this means we must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual Being.
  • We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning.
  • What is it that you actually love? What is it that you genuinely want? Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself. What
  • Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life.
  • Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up.
  • Be cautious when you’re comparing yourself to others. You’re a singular being, once you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise.
  • Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in a unique interplay with the other specifics of your life.
  • We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to specify a target, track it, and throw at it.
  • We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.
  • The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be.
  • The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.
  • Called upon properly, the internal critic will suggest something to set in order, which you could set in order, which you would set in order—voluntarily, without resentment, even with pleasure.
  • “Excuse me,” you might say to yourself, without irony or sarcasm. “I’m trying to reduce some of the unnecessary suffering around here. I could use some help.” Keep the derision at bay. “I’m wondering if there is anything that you would be willing to do? I’d be very grateful for your service.” Ask honestly and with humility. That’s no simple matter.
Javier E

The Truth About Torture, Revisited « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...-truth-about-torture-revisited

torture debate civlization sadism report senate opinion survey politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • What we once instinctively regarded with moral horror has, over the years, become something most Americans are comfortable with. This is what torture does. In the words of Charles Krauthammer, it degrades and morally corrupts those who practice it. And so it has:
  • Notice that Krauthammer’s maximal position in 2005 is now dead last in public opinion: his view that torture should be used extremely rarely commands less than 20 percent support and is beaten by those Americans who now believe that torture should be employed often. Yes: often
  • If torture is a monstrous thing, if it corrupts all who do it, as Krauthammer believes, what incalculable damage has been done by the US torturing innocents, in one case to death? Where was there any remorse – yes, remorse – expressed by the CIA yesterday for this compounding of a crime and a mistake?
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  • this, of course, is not an accident. When a former president and vice-president openly back torture, and when the CIA has been engaging in a massive p.r. campaign to argue – against what we now know are incontrovertible facts from the CIA’s own records – that it saved thousands of lives, it will affect public opinion. There are always atavist and repellent sentiments in war time. The difference now is that a huge section of the elite endorses them.
  • They had a pecuniary interest in the criminal enterprise. And they were making things up as they went along:
  • We now know that the CIA contracted out the torture to two individuals without “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.” They had never interrogated anyone – yet they got a $181 million contract to run the program. They were sadists:
  • Why aren’t the defenders of torture horrified by this amateurism? Where are the Republican voices of outrage that a serious torture program was handed out to amateur contractors who had no idea what they were doing and no moral compass at all?
  • CIA sources were lying. KSM was waterboarded 183 times over a matter of weeks. And the waterboarding was not just 2 1/2 minutes of panic. It was full-fledged, endless, soul-breaking, body-destroying torture of a kind practiced in the past by totalitarian or authoritarian police states:
  • What this report proves – not asserts, but proves – is that the torture the US inflicted on prisoners was of an uncontrolled, nightmarish quality whose impact was so great that even the junior grunts on the night beat at Abu Ghraib knew what they were supposed to do.
  • In a civilized society, there really would be no debate over this. And before 9/11, there wasn’t. Ever since, this country has slid and then fallen out of the civilized world and out of the core American traditions of humanity and legal warfare. Krauthammer can be seen as emblematic of that slide – someone whose early abhorrence at torture and defense of it only in its mildest and rarest forms has slowly succumbed to a full-fledged defense of a program that violated every rule he said should be in place to protect us from the abyss. This is not surprising. When you start to torture, the sheer evil of what you are doing requires that you believe ever more in its value. You can never admit error, because it would mean you have committed crimes against humanity without even the defense of acquiring any useful intelligence. You are revealed as monsters – and you cannot accept that of yourself or of those you know. And so you insist – with ever-rising certainty – that the torture worked – even though that’s irrelevant as a matter of morality and of law, and even though your own internal documents prove that it didn’t.
  • And so you become the monster you were supposed to be fighting. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Javier E

Jordan Peele Is the New Master of Suspense - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...master-of-suspense-11551708118

comedy suspense race exploitation culture movies

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Peele draws a straight line from his past, conducting laughs, to his present, conducting dread: “People who have done live comedy and who have written comedy develop a real sense of how an audience is going to react. It’s a skill that continues to sharpen, and in my directing career, it’s left me obsessed with riding the audience like a wave.”
  • “I do like to give the audience enough to figure it out, if they were to watch the movie enough, but I feel similarly to David Lynch in that I don’t think the audience needs to know everything. The key for me, as a director, is that I need to know everything, because the audience can sense it if I don’t. The beauty of Lynch’s work is that you can leave fulfilled and, at the same time, clueless as to what it was about.”
  • Peele wants social critiques to intertwine with his scares. “When you look at the great horror directors—George Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Alfred Hitchcock—they’re all talking about something without talking about it,
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  • Peele repeatedly explained how the notion of a post-racial America, which circulated around the 2008 election, struck him as part of a destructive national mind-set of denial. “The thing I didn’t feel we were talking about in any substantive manner was race. With this one, I asked myself, ‘What are we not ready to talk about now?’ And the answer for me was, ‘What is my part in this mess?’
  • “We’re living in a messy time,” he continues. “A dark time. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but what I don’t see happening enough is people looking at their own part in this dark turn. It’s so much easier to blame the other. It connects to something in human nature, and to a duality in the history and present of this country as well: this fear of the outsider. This movie was a way to say, What if the intruder is us? Maybe the monster has our face, and we’re so obsessed with some unrecognizable monster that we’ve been blinded to the real one.”
  • By the time he dropped out of Sarah Lawrence he’d become hyperliterate in horror and, simultaneously, obsessed with improv comedy. In both idioms, he has addressed complex questions about race, such as what it means to be authentically black—a question with particular resonance to a kid whose own dad once asked him why he “talked white.”
  • in Us. Rather than another meditation on race, Peele says, he wanted to explore questions of economic privilege, training his lens on an upper-middle-class American family that happens to be black.
  • “There’s this idea that we deserve our privilege,” Peele says, “but when someone enjoys privilege, there almost has to be someone suffering so you can have that. Which means it’s not deserved. It’s violent. In this country we shield ourselves from the people who make our shoes. The people who have to work three jobs. The people we’ve murdered to build over. The wars that have happened so that we can have what we have. If we really acknowledge our place in the world, we have to acknowledge the atrocities, even if we’re not active members in them.”
  • I observe that Peele has just paraphrased Marx’s theories of alienation in describing a potential Hollywood blockbuster, and he doesn’t miss a beat: “The Tethered are wearing red.”
  • “I can watch Us, just like I watched Get Out, and learn what I’m trying to say to myself,” he says. “You never make a film and know what you were doing entirely.”
  • Peele says that, in Hollywood, “the presumption used to be that a successful story is about someone who looks and feels like the audience. With the majority population being white, why would you make a movie with a protagonist of a different race than where your money is? It was a failure of imagination. Black people always saw white movies—because we had to! But also because when a story works, you see yourself in it no matter who you are.”
Javier E

I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594802

politics culture influencer podcasting

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
  • His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views.
  • there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.
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  • He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet
  • The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys
  • Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?
  • the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast
  • The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.
  • how many mainstream entertainers routinely expose their audiences to Harvard biologists? Or climate-change experts? (The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells, episode No. 1259.) Or biosocial scientists? (The Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, episode No. 1274.) Or ethical-leadership lecturers? (The NYU Stern business-school professor Jonathan Haidt, episode No. 1221.)
  • “Learn, learn, learn, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe said at the start of one podcast episode this winter, wrapping up an ad read for the online education platform Skillshare. “That’s what I’m getting out of this. I think it’s very important to continue to challenge your mind.”
  • He’s right! It is! And don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? Don’t we want them striving, setting goals, learning, learning, learning? Don’t we want more Joes?
  • Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets
  • if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to
  • There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention.
  • Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble.
  • the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society.
  • that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that.
  • The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization
  • It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.
  • Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.
  • His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.
  • a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.
  • At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.
  • In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump.
  • More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.
  • if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies,
  • All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time
  • like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic
  • Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.
  • It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.
  • His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”
  • I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron
  • And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite.
  • My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.
  • Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,”
leilamulveny

Opinion | Don't Let QAnon Bully Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...qanon-capitol-security.html

opinion congress new york times Politics Trump US history

shared by leilamulveny on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.On March 2, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that militia extremists might be plotting to overrun the Capitol complex and “remove Democratic lawmakers.” The details of the possible plot were hazy, but the threat unnerved enough people that House leaders canceled Thursday’s session. The voting schedule was condensed, and lawmakers left town early for the weekend.Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOf course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.The current security threat is not expected to dissipate any time soon. If anything, the intelligence community has cautioned that the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol may have emboldened extremists. Having sacked the Capitol, the lunatic fringe is now dreaming of a bigger, bloodier encore.
  • Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.” On Thursday, Tucker Carlson told viewers: “Honoré is an unhinged partisan extremist. He’s nuttier than anyone affiliated with QAnon.”
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  • Of course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • Trump toadies should not be allowed to turn this issue into a partisan game. Steps must be taken to safeguard the seat of government. Going forward, lawmakers cannot be seen as bowing to political thugs, their work upended whenever there is a semi-credible threat. That is not the American way.
  • March 4 was just one target. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, recently warned that extremists have been talking about possibly blowing up the Capitol during President Biden’s first address to a joint meeting of Congress, which has not yet been scheduled, with an eye toward killing “as many members as possible.”
  • On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.
  • This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.
  • Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.
  • This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.
  • In the wake of Jan. 6, enhanced protections were put in place around Capitol Hill. There is an increased police presence along with thousands of National Guard troops. Last week, Chief Pittman requested that the Guard presence, originally set to expire Friday, be extended 60 days. (The Pentagon has yet to issue a final decision.) Inside the Capitol building, additional metal detectors have been installed. The grounds are ringed by security fencing. Lawmakers from both parties have complained that “the people’s house” now has the grim vibe of an armed camp — or a low-security prison.
  • Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased.
  • The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building.
Javier E

Opinion | The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-gop.html

gop trump crisis Culture politics radicalization pessimism apocalypse illiberal catastrophe

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it
  • When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.The level of Republican pessimism is off the chart
  • A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”
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  • Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”
  • This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.
  • With their deep pessimism, the hyperpopulist wing of the G.O.P. seems to be crashing through the floor of philosophic liberalism into an abyss of authoritarian impulsiveness.
  • With this view, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not a shocking descent into lawlessness but practice for the war ahead. A week after the siege, nearly a quarter of Republicans polled said violence can be acceptable to achieve political goals.
  • Liberal democracy is based on a level of optimism, faith and a sense of security. It’s based on confidence in the humanistic project: that through conversation and encounter, we can deeply know each other across differences; that most people are seeking the good with different opinions about how to get there; that society is not a zero-sum war, but a conversation and a negotiation.
  • Philosophic liberals — whether on the right side of the political spectrum or the left — understand people have selfish interests, but believe in democracy and open conversation because they have confidence in the capacities of people to define their own lives, to care for people unlike themselves, to keep society progressing.
  • “The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”
  • The G.O.P. response to the Biden agenda has been anemic because the base doesn’t care about mere legislation, just their own cultural standing.
  • There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
  • Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.
  • apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.
brickol

'The disappeared': searching for 40,000 missing victims of Mexico's drug wars | World n... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rs-thousands-disappear-missing

crisis culture

shared by brickol on 06 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • It has been six months since José Barajas was snatched from his home near the US border, for reasons that remain obscure.
  • Jesse, the eldest of seven siblings, said US-based relatives had implored José to join them north of the border as the cartels tightened their grip on a region notorious for the smuggling of drugs and people.
  • We told him how big a monster is organised crime. It is a huge monster that nobody knows where it is hiding
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  • He was a man that believed in Mexico,” said Jesse, who left Mexico as an undocumented migrant aged 14 and is now a US citizen. “He chose to stay here because he thought that he could change things, you know?
  • The disappeared are perhaps the dirtiest secret of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has shown no sign of easing since leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power last December promising a new era of peace.
  • In August Mexican authorities, who after years of public pressure are beginning to demonstrate greater interest in investigating such crimes, acknowledged over 3,000 clandestine burial sites. More than 500 had been discovered since López Obrador took power.
  • As Jesse marched on – shadowed by a rifle-toting police agent – the hidden perils that lay behind his brother’s disappearance became clear. Pickup trucks, apparently sent by cartel bosses to monitor the search party, rattled past on the country lane down which José’s abductors fled. “These assholes are halcones,” Jesse complained, using the Spanish slang word for lookouts.
  • This kind of activism is about patience, not speed
  • “We all have the same goal, which is finding our missing ones,” said Ocegueda who became a campaigner after his own son was taken, in 2007, and has recovered more than 120 bodies since.
clairemann

GOP Election Attorney Rips Trump's Attack On Voting: 'As Un-American As It Gets' | Huff... - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ack_n_5f9f91f4c5b6bef9f18f1a83

election US trump gop

shared by clairemann on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A longtime Republican attorney who worked for multiple presidential campaigns is calling out both President Donald Trump and members of his own party for their attacks on the election process and ballot counting.
  • “This is as un-American as it gets,” Benjamin L. Ginsberg, who worked for former President George W. Bush during the 2000 Florida recount and again in 2004, wrote in the Washington Post.
  • “Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party,” he wrote. “People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.” 
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  • “These are painful words for me to write,” he said.  “My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump,” he wrote. “Republican elected officials, party leaders and voters must recognize how harmful this is to the party’s long-term prospects.”
  • “My fellow Republicans, look what we’ve become. It is we who must fix this. Trump should not be reelected. Vote, but not for him.”
Javier E

What 'A Face in the Crowd' Tells Us About Ourselves - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616471

demagogue us movie gullibility

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Schulberg and Kazan’s real achievement wasn’t anticipating Trump. It was appreciating, at the dawn of the television era, how susceptible the American public would be to his pitch. As Trump’s first term comes to a close, A Face in the Crowd is worth revisiting—less for what it reveals about the president than for what it says about the rest of us.
  • As much as Lonesome Rhodes may remind contemporary Americans of Donald Trump, he was modeled on one of the nation’s most famous Democrats: Will Rogers.
  • “My father was so full of shit, because he pretends he’s just one of the people, just one of the guys,” Rogers told Schulberg. “But in our house the only people that ever came as guests were the richest people in town, the bankers and the power-brokers of L.A. And those were his friends and that’s where his heart is and he (was) really a goddamned reactionary.”
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  • In short order, he has the entire town eating from his hand as he dispenses hard-earned wisdom and spins tall tales about his hometown of Riddle, Arkansas, which no one can seem to find on a map. His stories aren’t true, but they feel true. They’re not unlike what Trump, in The Art of the Deal, called “truthful hyperbole”: “an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”
  • As Kazan wrote to Schulberg in 1956,This story is of love and betrayal between LR and the people of the country. He speaks for them and at first is their partisan. So they fall in love with him. They reward him with their love and then their esteem and dollars. These spoil him. He begins to despise them … This is the CENTRAL STORY, all the other stories are subordinate.
  • On his variety show he plays loud music, tells wild yarns, and generally rejoices in violating television’s, and society’s, rules of propriety. The network execs fear they’ve created a monster. But the viewers can’t get enough of his act.
  • A Face in the Crowd paints an unflattering portrait of the viewing public’s gullibility and distractibility, but it held out hope that the American people could be made to see through a figure like Lonesome Rhodes. Kazan recognized his mistake in retrospect. In the age of mass media, a skilled demagogue like Rhodes can rise to great heights and defy any easy moral arc as long as the public continues to sit back and enjoy the show
  • The problem, as diagnosed by The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, was that audiences found Rhodes unbelievable. The public, he wrote, would never be snowed that easily—they would be “finished with him” before a real-life Rhodes could do nearly so much damage.
  • the two men intuited how susceptible the American public would be to this form of mass communication and the ways it could be used to corrupt the nation’s politics.
  • In the film, the reveal results in Rhodes’s downfall. As Kazan put it, “He is unmasked—irretrievably so—before the nation.” In real life, it’s not clear that demagogues are subject to the laws of physics. Trump’s infamous boast that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”—while intended as a compliment to his loyal supporters—is not so different from calling them trained seals.
  • of course, Trump had his own hot-mic moment, the Access Hollywood tape, on which the candidate bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. Many observers, including on the Trump campaign, thought the tape would be the end of his candidacy—surely the public would react as the vox populi did in A Face in the Crowd: “Why, he’s a monster!” “We’ll fix you, jerk.” The Trump campaign took a momentary hit, but the crowd eventually moved on to other distractions and entertainments.
  • The writer and the director were convinced they had another hit on their hands. They didn’t. Critics shrugged, and the box office disappointed.
  • In a 1958 letter to Schulberg, Kazan wrote, “We conceived Face in the Crowd as a ‘warning to the American people.’ ” To that end, they made Lonesome Rhodes play the heavy and take the fall, letting the rest of us off the hook. “We should have been showing that LR was us.”
Javier E

Opinion | Kamala Harris's facial expressions at the debate were her strength - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...he-its-black-womens-superpower

sexism politics culture history women strength voice

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Vice President Pence wasn’t following the rules — not about timing, not about interrupting — during Wednesday’s debate. Moderator Susan Page’s efforts at polite shushing, uttering repeated “thank you’s,” was about as effective as a cafeteria monitor trying to halt a food fight. It fell to Harris to remind the vice president, “I’m speaking” — something he already knew but chose to ignore.
  • If Harris had raised her voice in those moments, she would have been labeled shrill. If she had frowned, she would have been labeled a scold. If she had raised a hand, she would have been called angry or even unhinged.
  • she smiled as she held her ground — and of course they called it a smirk, a grin that by definition comes off as irritating or smug. But it was more than that. Harris gave Pence “The Look” — and you don’t have to look up that phrase to know exactly what I mean.
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  • Black women have elevated the “Mama don’t take no mess” expression to a form of high art — a narrowing of the eye, a lift of the eyebrow, a tilt of the head. Sometimes there is a sideways arch of the neck, a molasses-slow movement of the jaw that says, without speaking, “You’ve got exactly 10 seconds to pick up your feet and run for the hills.”
  • Some of this is the stuff of caricature. The kind of thing that leads Black women to be called sassy, volatile, aggressive or angry. All of that is an effort to dismiss or demean. But that attempted erasure is the very reason Black women — indeed, most women — have some version of The Look in their arsenal.
  • Women often can’t get a word in edgewise in the workplace — or, really, any place where they share a room with men. This phenomenon is universal and documented in a large body of research.
  • Women have long had to adorn their actual language with body language to be heard. Sometimes it is through protest, but often it is much more subtle than that. Lowering or adjusting the pitch of one’s voice. Fixing one’s gaze. A posture that says “I mean business” when the world isn’t interested in allowing you to run a business.
  • President Trump, who could have benefited from being on the receiving end of more Looks, on Thursday called Harris “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” It’s an ugly insult from a president who always manages to reveal himself, even or especially when trying to target others.
  • A smiling woman stands her ground and shoots a forceful look that requires a man to follow the rules. She only seems monstrous if progress is what you really find scary.
Javier E

Trump's Captain Queeg Crackup - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/trumps-captain-queeg-crackup

trump 25th amendment deranged crisis 2020

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The situation in Washington grows dire. For Trump’s most recent ravings make Queeg look like a model of sanity and restraint.
  • He attacked his own cabinet members for not prosecuting or persecuting his political adversaries. Attorney General William Barr, Trump proclaimed, will go down in history as “a very, sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama:
  • Of Kamala Harris, Trump said, “she’s a communist,” calling her “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” He claimed that Biden “wouldn’t be president for two months” because “he’s not mentally capable.”
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  • He retweeted tweets asserting that Nancy Pelosi might be planning “a coup” against him. He asserted that law enforcement was “watching” Nevada’s governor for potential voter fraud.
  • After the FBI thwarted a kidnap attempt by right-wing militia against Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, he labeled her “the lockup queen”—a reference to her life-saving public-safety directives to stave off the pandemic. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released Hillary Clinton’s emails, exhuming his demented obsession from 2016.
  • All this in but a few hours.
  • Obviously, Trump has long since has become an unacceptable danger to the country he is sworn to protect—not only to our spirit, but to our safety, security, and the conduct of our democracy
  • Until now, only in feverish political potboilers do lunatic presidents propose to jail the opposing candidate. No man this unmoored should be permitted to hold—and abuse—such power.
  • What might that be? One cannot help but remember that John F. Kennedy’s coolheaded judgment during the Cuban missile crisis helped save the Western hemisphere from a nuclear catastrophe. One simply cannot know, and America should not risk, what Trump may do when his psychic thermometer passes the boiling point.
  • For his own sake, and that of others, a president possessed of minimal self-awareness and empathy would refrain from debating in person—or demanding the presence of others.
  • Not Trump. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” announced our ill-conditioned, 74-year-old president
  • That this man has already threatened the peaceful transition of power—and clearly means it—is reason enough to remove him from office.
  • So is the worry that Trump will abuse our military power—potentially provoking an incendiary geopolitical crisis—in a reckless attempt to reverse his failing electoral fortunes. This need not involve that terrifying conceit of apocalyptic political fiction: the unhinged president reaching for the nuclear button. But whatever dangers Trump may pose, one cannot dismiss the deranged verbiage he used yesterday with Rush Limbaugh to threaten Iran
  • The language itself shows a president who has exceeded his limited capacities for self-control, rhetorical and behavioral. “If you fuck around with us,” he informed the Iranians, “if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.”
  • But he does, and so we watch the spectacle of his unraveling
  • He has a pre-existing condition which made him a danger to our country since his first day in office: an ineradicable personality disorder which fatally compromises the ability to perceive anything outside his own stunted inner landscape. The only reality he has grasped, in his frighteningly feral way, is that Joe Biden is going to beat him—and it is making him more dangerous than ever.
Javier E

Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching 'The Sopranos'? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sopranos.html

politics history Culture crisis US mafia allegory decline corruption alienation

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,” he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.”
  • The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life.
  • “The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history.
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  • that’s what I felt back in those days,” he said, “that everything was for sale — it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash.”
  • Younger viewers do not have to fear Chase’s wrath, because they are not so obviously its object. They are also able to watch the show for hours on end, which makes the subtext and themes more apparent. Perhaps all of this has offered clarity that was not possible when the show aired. Perhaps it is easier now to see exactly who — or what — Chase was angry at.
  • it is easily one of the most written-about TV shows in the medium’s short history. But more than the shows that have emerged in its wake, which are subjected to close readings and recaps in nearly every major publication, “The Sopranos” has a novelistic quality that actually withstands this level of scrutiny. It’s not uncommon to hear from people who have watched the series several times, or who do so on a routine basis — people who say it reveals new charms at different points in life
  • Perhaps the greatest mystery of all, looking back on “The Sopranos” all these years later, is this: What was Chase seeing in the mid-’90s — a period when the United States’ chief geopolitical foe was Serbia, when the line-item veto and school uniforms were front-page news, when “Macarena” topped the charts — that compelled him to make a show that was so thoroughly pessimistic about this country?
  • “I don’t think I felt like it was a good time,” he told me. He is 76 now, and speaks deliberately and thoughtfully. “I felt that things were going downhill.” He’d become convinced America was, as Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic put it, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” not an easy thing for a journeyman TV writer to accept.
  • “There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people’s predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap.”
  • Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”
  • I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.”
  • Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”
  • In “The Mafia: A Cultural History,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a professor of literature at Duke, writes that one thing our cinematic Mafiosi have that we admire, against our better judgment, is access to structures of meaning outside of market forces: the church, family, honor. The Mafia movie often pits these traditional values against the corrosive and homogenizing effects of American life.
  • What “The Sopranos” shows us, Dainotto argues, is what happens when all that ballast is gone, and the Mafia is revealed to be as ignoble as anything else. “Life is what it is,” he writes, “and repeats as such.”
  • The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it.
  • What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.
  • Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.
  • In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”
  • You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack.
  • The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control.
  • Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart.
  • t is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?
  • Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral.
  • It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway.
  • Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal.
  • That the people in power truly had insulated themselves in a fantasy environment — not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also, more concretely, in the endless faux-bucolic subdivisions that would crater the economy. We were living in a sort of irreality, one whose totality would humiliate and delegitimize nearly every important institution in American life when it ended, leaving — of all people — the Meadows and A.J.s of the world to make sense of things.
  • if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.
  • Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little Tonys, lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all.
  • This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to.
  • In the show’s finale, as the extended Soprano family gathers to mourn the death of Bobby Baccalieri, we find Paulie Walnuts stuck at the kids’ table, where A.J., newly politically awakened, charges into a rant. You people are screwed, he says. “You’re living in a dream.” Bush let Al Qaeda escape, he tells them, and then made us invade some other country? Someone at the table tells him that if he really cares, he should join up. A.J. responds: “It’s more noble than watching these jackoff fantasies on TV of how we’re kicking their ass. It’s like: America.” Again, he’s interrupted: What in the world does he mean? He explains: “This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? And come-ons for [expletive] they don’t need and can’t afford?”
  • However inartfully, A.J. was gesturing at something that would have been hard for someone his age to see at the time, which is that the ’00s were a sort of fever dream, a tragic farce built on cheap money and propaganda.
  • The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism.
  • . The “leftist ‘Sopranos’ fan” is now such a well-known type that it is rounding the corner to being an object of scorn and mockery online.
  • One oddity that can’t be ignored in this “Sopranos” resurgence is that, somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there is an openly left-wing subcurrent within it
Javier E

War in Ukraine Has Russia's Putin, Xi Jinping Changing the World Order - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ng-capitalism-s-great-illusion

ukraine war russia world order strategy plan crisis globalization history

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 
  • just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.
  • That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply
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  • Right now, the outcome that we have been sliding toward seems one in which an autocratic East gradually divides from — and then potentially accelerates past — a democratic but divided West. 
  • Seizing that opportunity will require an understanding of both economics and history.
  • By any economic measure the West is significantly more powerful than the East, using the terms “West” and “East” to mean political alliances rather than just geographical regions. The U.S. and its allies account for 60% of global gross domestic product at current exchange rates; China, Russia and the autocracies amount to barely a third of that. And for the first time in years, the West is coming together rather than falling apart.
  • The question for Biden and the European leaders he will meet this week is simple: What sort of world do they want to build in the future? Ukraine could well mark the end of one great episode in human history. It could also be the time that the free world comes together and creates another, more united, more interconnected and more sustainable one than ever before
  • the answer to globalization’s woes isn’t to abandon economic liberalism, but to redesign it. And the coming weeks offer a golden opportunity to redesign the global economic order.
  • Yet once politicians got out of the way, globalization sped up, driven by technology and commerce.
  • Only after the Second World War did economic integration resume its advance — and then only on the Western half of the map
  • What most of us today think of as globalization only began in the 1980s, with the arrival of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reintegration of China into the world economy, and, in 1992, the creation of the European single market.
  • When the guns finally fell silent in 1918 and peace was forced on Germany at Versailles (in the Carthaginian terms that Keynes decried so eloquently), the Bidens, Johnsons and Macrons of the time tried to restore the old world order of free trade and liberal harmony — and comprehensively failed. 
  • As the new century dawned and an unknown “pro-Western” bureaucrat called Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the daily volume of foreign-exchange transactions reached $15 trillion. 
  • More recently, as the attacks on globalization have mounted, economic integration has slowed and in some cases gone into reverse.
  • Meanwhile in the West, Ukraine has already prompted a great rethink. As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has proclaimed, we are at a Zeitenwende — a turning point. Under his leadership, pacifist Germany has already proposed a defense budget that’s larger than Russia’s. Meanwhile, Ukrainian immigrants are being welcomed by nations that only a few months ago were shunning foreigners, and, after a decade of slumber in Brussels, the momentum for integration is increasing.
  • But this turning point can still lead in several directions.
  • the invasion of Ukraine is accelerating changes in both geopolitics and the capitalist mindset that are deeply inimical to globalization.
  • The changes in geopolitics come down to one word: China, whose rapid and seemingly inexorable rise is the central geopolitical fact of our time.  
  • absent any decisive action by the West, geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs: an Asian one with China at its heart and perhaps Russia as its energy supplier; an American-led bloc; and perhaps a third centered on the European Union, with the Europeans broadly sympathetic to the U.S. but nervous about the possible return of an America-First isolationist to the White House and irked by America’s approach to digital and media regulation.
  • World trade in manufactured goods doubled in the 1990s and doubled again in the 2000s. Inflationary pressures have been kept low despite loose monetary policies.
  • From a CEO’s viewpoint, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done more than unleash Western embargoes and boost inflation. It is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years. 
  • Commercially speaking, this bet paid off spectacularly. Over the past 50 years multinationals have turned themselves from federations of national companies into truly integrated organizations that could take full advantage of global economies of scale and scope (and, of course, global loopholes in taxes and regulations)
  • Just as important as this geopolitical shift is the change in the capitalist mindset. If the current age of globalization was facilitated by politicians, it has been driven by businesspeople. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher didn’t decide that the components of an iPhone should come from 40 countries. Facebook wasn’t created by senior politicians — not even by Al Gore. Uber wasn’t an arm of the Department of Transportation. 
  • profits have remained high, as the cost of inputs (such as energy and labor) have been kept low.
  • Now what might be called the Capitalist Grand Illusion is under assault in Kyiv — just as Norman Angell’s version was machine-gunned on the Western Front.
  • Militarism and cultural rivalries keep trumping economic logic.
  • The second is Biden’s long experience
  • Every Western company is now wondering how exposed it is to political risk. Capitalists are all Huntingtonians now.
  • Greed is also acquiring an anti-global tint. CEOs are rationally asking how they can profit from what Keynes called “monopolies, restrictions and exclusions.
  • So the second age of globalization is fading fast. Unless something is done quickly and decisively, the world will divide into hostile camps, regardless of what happens in Ukraine.
  • this divided world will not suit the West. Look at the resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The most trumpeted figure is that only 40 countries did not vote for this (35 abstained, and five voted against it), compared with 141 countries who voted in favor. But those 40 countries, which include India and China, account for the majority of the world’s population.
  • we still have time to shape a very different future: one in which global wealth is increased and the Western alliance bolstered.
  • One of the great problems with modern liberalism for the past few decades has been its lack of a gripping narrative and a compelling cast of heroes and villains
  • Now Putin has inadvertently reversed all that. Freedom is the creed of heroes such as Zelenskiy; anti-liberalism is the creed of monsters who drop bombs on children.
  • Biden can soften that message at home by adding a political dimension to his trade agenda. “Build back better” applies to globalization, too. A global new deal should certainly include a focus on making multinational companies pay their taxes, and the environment should be to the fore. But Biden should also talk about the true cost of protectionism in terms of higher prices, worse products and less innovation.
  • So far, Biden’s handling of the Ukraine invasion has been similarly nuanced. He has drawn a line between supplying the resistance and becoming involved in the war (or giving others an excuse to claim the U.S. is involved). And he has put firm pressure on China to stay out of the conflict.
  • Biden needs to recognize that expanding economic interdependence among his allies is a geostrategic imperative. He should offer Europe a comprehensive free-trade deal to bind the West together
  • It is not difficult to imagine Europe or democratic Asia signing up for these sorts of pacts, given the shock of Putin’s aggression and their fear of China. Biden’s problem is at home. Why should the Democratic left accept this? Because, Biden should say, Ukraine, China and America’s security matter more than union votes.
  • Biden should pursue a two-stage strategy: First, deepen economic integration among like-minded nations; but leave the door open to autocracies if they become more flexible.
  • CEOs who used to build empires based on just-in-time production are now looking at just-in-case: adding inefficient production closer to home in case their foreign plants are cut off.
  • Constructing such a “new world order” will be laborious work. But the alternative is a division of the world into hostile economic and political blocs that comes straight out of the 1930s
  • Biden, Johnson, Scholz and Macron should think hard about how history will judge them. Do they want to be compared to the policymakers in the aftermath of World War I, who stood by impassively as the world fragmented and monsters seized the reins of power? Or would they rather be compared to their peers after World War II, policymakers who built a much more stable and interconnected world?
  • The Western policymakers meeting this week will say they have no intention of closing down the global order. All this economic savagery is to punish Putin’s aggression precisely in order to restore the rules-based system that he is bent on destroying — and with it, the free flow of commerce and finance. In an ideal world, Putin would be toppled — the victim of his own delusions and paranoia — and the Russian people would sweep away the kleptocracy in the Kremlin. 
  • In this optimistic scenario, Putin’s humiliation would do more than bring Russia back to its senses. It would bring the West back as well. The U.S. would abandon its Trumpian isolationism while Europe would start taking its own defense seriously. The culture warriors on both sides of the Atlantic would simmer down, and the woke and unwoke alike would celebrate their collective belief in freedom and democracy.
  • There’s a chance this could happen. Putin wouldn’t be the first czar to fall because of a misjudged and mishandled war.
  • Regardless of whether China’s leader decides to ditch Putin, the invasion has surely sped up Xi’s medium-term imperative of “decoupling” — insulating his country from dependence on the West.
  • For the “wolf pack” of young Chinese nationalists around Xi, the reaction to Ukraine is another powerful argument for self-sufficiency. China’s vast holdings of dollar assets now look like a liability given America’s willingness to confiscate Russia’s assets,
  • Some Americans are equally keen on decoupling, a sentiment that bridged Republicans and Democrats before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
  • In the great intellectual battle of the 1990s between Francis Fukuyama, who wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), and his Harvard teacher Samuel Huntington, who wrote “The Clash of Civilizations” (1996), CEOs have generally sided with Fukuyama.
  • Biden needs to go further in the coming weeks. He needs to reinforce the Western alliance so that it can withstand the potential storms to come
  • Keynes, no longer a protectionist, played a leading role in designing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the infrastructure of the postwar Western order of stable exchange rates. He helped persuade the U.S. to lead the world rather than retreating into itself. He helped create the America of the Marshall Plan. This Bretton Woods settlement created the regime that eventually won the Cold War and laid the foundations for the second age of globalization.
  • At the closing banquet on July 22, the great man was greeted with a standing ovation. Within two years he was dead — but the world that he did so much to create lived on. That world does not need to die in the streets of Kyiv. But it is on course to do so, unless the leaders meeting this week seize the moment to create something better. 
  • Javier E on 26 Mar 22
     
     
Javier E

Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675946

democracy tech billionaire anti-democratic stagnation immortal culture

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced—and growing—among tech founders.
  • why does he want to cut off politicians
  • But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.”
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  • Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.
  • Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.
  • For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.
  • Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”
  • Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.
  • His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.
  • “Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.
  • He admits now that it was a bad bet.
  • “There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
  • eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment
  • Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.
  • “Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.
  • he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.
  • He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.
  • Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied
  • on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”
  • Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.
  • He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine
  • He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity
  • Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?
  • He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.
  • More than anything, he longs to live forever.
  • Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”
  • Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.
  • But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.
  • Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.
  • How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”
  • During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.
  • Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach
  • But something changed for Thiel in 2009
  • he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.
  • ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
  • By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape
  • The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).
  • Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution
  • His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics
  • It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.
  • “There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)
  • As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz
  • Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.
  • When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”
  • You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”
  • None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias
  • He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.
  • Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200
  • The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”
  • This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.
  • He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”
  • “It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”
  • Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.
  • In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)
  • Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”
  • he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.
  • When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”
  • “I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.
  • He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.
  • When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.
  • “I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”
  • Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian
  • he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”
  • Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”
  • Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.
  • “That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.
  • ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.
  • A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.
  • “I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”
  • Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.
  • “Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc
  • He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.
  • there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss
  • Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic
  • Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.
  • He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”
  • He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”
  • he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”
  • “Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.
  • Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”
  • “the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
  • “Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”
  • Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests
  • “It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”
  • About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?
  • Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them
  • He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”
  • besides, a different cause moves him far more.
  • Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.
  • Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.
  • All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.
  • I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?
  • “Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”
  • Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.
  • . “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”
  • You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”
  • No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.
  • There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.
Javier E

'Oppenheimer,' 'The Maniac' and Our Terrifying Prometheus Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hn-von-neumann-prometheus.html

progress value-neutral science modernity AI nuclear power prometheus knowledge overreach tech

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.
  • The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els
  • Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”
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  • Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.
  • both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.
  • on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.
  • More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.
  • MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”
  • More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.
  • Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”
  • . Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
  • Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.
  • Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”
  • the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.
  • If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.
  • “Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
Javier E

Pause or panic: battle to tame the AI monster - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-tame-the-ai-monster-mjd97lhkh

AI control threat report crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction
  • This tribe feels we have made three crucial errors: giving the AI the capability to write code, connecting it to the internet and teaching it about human psychology. In those steps we have created a self-improving, potentially manipulative entity that can use the network to achieve its ends — which may not align with ours
  • This is a technology that learns from our every interaction with it. In an eerie glimpse of AI’s single-mindedness, OpenAI revealed in a paper that GPT-4 was willing to lie, telling a human online it was a blind person, to get a task done.
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  • For researchers concerned with more immediate AI risks, such as bias, disinformation and job displacement, the voices of doom are a distraction. Professor Brent Mittelstadt, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the warnings of “the existential risks community” are overblown. “The problem is you can’t disprove the future scenarios . . . in the same way you can’t disprove science fiction.” Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, believes the doomsters are propagating “unhinged AI hype, helping those building this stuff sell it”.
  • Those urging us to stop, pause and think again have a useful card up our sleeves: the people building these models do not fully understand them. AI like ChatGPT is made up of huge neural networks that can defy their creators by coming up with “emergent properties”.
  • Google’s PaLM model started translating Bengali despite not being trained to do so
  • Let’s not forget the excitement, because that is also part of Moloch, driving us forward. The lure of AI’s promises for humanity has been hinted at by DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, which predicted the 3D structures of nearly all the proteins known to humanity.
  • Noam Shazeer, a former Google engineer credited with setting large language models such as ChatGPT on their present path, was asked by The Sunday Times how the models worked. He replied: “I don’t think anybody really understands how they work, just like nobody really understands how the brain works. It’s pretty much alchemy.”
  • The industry is turning itself to understanding what has been created, but some predict it will take years, decades even.
  • Alex Heath, deputy editor of The Verge, who recently attended an AI conference in San Francisco. “It’s clear the people working on generative AI are uneasy about the worst-case scenario of it destroying us all. These fears are much more pronounced in private than they are in public.” One figure building an AI product “said over lunch with a straight face that he is savoring the time before he is killed by AI”.
  • Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, told the TED2023 conference this week: “We hear from people who are excited, we hear from people who are concerned. We hear from people who feel both those emotions at once. And, honestly, that’s how we feel.”
  • A CBS interviewer challenged Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, this week: “You don’t fully understand how it works, and yet you’ve turned it loose on society?
  • In 2020 there wasn’t a single drug in clinical trials developed using an AI-first approach. Today there are 18
  • Consider this from Bill Gates last month: “I think in the next five to ten years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionising the way people teach and learn.”
  • If the industry is aware of the risks, is it doing enough to mitigate them? Microsoft recently cut its ethics team, and researchers building AI outnumber those focused on safety by 30-to-1,
  • The concentration of AI power, which worries so many, also presents an opportunity to more easily develop some global rules. But there is little agreement on direction. Europe is proposing a centrally defined, top-down approach. Britain wants an innovation-friendly environment where rules are defined by each industry regulator. The US commerce department is consulting on whether risky AI models should be certified. China is proposing strict controls on generative AI that could upend social order.
  • Part of the drive to act now is to ensure we learn the lessons of social media. Twenty years after creating it, we are trying to put it back in a legal straitjacket after learning that its algorithms understand us only too well. “Social media was the first contact between AI and humanity, and humanity lost,” Yuval Harari, the Sapiens author,
  • Others point to bioethics, especially international agreements on human cloning. Tegmark said last week: “You could make so much money on human cloning. Why aren’t we doing it? Because biologists thought hard about this and felt this is way too risky. They got together in the Seventies and decided, let’s not do this because it’s too unpredictable. We could lose control over what happens to our species. So they paused.” Even China signed up.
  • One voice urging calm is Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist. He has labelled ChatGPT a “flashy demo” and “not a particularly interesting scientific advance”. He tweeted: “A GPT-4-powered robot couldn’t clear up the dinner table and fill up the dishwasher, which any ten-year-old can do. And it couldn’t drive a car, which any 18-year-old can learn to do in 20 hours of practice. We’re still missing something big for human-level AI.” If this is sour grapes and he’s wrong, Moloch already has us in its thrall.
Javier E

Opinion | The Limits of Moralism in Israel and Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oreign-policy-israel-gaza.html

israel gaza moral clarity tragedy dilemma freedom tolerance lesser of two evils balance absolutism

shared by Javier E on 12 May 24 - No Cached
  • Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.
  • This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past
  • It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression.
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  • It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.
  • The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply disappear.
  • A “realist” foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations.
  • But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel’s war in Gaza.
  • But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.
  • The difficulty is that liberal “freedom” is on offer almost nowhere in the Middle East, certainly not in Gaza under Hamas’s rule, and the most challenging “otherness of beliefs” in this situation are the beliefs that motivated the massacres of Oct. 7.
  • a hype around Israeli moral failures — it's not enough for a war that yields so many casualties to be unjust, if it’s wrong it must be genocide — that ends up suppressing the harsh implications of a simple call for peace.
  • A representative passage, from Pankaj Mishra in The London Review of Books, describes many protesters as “motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.”
  • No doubt many campus protesters have these motivations.
  • The alternative articulated by, for instance, Mitt Romney — “We stand by allies, we don’t second-guess them” — is not a serious policy for a hegemon balancing its global obligations
  • For example, reading the apologia for pro-Palestinian protests from certain left-wing intellectuals, you have a sense of both elision and exaggeration
  • seem untroubled by this fact, and perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.
  • Which yields the moral dilemma the protests don’t acknowledge: Ending the war on the terms they want could grant a major strategic victory to the regional alliance dedicated to the murder of Israelis and their expulsion from the Middle East.
  • Maybe the Gaza war is unjust enough, and Israeli goals unachievable enough, that there’s no alternative to vindicating Hamas’s blood-soaked strategy
  • you have to be honest about what you’re endorsing: a brutal weighing-out of evils, not any sort of triumph for “universally desirable” ideals.
  • Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war, for whom moral considerations — the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel — are invoked as an argument-ender in an inflexible way
  • We are constantly urged to “stand with Israel” when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing.
  • Joe Biden’s administration is chastised for betrayal when it tries to influence Israel’s warmaking, even though the Israeli government’s decisions before and since Oct. 7 do not inspire great confidence.
  • Biden’s specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or hamfisted
  • But it’s not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.
  • Another difficulty is that some instigators of the protests
  • In each case, you have a desire that mirrors the impulse of the left-wing intellectuals — to make foreign policy easy by condensing everything to a single moral judgment. But the problems of the world cannot be so easily reduced.
  • Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.
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