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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.