Make that "memetic societies" and Luca Dellana is bang on, since that name was used in the early nineties in the fringes of political science studies here in Sweden; bureaucracy becoming ritual being a well-known and well-studied problem even before Parkinson wrote about the phenomenon.
It was argued that thanks to increasing speed of communication and corresponding increases in pace in careers and society, messages would become more and more akin to shorthand and pictographic symbolism than actual intelligence, meaning or debate - memes. As we know, the hypothesis was self-fulfilling and correct.
(Also suggested by others, f.e. Bradbury in 'Fahrenheit 451', where he used TV-walls, bookburnings and 60 yards wide billboards next to the motorways as visual examples of the same trend.)
Look at FB, Twitter, and even Substack. This little reply, barely longer than a footnote in an academic journal of the pre-internet age (the age of greater freedom too, but that's different text), would by most be considered too long to read. And while brevity may be the soul of wit, it is by no means the voice of clarity.
Finally, a ruling caste does not need creatives. What you talk about above and as Dellana notes, societies who become fully mimetic (or memetic, or as I'd like to call it emetic) dies. Aztecs. China before communism. The caliphates of islam. The British Empire. Many more - not just because of this but the pre-eminence of following ritual in all situations and on all levels makes stasis the ideal, and also makes everything more expensive to achieve, measured in resources used.
The danger now is that this will achieved on the global level, stopping the cycle of civilisations competing for dominance and instead causing a regressive rot rationalised as "climate saviourism" but in reality intended to maintain the capitalist-authoritarian status quo.
The social failure that inevitably follows the establishment of a closed, self-referential mimesis is due to the absence of error correction. Or really, more precisely, the re-direction of error correction away from reality testing (is what we're doing working?) towards ritual testing (did we do the ritual correctly?) The result is a steady accumulation of reality debt, leading to increasing dysfunction, brittleness, and ultimately collapse.
The government has completely lost control of the border, a minor territorial dispute in the former Eastern bloc is chewing its way through the entire Western economy, the American life expectancy has fallen by two entire years from 78 to 76 in a two-year time span with the excess death rate at the highest level since WWII despite the USA not even being at war, a $200 billion bank just evaporated, the standard of living in the United Kingdom is set to contract at the fastest pace since the 1950s, and, well, you get the idea: it's not a matter of 'when' it collapses, we are living in the collapse right now.
Our memetic society cares only about lagging indicators, and all the lagging indicators say we're in an accelerating collapse phase. That means the present reality is even worse; the masses just haven't gotten the news and accepted that reality yet, but that moment is coming sooner rather than later. Will it be too late to turn things around when the masses do figure out the true state of affairs? Probably, unless we really luck out and basically get a Caesar figure, because we're not voting our way out of this. Sadly, that ship has already sailed. As for a Caesar emerging, that appears to be an increasingly likely scenario, as our ruling class makes its collective retardation and degeneracy ever more obvious.
100. This is the long farewell we've been set up to endure. Though, in the near future, I believe we will realize this WAS a war, one launched from behind trillionaire-built walls, while those dying from the attacks and the families burying them remain mostly oblivious to the fact they've been killed with a bioweapon they voluntarily chose to inject. But I do believe it's a war the humans will win. I'm launching my own Substack soon about this.
How many times, working in “Big Tech” have I seen some callow, wet-behind-the-ears (and, frequently, “diverse”) “director” of this or that chanting the approved incantations with an obviously profound lack of understanding of what it all means and being praised for it. This is not a new phenomenon, but has been the basis for success in bureaucracies for as long as I can remember, and that’s no short while.
This is part of the human condition. Moderns sneer at mindless repetition of various phrases in institutional religion, while blithering on about “growth scenarios in global emerging markets while maintaining our carbon-neutral posture”.
There's a british sci-fi IP called "Warhammer 40 000". It premiered in 1987, as a miniatures boardgame. One of the playable factions is called Adeptus Mechanicus, a priesthood safeguarding technology and to whom technological progress and science is heresy, since the God-Emperor of Mankind has already discovered everything and put it in a big database, the fragments of which are spread around the galaxy. Sample quote:
"Strike the first rune upon the engine's casing employing the chosen wrench. Its tip should be anointed with the oil of engineering using the proper incantation when the auspices are correct. Strike the second rune upon the engine's casing employing the arc-tip of the power-driver. If the second rune is not good, a third rune may be struck in like manner to the first. This is done according to the true ritual laid down by Scotti the Enginseer. A libation should be offered. If this sequence is properly observed the engines may be brought to full activation by depressing the large panel marked "ON"."
The above was the first thing I thought of, reading your comment.
You can imagine then, how this statement of mine was received by my fellow teachers of political science and related subjects, more than 15 yeas ago:
"The beer-swilling skinheads of Gamla Stan* and Helikopterplattan** were more accurate in their analyses of what migration from the Middle East and Africa wouldlead to, than any academic."
For those not familiar with the nuances of this little back-and-forth about skinheads (i.e. virtually everyone on the planet...):
*Gamla Stan is Stockholm's Old Town, a common hangout area for skins in the 1980s. As a side-note, punks were divided into two camps; one at Kafé 44 on Tjärhovsgatan (Tarred hoof street) where the communists et al gathered, and still do to this day, and the others who gathered at Oxtorget (Ox plaza, an almost fully concrete park off Stockholm's major whore-street) or Sergel Plaza in the city center.
**Helicopter landing pad floating in the water between Stockholm's south side and Old Town. During the 1980s it became an iconic hangout for skinheads.
Hahaha! Not by choice and not by birth, and I got out of that town back before Bildt became PM. Did live there duing the 1980s though, saw a lot of the underground scene.
Strongest memory I have of Göteborg (Gothenburg) is when I was moonlighting as doorman at a joint on Andra Långgatan, it was called Kropotkin or something like that. Still had the Stockholm dialect, so you can imagine how that went over... :)
Oh they knew exactly what they were doing. It was always intentional harm and to create the "crisis" needed to implement their greater agenda. The profits are a bonus.
Fall into line, Chris, or Jones will come back. Also polio.
Seriously, though, if you read "the science was moving incredibly fast" and have a reaction other than <snarf> and <delete>... well, don't say I didn't warn you. We already know these people need to be disempowered. (How's that for a word?) Intelligent people refusing to send their kids to universities with mandates is a nice first step. Too bad there are only about three of us.
Yep. I have two teenage daughters. We have money saved for them post high school. One is going into business with my husband in multi-family real estate. She’ll need some certifications and marketing. The other is going to be a personal trainer and open her own gym. So more certifications, marketing and money to lease the space. The remainder of what would have been their college money is going to be put down on a starter home.
So by the time most college kids are graduating with massive debt and useless degrees my kids should be self-employed, starting to earn real money, and home owners. Also, no indoctrination.
Just boycott the whole mess. Let them rot on the vine.
Absolutely. And it's getting worse for some. I was told the other day, without a trace of irony, that I need to "stop thinking with my head, and start thinking with my heart."
They are career narcissists and they are coming unhinged in face of their failure. It's worse than being the kicker that blows the final play of the big game. The most consequential event of their lives has come and gone and they got everything wrong. And the whole world knows it.
The Age of Reason has devolved to the Age of Compassionate Monkeys. Think with your heart, come back to the group, and get groomed more. Chee Chee Chee!
This isn't only relevant to the shit show of the last three years, it's core to wokeness as well. There's no real ideology to the woke. They simply feel out what the mob's consensus is, and adopt that view sans reflection or comparison to what they believed five minutes before. It's networked hyper-mimesis, turning millions of weak-minded midwits into the pseudopods of a headless gibbering egregore whose only drive is will to power by way of consensus enforcement.
Like that scene in '1984' when they are celebrating Hate Week, and a speaker switches out Eastasia to Eurasia mid-sentence without any break in his speech.
I think that there might be some, but Red cadres themselves are simply base instinct taking the place of thought. Caplan has found that many people have an “anti market bias”, among others, similar to Hayek’s point about people wanting to apply the rules of the family to society outside the family. In other words, ask a few thousand unreflective people if “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is a good idea, and 900 will say “Yes!”
Thanks very much, you've given me several things to pursue. I have always been the sort of useful idiot that helps Socialism along, dumb enough to clean the communal fridge at work!
Well, that’s the thing: there is a difference between acting “socialistic” in the sense of doing things to help others with no real expectation of benefit, and forcing others to do so (or expecting them to without force). Socialist societies tend to rely on the former, while mandating the force part, but there is nothing wrong with being nice and helping out!
Maybe don’t go clean out the fridge at some other random office though, at least not without asking... creeps people out :)
Well, it IS a "good idea", but it also produces bad reality. And also, as an idea, it does NOT reflect the reality of any society I've ever heard of..... Nobody in Stalin's Russia or Mao's China "needed" to be slaughtered....
Except the 'reality' inside the mind of a Dedicated Cadre, like a student at Stanford Law. "This old white cis-gender hierarchical professor, trying to teach me stuff I don't need to know. He got to go!"
As so many addicted-to-wishful-thinking people have learned to chant, "Perception is Reality." That was a genius Dick Move, whichever ex-hippy bullshit artist came up with that. My guess is Werner Ehrhard, or one of his disciples.
These are the Emily Osters of the world. They have lived their lives believing they are the gold standard of intellectualism and that by virtue of their intelligence they are morally superior. They exist to tell other people what to do. So it's not that they got it wrong, just like Emily they were "in the dark", ya see. Those rogue academics weren't right, they got lucky and being rogue is still bad. They are still the good guys and they're still smarter than you.
The frustrating problem illustrated by the panel discussion is that people who aren’t that smart are presented as serious thinkers. See El Gato Malo’s March 13 Substack on the Glorification of Sub-Mediocrity. My high school social studies teacher, who, in 1979, did more to teach me how to write and think than anyone else, would have ripped this discussion apart (as Chris did) and would have directed the participants to try again.
That's why these people never go on any show that will actually push back. How often have you seen Fauci in front of a REAL audience taking REAL questions?
Yeah, and what was the name of the shitweasel that went on Rogan and had to admit he got Ivermectin from a human doctor for human reasons, then like the next day he was back on CNN calling Rogan a conspiracy theorist.
If you can't handle Joe Rogan, you don't have a chance against a real audience.
So true. He only takes questions from his uninformed and incurious fanboys. They smugly agree that anyone who questions him is anti-science. Compare to Trump who takes on all comers.
The overarching pathology — the big cultural sickness running through all the little pieces of sickness — is the now widely shared institutional view that consensus-focused speech is always healthy and responsible, while “voices that were working against the theme” are always dangerous. If you adhered to the consensus in the moment of crisis, but then the consensus turned out to be completely wrong, you behaved responsibly
Your comments above really show how "they" were able to pull it off. Once you understand the mindset running through society you could get experts to go along with horribly wrong things. Because even if they were wrong, they would still be ok in the revered group. The ones that were ultimately right are still dismissed as fringe crazy trouble makers. Literal madness in charge.
I used to read Eric Toppel's tweets about covid, but stopped when he retreated something along the party lines about "people who get pregnant" instead of women.
You picked a really illustrative example. Even the part "well-intentioned people..." because these genius experts are free to libel those who question 'science', and since Trump, they KNOW that there are 'malicious actors' out there...and since 'hate crimes' legislation, we have established the principle of being inside the head of the 'bad person' in jurisprudence...in other words, THOUGHT CRIMES. These effing weak morons, not strong enough to debate, raised in comfort of never being challenged to justify their precious credentials...free to consider that some things "should not be talked about" in an academic setting! I really think that the event that broke their brains was the election of Trump. They like to think that they love democracy and tolerate all people, but then those bloody deplorable peasants dare to vote for a gauche reality TV star, and ALL BETS ARE OFF. Masks dropped in 2017. These institutional intellectuals remind me of the eunuchs of Byzantium, or the medieval Catholic monks unable to comprehend the Protestant revolution. I really want to thank you for this piece and the insert about mimetic societies. I had been heading in that direction but I didn't have the vocabulary or the concept. God, that's most of what we were doing at NSA, even. Ritual intelligence sifting and reporting with no real purpose or direction, ostensibly for the 'foreign policy objectives' crafted by ostensible 'policy makers' pretending to be Statesmen purportedly working in the 'national interest' but it was all a sham. The only real result was money flowing to the contracting corporations. Maybe I need to go paint a ceiling now.
Great word! You 're like W.F. Buckley: inventing words and phrases that succinctly describe something, animate or not. I think you've got real potential in writing, so keep it up! Of course, you won't be welcomed at many universities: neither was Buckley. You and he are..... anti-consensusists!
The great lesson of COVID was how little we can trust our "betters."
Here is how it should have gone: We have these ideas. Here is our best advice. We're going to protect those we feel are the most vulnerable. Other than that use your best judgement because we *know* nothing for sure.
How it went: We changed our minds every ten minutes and called you a conspiracy theorist if you reminded us that we changed our mind every ten minutes (or, you know, missed the 10:05 update on masks), and then we made rules that ruined people's lives based on things we were only guessing about and now we want to act like you're the bad guy for telling us we had no right to act so authoritarian especially as we amply demonstrated if there was a possible wrong choice, we made it.
Of course, what is truly maddening is they will do exactly the same thing the next time around because none of them have paid even the slightest price for their arrogance and therefore have learned nothing.
But next time we must refuse the tendency to comply. Non-compliance of at least 30% of the population negates the power of the wanna-be authoritarians.
"Betters," indeed! To those of us "serfs" who were being manipulated through perversion of legal authority on multiple levels--mandated closures, 2 weeks to flatten curves and the endless updates on "Covid positive" tests (without regard to how many PCR cycles it took to get to a "positive")--it was confounding. The ONLY question that kept going through my mind was, "HOW are they justified in calling a virus that has a demonstrable 99.5% survival rate, a 'pandemic'?"
It was designed to incite fear--to increase a willingness to be exposed to the REAL pandemic: the already patented, untested "vaccines" they pushed simply for profit. And just like a cult, the most gullible became the enforcers through peer pressure and character assassination. I agree with Chris, the weapon of choice was THEIR uninformed consensus and self-righteous claim of being the only arbiters of "truth."
These people play with words. What "pandemic" means is simply it's global, meaning it is occurring everywhere or virtually everywhere. What it doesn't mean: that it's deadly or that even though it is global, it is ubiquitous in communities themselves. A cold virus can be "pandemic" and kill no one. A disease can be "pandemic" and maybe deadly but also relatively rare in the grand scheme of things
But . . . they called it a "pandemic" to scare people into obedience without making sure people understood that "pandemic" doesn't even remotely require something to be deadly or even particularly widespread in communities.
Well said. And well-debunked. Just one comment: the problem is not consensusism.
These folks don't believe in the value of mindlessly honoring consensus any more than you do. When the need arises, they will happily and vehemently argue against following the consensus. That could happen as early as next week. But that does not necessarily mean that they are intellectually dishonest.
I speak from experience when I say that many bright and well-meaning university types have gone through an entire career leaping from one conclusion to the next without ever learning how to construct a logical argument. I not only met them, I almost became one of them. I was considered quite able as a grad student but dug myself into a deep ideological hole when already well into the Ph.D. level. Ultimately, found myself working as a self-taught scientific programmer. There, computers taught me what years of graduate education had not: an Olympic-class intuitive leap with impressive rhetorical vapor trails connecting the endpoints is not the same thing as a logical bridge.
I had the same thing happen to me on a personal level. Two years ago a friendly cat started coming around. The wife and kids started feeding it and giving it attention. I protested, as it was clear that someone else's cat would soon become our cat but was poo-pood as I was not an expert on cats, which is true. I'm a dog person.
When it was clear that the cat was pretty much close to becoming our cat I noticed the cat looked pregnant, a subject I remarked upon quite vociferously in a last ditch effort to not have a cat. Of course, I didn't know what I was talking about. The next door neighbor (who is an expert on cats) inspected the feline and was sure I didn't know what I was talking about. Very sure. Everybody agreed, that cat wasn't pregnant and I didn't know anything.
Two weeks later and my oldest was running back from the barn yelling "Kittens! We have kittens!" Then we had four cats. Yay. Nothing like paying for four cats you didn't want to get spayed/neutered and vaccinated. I guess the kids were happy, but a puppy could have provided just as much happiness and would actually love them back. Also, puppies are at least sorry when they make a mess on the floor
I am still not considered any kind of expert on cats (never will be even if I spot 1000 pregnant cats) but I am exempt from cleaning up any explosive cat diarrhea if it occurs in our house. That has been a small victory for me whenever that unfortunate event occurs but what gravels my ass is that the "expert" cat lady next door is also exempt.
The "experts" will never pay for being wrong about the very things they were supposed to get right. We will never be right in the eyes of the experts or those fool wives who listened to them. Just don't clean up the cat diarrhea if you can avoid it. That shit should be left to those who listened to the experts.
This is a non-apology apology, if ever there was one. “I’m not apologizing because what I did was based on what I knew which changed from day to day…so you see, I did nothing wrong because the facts changed which caused what I knew to change which, of course, was not my fault.”
The whole epistemological argument dies in the fourth sentence…”What we knew changed, sometimes day by day, as new pieces of information became known.” No, Dr. Harrington, you didn’t “know”…you “thought!” And what you “thought” was based on incomplete and ever changing data points provided by occasionally reliable, and often unreliable sources. And as it turns out, many of those sources upon which you based your “knowledge” were compromised by monetary greed, societal pressure, the need to conceal reputation-destroying facts, and/or flat out ignorance.
Your unforgivable crime, Dr. Harrington, which could have been avoided had you been afflicted with a tad less hubris, was the prideful presumption that you could not be wrong, and therefore anyone who deigned to question your “knowledge” was harming society and that they would necessarily need to give up their “individual freedom for the greater good.”
You “know” the Sun rises in the east, Dr. Harrington, you did not “know” Covid came from a pangolin…yet because you pretended to “know’ something you did not, you justified shutting down and demonizing anyone who sought to question your “knowledge.”
What you did, and the harm you caused, is shameful. Your apology is not accepted!
I really admire the way you are able to cut through the bullshit to see the underlying dislogic of what's going on. I can see why it took you a few days hard labor to get to it, though. My first reaction on reading these is just a spitting rage at the stupidity, you know how you start shaking your head and saying "no, no, no...." it's like a primal instinct of stupidity spotting that the conscious mind takes ages to explain in actual words.
Make that "memetic societies" and Luca Dellana is bang on, since that name was used in the early nineties in the fringes of political science studies here in Sweden; bureaucracy becoming ritual being a well-known and well-studied problem even before Parkinson wrote about the phenomenon.
It was argued that thanks to increasing speed of communication and corresponding increases in pace in careers and society, messages would become more and more akin to shorthand and pictographic symbolism than actual intelligence, meaning or debate - memes. As we know, the hypothesis was self-fulfilling and correct.
(Also suggested by others, f.e. Bradbury in 'Fahrenheit 451', where he used TV-walls, bookburnings and 60 yards wide billboards next to the motorways as visual examples of the same trend.)
Look at FB, Twitter, and even Substack. This little reply, barely longer than a footnote in an academic journal of the pre-internet age (the age of greater freedom too, but that's different text), would by most be considered too long to read. And while brevity may be the soul of wit, it is by no means the voice of clarity.
Finally, a ruling caste does not need creatives. What you talk about above and as Dellana notes, societies who become fully mimetic (or memetic, or as I'd like to call it emetic) dies. Aztecs. China before communism. The caliphates of islam. The British Empire. Many more - not just because of this but the pre-eminence of following ritual in all situations and on all levels makes stasis the ideal, and also makes everything more expensive to achieve, measured in resources used.
The danger now is that this will achieved on the global level, stopping the cycle of civilisations competing for dominance and instead causing a regressive rot rationalised as "climate saviourism" but in reality intended to maintain the capitalist-authoritarian status quo.
The social failure that inevitably follows the establishment of a closed, self-referential mimesis is due to the absence of error correction. Or really, more precisely, the re-direction of error correction away from reality testing (is what we're doing working?) towards ritual testing (did we do the ritual correctly?) The result is a steady accumulation of reality debt, leading to increasing dysfunction, brittleness, and ultimately collapse.
Good overview of how that works here:
https://radicalamerican.substack.com/p/late-stage-bureaucracy
"Reality debt." +1000.
Perfectly said.
when is it going to collapse? it seems to barely function.....
The government has completely lost control of the border, a minor territorial dispute in the former Eastern bloc is chewing its way through the entire Western economy, the American life expectancy has fallen by two entire years from 78 to 76 in a two-year time span with the excess death rate at the highest level since WWII despite the USA not even being at war, a $200 billion bank just evaporated, the standard of living in the United Kingdom is set to contract at the fastest pace since the 1950s, and, well, you get the idea: it's not a matter of 'when' it collapses, we are living in the collapse right now.
Our memetic society cares only about lagging indicators, and all the lagging indicators say we're in an accelerating collapse phase. That means the present reality is even worse; the masses just haven't gotten the news and accepted that reality yet, but that moment is coming sooner rather than later. Will it be too late to turn things around when the masses do figure out the true state of affairs? Probably, unless we really luck out and basically get a Caesar figure, because we're not voting our way out of this. Sadly, that ship has already sailed. As for a Caesar emerging, that appears to be an increasingly likely scenario, as our ruling class makes its collective retardation and degeneracy ever more obvious.
100. This is the long farewell we've been set up to endure. Though, in the near future, I believe we will realize this WAS a war, one launched from behind trillionaire-built walls, while those dying from the attacks and the families burying them remain mostly oblivious to the fact they've been killed with a bioweapon they voluntarily chose to inject. But I do believe it's a war the humans will win. I'm launching my own Substack soon about this.
How many times, working in “Big Tech” have I seen some callow, wet-behind-the-ears (and, frequently, “diverse”) “director” of this or that chanting the approved incantations with an obviously profound lack of understanding of what it all means and being praised for it. This is not a new phenomenon, but has been the basis for success in bureaucracies for as long as I can remember, and that’s no short while.
This is part of the human condition. Moderns sneer at mindless repetition of various phrases in institutional religion, while blithering on about “growth scenarios in global emerging markets while maintaining our carbon-neutral posture”.
There's a british sci-fi IP called "Warhammer 40 000". It premiered in 1987, as a miniatures boardgame. One of the playable factions is called Adeptus Mechanicus, a priesthood safeguarding technology and to whom technological progress and science is heresy, since the God-Emperor of Mankind has already discovered everything and put it in a big database, the fragments of which are spread around the galaxy. Sample quote:
"Strike the first rune upon the engine's casing employing the chosen wrench. Its tip should be anointed with the oil of engineering using the proper incantation when the auspices are correct. Strike the second rune upon the engine's casing employing the arc-tip of the power-driver. If the second rune is not good, a third rune may be struck in like manner to the first. This is done according to the true ritual laid down by Scotti the Enginseer. A libation should be offered. If this sequence is properly observed the engines may be brought to full activation by depressing the large panel marked "ON"."
The above was the first thing I thought of, reading your comment.
I remember quite well that expressing concern about all of the refugees coming into Sweden got you labeled a skinhead.
And look at Sweden now.
>got you labeled
>implying that things have really changed there
My Swedish friends would beg to differ.
Did I somehow imply that anything has changed? Of course not. I was pointing out early signs in the 80s.
You can imagine then, how this statement of mine was received by my fellow teachers of political science and related subjects, more than 15 yeas ago:
"The beer-swilling skinheads of Gamla Stan* and Helikopterplattan** were more accurate in their analyses of what migration from the Middle East and Africa wouldlead to, than any academic."
For those not familiar with the nuances of this little back-and-forth about skinheads (i.e. virtually everyone on the planet...):
*Gamla Stan is Stockholm's Old Town, a common hangout area for skins in the 1980s. As a side-note, punks were divided into two camps; one at Kafé 44 on Tjärhovsgatan (Tarred hoof street) where the communists et al gathered, and still do to this day, and the others who gathered at Oxtorget (Ox plaza, an almost fully concrete park off Stockholm's major whore-street) or Sergel Plaza in the city center.
**Helicopter landing pad floating in the water between Stockholm's south side and Old Town. During the 1980s it became an iconic hangout for skinheads.
Ah, a nollåtta! I lived outside of Gothenburg.
And yes, I could see where this was going, too.
Hahaha! Not by choice and not by birth, and I got out of that town back before Bildt became PM. Did live there duing the 1980s though, saw a lot of the underground scene.
Strongest memory I have of Göteborg (Gothenburg) is when I was moonlighting as doorman at a joint on Andra Långgatan, it was called Kropotkin or something like that. Still had the Stockholm dialect, so you can imagine how that went over... :)
Oh they knew exactly what they were doing. It was always intentional harm and to create the "crisis" needed to implement their greater agenda. The profits are a bonus.
100% Transfer of wealth is what all if this nonsense is about
Fall into line, Chris, or Jones will come back. Also polio.
Seriously, though, if you read "the science was moving incredibly fast" and have a reaction other than <snarf> and <delete>... well, don't say I didn't warn you. We already know these people need to be disempowered. (How's that for a word?) Intelligent people refusing to send their kids to universities with mandates is a nice first step. Too bad there are only about three of us.
Enrollment is down 8% nationwide. As the universities metamorphose into marxcissist convents, their cultural prestige is bleeding out.
Yep. I have two teenage daughters. We have money saved for them post high school. One is going into business with my husband in multi-family real estate. She’ll need some certifications and marketing. The other is going to be a personal trainer and open her own gym. So more certifications, marketing and money to lease the space. The remainder of what would have been their college money is going to be put down on a starter home.
So by the time most college kids are graduating with massive debt and useless degrees my kids should be self-employed, starting to earn real money, and home owners. Also, no indoctrination.
Just boycott the whole mess. Let them rot on the vine.
You're doing it exactly right. Good for you. More should follow your example.
Thanks. I’m just hoping one of them doesn’t change her mind and want to be a brain surgeon or something. ;)
Bravo!
"These people have gone crazy without noticing."
Absolutely. And it's getting worse for some. I was told the other day, without a trace of irony, that I need to "stop thinking with my head, and start thinking with my heart."
They are career narcissists and they are coming unhinged in face of their failure. It's worse than being the kicker that blows the final play of the big game. The most consequential event of their lives has come and gone and they got everything wrong. And the whole world knows it.
Your last two sentences should be engraved as the epitaph on their gravestones! The most concise summary of the current situation I’ve ever read!
The Age of Reason has devolved to the Age of Compassionate Monkeys. Think with your heart, come back to the group, and get groomed more. Chee Chee Chee!
This isn't only relevant to the shit show of the last three years, it's core to wokeness as well. There's no real ideology to the woke. They simply feel out what the mob's consensus is, and adopt that view sans reflection or comparison to what they believed five minutes before. It's networked hyper-mimesis, turning millions of weak-minded midwits into the pseudopods of a headless gibbering egregore whose only drive is will to power by way of consensus enforcement.
Like that scene in '1984' when they are celebrating Hate Week, and a speaker switches out Eastasia to Eurasia mid-sentence without any break in his speech.
Well said, John Carter.
Thanks for introducing me to 'egregore'!
You don't think there's some Red cadre directing Wokeness? (I honestly don't know.)
I think that there might be some, but Red cadres themselves are simply base instinct taking the place of thought. Caplan has found that many people have an “anti market bias”, among others, similar to Hayek’s point about people wanting to apply the rules of the family to society outside the family. In other words, ask a few thousand unreflective people if “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is a good idea, and 900 will say “Yes!”
Thanks very much, you've given me several things to pursue. I have always been the sort of useful idiot that helps Socialism along, dumb enough to clean the communal fridge at work!
Well, that’s the thing: there is a difference between acting “socialistic” in the sense of doing things to help others with no real expectation of benefit, and forcing others to do so (or expecting them to without force). Socialist societies tend to rely on the former, while mandating the force part, but there is nothing wrong with being nice and helping out!
Maybe don’t go clean out the fridge at some other random office though, at least not without asking... creeps people out :)
I changed into the annoying curmudgeon who, whenever anyone complained about the fridge, said loudly “that’s why Socialism will never work!”
Indeed, that and the tendency to start murdering everyone.
Good idea for Corporate Cubicle Performance Theater of the Absurd. "The Uptight Citizens' Brigade has arrived to clean your fridge, comrades!
Man, I miss that show :)
Well, it IS a "good idea", but it also produces bad reality. And also, as an idea, it does NOT reflect the reality of any society I've ever heard of..... Nobody in Stalin's Russia or Mao's China "needed" to be slaughtered....
I posit that any "good idea" that produces bad reality is not, in fact, a "good idea". :)
Yes, not a good idea in fact of reality, but only a "good idea" in theory.... Great minds think alike, but each in their own words....
Except the 'reality' inside the mind of a Dedicated Cadre, like a student at Stanford Law. "This old white cis-gender hierarchical professor, trying to teach me stuff I don't need to know. He got to go!"
As so many addicted-to-wishful-thinking people have learned to chant, "Perception is Reality." That was a genius Dick Move, whichever ex-hippy bullshit artist came up with that. My guess is Werner Ehrhard, or one of his disciples.
There are truths in lies....
These are the Emily Osters of the world. They have lived their lives believing they are the gold standard of intellectualism and that by virtue of their intelligence they are morally superior. They exist to tell other people what to do. So it's not that they got it wrong, just like Emily they were "in the dark", ya see. Those rogue academics weren't right, they got lucky and being rogue is still bad. They are still the good guys and they're still smarter than you.
"Just because you ended up being correct doesn't mean you were right."
The frustrating problem illustrated by the panel discussion is that people who aren’t that smart are presented as serious thinkers. See El Gato Malo’s March 13 Substack on the Glorification of Sub-Mediocrity. My high school social studies teacher, who, in 1979, did more to teach me how to write and think than anyone else, would have ripped this discussion apart (as Chris did) and would have directed the participants to try again.
That's why these people never go on any show that will actually push back. How often have you seen Fauci in front of a REAL audience taking REAL questions?
Peter Hotez on Joe Rogan's podcast, quietly bleeding out because a former UFC color guy asked him simple questions.
Yeah, and what was the name of the shitweasel that went on Rogan and had to admit he got Ivermectin from a human doctor for human reasons, then like the next day he was back on CNN calling Rogan a conspiracy theorist.
If you can't handle Joe Rogan, you don't have a chance against a real audience.
So true. He only takes questions from his uninformed and incurious fanboys. They smugly agree that anyone who questions him is anti-science. Compare to Trump who takes on all comers.
Sometimes Fauci even makes sure his opponents aren't allowed in the room:
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/kim-iversen-reveals-details-of-fauci
Great video interview here with Kim Iversen, the one who wasn't allowed to question him.
Thank you.
The overarching pathology — the big cultural sickness running through all the little pieces of sickness — is the now widely shared institutional view that consensus-focused speech is always healthy and responsible, while “voices that were working against the theme” are always dangerous. If you adhered to the consensus in the moment of crisis, but then the consensus turned out to be completely wrong, you behaved responsibly
Your comments above really show how "they" were able to pull it off. Once you understand the mindset running through society you could get experts to go along with horribly wrong things. Because even if they were wrong, they would still be ok in the revered group. The ones that were ultimately right are still dismissed as fringe crazy trouble makers. Literal madness in charge.
This is covered so thoroughly by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn in their last podcast. Being right means nothing in this new world.
I used to read Eric Toppel's tweets about covid, but stopped when he retreated something along the party lines about "people who get pregnant" instead of women.
Pronouns are a handy heuristic, aren't they?
Reality bites.
You picked a really illustrative example. Even the part "well-intentioned people..." because these genius experts are free to libel those who question 'science', and since Trump, they KNOW that there are 'malicious actors' out there...and since 'hate crimes' legislation, we have established the principle of being inside the head of the 'bad person' in jurisprudence...in other words, THOUGHT CRIMES. These effing weak morons, not strong enough to debate, raised in comfort of never being challenged to justify their precious credentials...free to consider that some things "should not be talked about" in an academic setting! I really think that the event that broke their brains was the election of Trump. They like to think that they love democracy and tolerate all people, but then those bloody deplorable peasants dare to vote for a gauche reality TV star, and ALL BETS ARE OFF. Masks dropped in 2017. These institutional intellectuals remind me of the eunuchs of Byzantium, or the medieval Catholic monks unable to comprehend the Protestant revolution. I really want to thank you for this piece and the insert about mimetic societies. I had been heading in that direction but I didn't have the vocabulary or the concept. God, that's most of what we were doing at NSA, even. Ritual intelligence sifting and reporting with no real purpose or direction, ostensibly for the 'foreign policy objectives' crafted by ostensible 'policy makers' pretending to be Statesmen purportedly working in the 'national interest' but it was all a sham. The only real result was money flowing to the contracting corporations. Maybe I need to go paint a ceiling now.
Great word! You 're like W.F. Buckley: inventing words and phrases that succinctly describe something, animate or not. I think you've got real potential in writing, so keep it up! Of course, you won't be welcomed at many universities: neither was Buckley. You and he are..... anti-consensusists!
Danny Huckabee
The great lesson of COVID was how little we can trust our "betters."
Here is how it should have gone: We have these ideas. Here is our best advice. We're going to protect those we feel are the most vulnerable. Other than that use your best judgement because we *know* nothing for sure.
How it went: We changed our minds every ten minutes and called you a conspiracy theorist if you reminded us that we changed our mind every ten minutes (or, you know, missed the 10:05 update on masks), and then we made rules that ruined people's lives based on things we were only guessing about and now we want to act like you're the bad guy for telling us we had no right to act so authoritarian especially as we amply demonstrated if there was a possible wrong choice, we made it.
Of course, what is truly maddening is they will do exactly the same thing the next time around because none of them have paid even the slightest price for their arrogance and therefore have learned nothing.
But next time we must refuse the tendency to comply. Non-compliance of at least 30% of the population negates the power of the wanna-be authoritarians.
"Betters," indeed! To those of us "serfs" who were being manipulated through perversion of legal authority on multiple levels--mandated closures, 2 weeks to flatten curves and the endless updates on "Covid positive" tests (without regard to how many PCR cycles it took to get to a "positive")--it was confounding. The ONLY question that kept going through my mind was, "HOW are they justified in calling a virus that has a demonstrable 99.5% survival rate, a 'pandemic'?"
It was designed to incite fear--to increase a willingness to be exposed to the REAL pandemic: the already patented, untested "vaccines" they pushed simply for profit. And just like a cult, the most gullible became the enforcers through peer pressure and character assassination. I agree with Chris, the weapon of choice was THEIR uninformed consensus and self-righteous claim of being the only arbiters of "truth."
These people play with words. What "pandemic" means is simply it's global, meaning it is occurring everywhere or virtually everywhere. What it doesn't mean: that it's deadly or that even though it is global, it is ubiquitous in communities themselves. A cold virus can be "pandemic" and kill no one. A disease can be "pandemic" and maybe deadly but also relatively rare in the grand scheme of things
But . . . they called it a "pandemic" to scare people into obedience without making sure people understood that "pandemic" doesn't even remotely require something to be deadly or even particularly widespread in communities.
Well said. And well-debunked. Just one comment: the problem is not consensusism.
These folks don't believe in the value of mindlessly honoring consensus any more than you do. When the need arises, they will happily and vehemently argue against following the consensus. That could happen as early as next week. But that does not necessarily mean that they are intellectually dishonest.
I speak from experience when I say that many bright and well-meaning university types have gone through an entire career leaping from one conclusion to the next without ever learning how to construct a logical argument. I not only met them, I almost became one of them. I was considered quite able as a grad student but dug myself into a deep ideological hole when already well into the Ph.D. level. Ultimately, found myself working as a self-taught scientific programmer. There, computers taught me what years of graduate education had not: an Olympic-class intuitive leap with impressive rhetorical vapor trails connecting the endpoints is not the same thing as a logical bridge.
I guess I missed the worldwide edict that made opinions illegal.
And debate.
And agreeing to disagree.
I had the same thing happen to me on a personal level. Two years ago a friendly cat started coming around. The wife and kids started feeding it and giving it attention. I protested, as it was clear that someone else's cat would soon become our cat but was poo-pood as I was not an expert on cats, which is true. I'm a dog person.
When it was clear that the cat was pretty much close to becoming our cat I noticed the cat looked pregnant, a subject I remarked upon quite vociferously in a last ditch effort to not have a cat. Of course, I didn't know what I was talking about. The next door neighbor (who is an expert on cats) inspected the feline and was sure I didn't know what I was talking about. Very sure. Everybody agreed, that cat wasn't pregnant and I didn't know anything.
Two weeks later and my oldest was running back from the barn yelling "Kittens! We have kittens!" Then we had four cats. Yay. Nothing like paying for four cats you didn't want to get spayed/neutered and vaccinated. I guess the kids were happy, but a puppy could have provided just as much happiness and would actually love them back. Also, puppies are at least sorry when they make a mess on the floor
I am still not considered any kind of expert on cats (never will be even if I spot 1000 pregnant cats) but I am exempt from cleaning up any explosive cat diarrhea if it occurs in our house. That has been a small victory for me whenever that unfortunate event occurs but what gravels my ass is that the "expert" cat lady next door is also exempt.
The "experts" will never pay for being wrong about the very things they were supposed to get right. We will never be right in the eyes of the experts or those fool wives who listened to them. Just don't clean up the cat diarrhea if you can avoid it. That shit should be left to those who listened to the experts.
hahaha!
This is clearly hate speech against cats and should be deleted.
/s
This is a non-apology apology, if ever there was one. “I’m not apologizing because what I did was based on what I knew which changed from day to day…so you see, I did nothing wrong because the facts changed which caused what I knew to change which, of course, was not my fault.”
The whole epistemological argument dies in the fourth sentence…”What we knew changed, sometimes day by day, as new pieces of information became known.” No, Dr. Harrington, you didn’t “know”…you “thought!” And what you “thought” was based on incomplete and ever changing data points provided by occasionally reliable, and often unreliable sources. And as it turns out, many of those sources upon which you based your “knowledge” were compromised by monetary greed, societal pressure, the need to conceal reputation-destroying facts, and/or flat out ignorance.
Your unforgivable crime, Dr. Harrington, which could have been avoided had you been afflicted with a tad less hubris, was the prideful presumption that you could not be wrong, and therefore anyone who deigned to question your “knowledge” was harming society and that they would necessarily need to give up their “individual freedom for the greater good.”
You “know” the Sun rises in the east, Dr. Harrington, you did not “know” Covid came from a pangolin…yet because you pretended to “know’ something you did not, you justified shutting down and demonizing anyone who sought to question your “knowledge.”
What you did, and the harm you caused, is shameful. Your apology is not accepted!
I really admire the way you are able to cut through the bullshit to see the underlying dislogic of what's going on. I can see why it took you a few days hard labor to get to it, though. My first reaction on reading these is just a spitting rage at the stupidity, you know how you start shaking your head and saying "no, no, no...." it's like a primal instinct of stupidity spotting that the conscious mind takes ages to explain in actual words.