Eudaemonia

Jan 25th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
8 comments

Every city in ancient Greece had its own model of eudaemonia, translated as both “human flourishing” and “the good life.” The point was that society was pointed toward an apex of pleasurable existence, like an optimization of common sense.

Now we have no such sane thing. Instead we have utilitarianism, which is basically a statistical idea: the best plan is that which makes the greatest number of people respond on a survey (or ballot) that they are happy.

There are just a few problems with utilitarianism. First, it creates a false target; are we sure life is happy, and not simply well-spent? Next, it relies on the perceptions of individuals who are too commonly deceiving themselves. Finally, it assumes that raw numbers tell the whole story. “The 65% of our population who are imbeciles really love it, so it must be best!”

It’s unsociable to mention that even in the best societies, a relatively small number have the fortunate skill of discernment. The rest follow along, or more commonly sabotage what this small number do, with some people in the middle who can just barely figure out who to follow.

For this reason, utilitarianism is a ridiculous proposition. Like democracy and consumerism, it’s a method of un-leadership. The point is not to figure out what our best minds think, but to ask our least qualified people en masse what they think they might prefer.

We might think of all of the ancient Greek experience as a whole as the pursuit of eudaemonia. The Greeks knew how to survive, but the question was how to live well. The Greeks were surrounded by barbarian tribes who were also able to eat, find shelter, organize cities, etc. But the Greeks wanted more than function; they wanted a goal, a quest, a cause and a meaning to life.

This type of purpose required going beyond the comfort zones of most people. It transcended the individual/collective split that defined most societies. It even blew past ideas of property and equality. Instead, it was a sense of tribal goal, not of the finite type as material goals are, but of a spiritual sort. It was a new vision of the reason for society and culture.

Modern people are inclined to, thinking in a utilitarian sense, bemoan how this denied the individual. But what if someone didn’t want to go along with this? we are trained to object. The answer was simple: then that individual went looking for another society, as is not uncommon in our time or theirs.

For the rest however there was a sense of the unitive. The individual was not separate from nature, or society, but joined with those in harmonious motion toward a goal. Even all the bad things that happen in life took on a new meaning as they were seen as part of the experience of struggling toward this goal. In having a goal above the material, the Greeks transcended the dichotomies that divide societies and found a better purpose.

Most societies do not encourage the unitive. Their goal is to distance the individual from reality so the individual feels a sense of power through socialization. This makes the group hold together, and it then becomes an effective unit which can be manipulated by some individuals.

However, with each wedge we drive between ourselves and the notion of life itself as having a value outside the material, the more miserable we become. We have removed the ability to create meaning from ourselves, and handed it over to the day-to-day struggles that we loathe because they are boring. And we have done it in the name of liberation, equality, etc.

If there is a Satan, he is half composed of those who take advantage of the stupidity of others, and half of the willful ignorance and denial that the victims then adopt in order to deny their own helplessness. Instead of the good life, we have a constant mental bickering and empty, purposeless duty.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: ·

Jobs are jails

Jan 24th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
58 comments

An unfortunate fact of modern life: we have replaced callings with jobs and careers.

“Jobs” are things you attend where other people tell you what to do. In order to insure that you do not become too valuable to replace, your task will be broken down into simple steps and highly isolated fields of “expertise.” The result is apocalyptic boredom.

“Careers” are designed to convince you that a string of jobs equals a purpose. There’s a nod and a wink here, which is you recognizing that you’re disposable, and so seeing the “career” — the job of having jobs of the type you like, and hopefully moving up the ladder — as more important than the company you’re now working for.

In contrast, a calling was a skill and the ability to run a business around it. If you were a cobbler, a blacksmith, a teacher, a stonemason, an armorer, a priest or a farmer, you were an independent businessperson producing actual value.

This was distinct from the commercial class, who took the products of your labor and traded them around and spiced them up, making great profit from the cityfolk. For example, if you were a country spinner, and made fine cloth and sewed it into clothes, a city merchant might add a crocheted, stylized flower and call it a new design.

We can’t even relate to what kind of world that was. Today you tumble out of bed as a youngster, and then get shuffled through a series of grades until they find the right funnel to drop you in, and then pour you down it. You then find a job, and they spruce that up into a career so you have something to talk about at cocktail parties.

Everyone knows but few will say the obvious: very little of each day goes to actual work. The rest is mostly activities to include others, such as meetings or group projects. There’s exciting paperwork. There’s waiting on coworkers. There’s goofing off. At the end of the day, an hour of real work has occurred.

In the meantime, from the top of the cycle to the bottom, everyone is fairly miserable. The rich hate the way they are slaves to their jobs, but can’t stop. The demi-professional middle classes are terrified of losing their jobs or even worse, not rising. Everyone else just hangs on.

One ugly side-effect of this is crushing boredom, frustration, resentment and a thirst for oblivion. People run out of the offices and fly screaming into the sports stadiums. They don’t care what the beer costs. Smash the brain, pound it flat, make it stop sending back signals of misery.

They take it out on their kids too. Either they’re typical suburban dads, who are never around and when they are need to be (a) drunk or (b) zoned out and thus are “too busy” to toss a football around with the whiny kid, or they go the direct but less damaging route and beat their children bloody.

The cycle goes on and on. What can we do? First we have to look at the problem of modern jobs: they are designed to be interchangeable parts and thus are geared toward morons, and so must be boring. Even worse, the competition is fierce because there’s always someone worse off than you who wants to spend more hours “working” for lower pay than you get. To reverse that:

  • Halve the workforce. Get women back into the home. If they don’t have families, let them live with their parents. Very few of them want to be in the workplace, but they’ve been programmed by media to consider their disposable jobs “important.” Yet few succeed and none thrive, ending up instead bitter old maids. In the meantime, men come to hate them, because women are natural detail-maniacs, which drives men up a wall since someone who is always in detail mode will never know when to skip a detail.
  • Increase loyalty. Bring back the pension and the cumulative benefits. Encourage people to spend 20-30 years at a company. Get rid of do-nothing federal programs that pretend to take over this function. Perhaps allow greater employee vesting in 401k plans. If you’re getting matching funds to a percentage of the number of the years you’d been at the firm, you might stick around.
  • Deport immigrants. Our entire workforce is being shoved upward because we keep importing ludicrously cheap workers to do our construction and agriculture job. Forget that; replace them with traditional Americans. While no one doubts that illegal aliens work hard, they take frequent breaks and quality control is terrible — our construction industry became mediocre overnight. But even worse was that the immigrants displaced many people, and forced them into administrative or sales jobs that they’re not qualified for, and thus are botching.
  • Stop being nice. If Jimmy is smarter than Johnny, say it. You don’t need to say it to his face. Stop pretending that everyone can do every job if they just attend the right series of two week do-nothing training sessions. Put Jimmy on top and keep Johnny on the floor. Our bureaucracies murder themselves by promoting the incompetent.

These politically incorrect suggestions are sure to shock, horrify, and abjectly nauseate our readers. Hold that thought — savor it and relish just how disgusted you are. Now when you go back to your job in the morning, you’ll be able to compare your disgust at these suggestions to your drear misery and see which is worse.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: ·

Global concreting

Jan 23rd, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
6 comments

The foes of sensible environmental policy want you to believe that there is a binary question to conservation. Yes, you believe in global warming; no, you’re a denier — there are no other options. Either you’re good or you’re not.

Many people are suspicious of global warming because it’s one of those-easily abused catch-all concepts like “Jesus told me to do this” or “the Revolution demands this, comrade!” We instinctively do not trust the great ideological crusade. That’s sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, since some ideological crusades are presumably worth undertaking. That is, if we assume there are ideologies based on consequences in reality and not wishful thinking (“morality”).

As is fitting in a time of liberal politics, based in liberal democracy and with even our conservatives cementing their ideas with liberal goals, global warming is used to justify the liberal crusade for global redistribution of wealth. The liberals themselves don’t believe it, but because their ideology is based on personal satisfaction through socialization, and not results in reality, they don’t care. It sounds good and brings everyone together.

This of course puts humanity in a terrible place: as far as our public discourse goes, a very important issue has been tied to a divisive ideology. There is no way to win here except to give in to the liberal side, which half the population will not do. That in turn gives the other half a chance to act like Jesus On the Cross as they lament the ignorance of “the others.”

As a result, to put it mildly, the debate on global warming is poisoned, and it was poisoned by the left. There is nowhere to go with this issue now except to ignore it until the end. Caught in the middle are those of us who think something weird may be going on with the climate, but that global warming is not an accurate description.

What else could be to blame?

Land cover changes that alter the reflection of sunlight from land surfaces (albedo) are another major driver of global climate change. The precise contribution of this effect to global climate change remains a controversial but growing concern. The impact of albedo changes on regional and local climates is also an active area of research, especially changes in climate in response to changes in cover by dense vegetation and built structures. These changes alter surface heat balance not only by changing surface albedo, but also by altering evaporative heat transfer caused by evapotranspiration from vegetation (highest in closed canopy forest), and by changes in surface roughness, which alter heat transfer between the relatively stagnant layer of air at Earth’s surface (the boundary layer) and the troposphere. An example of this is the warmer temperatures observed within urban areas versus rural areas, known as the urban heat island effect. – Eo-Earth

As said around these parts before, global warming is convenient because it groups all of humanity’s destructive effects on the environment into a single measure, which is carbon output. This allows us to ignore other forms of pollution and the uglier fact that no land without a human touch can be found anymore. Even more importantly, land that is truly undeveloped is getting rarer and rarer.

Environmentalists from a more sensible time would wave away global warming as a detail. They would point to the simple fact that humanity has an exponential growth curve. Everywhere we go, we take over all useful land and divide it up into little parcels. We fence those in, cut off the natural species, and then cover the rest with concrete.

The result is many dysfunctions at once converging on a larger dysfunction. Natural ecosystems are shattered, removing their replenishing function. There are fewer trees to transform CO2 into oxygen. Rainfall is not retained, but becomes runoff, depleting the soil and poisoning the water with too many nutrients. Finally, the concrete which covers the whole mess tends to reflect heat and water while preventing anything from growing where it is.

Overpopulation, land overuse and industrial construction are the missing elements that humanity is trying to hide behind global warming. Cutting carbon allows these bigger problems to continue, which may be why we want global warming so badly to be the culprit. Slashing carbon will crimp our lifestyles, but facing overpopulation requires we make some hard moral decisions that no one wants to face.

The most revealing part of this situation is that our environmental sins come from the same root as all our other sins. We are dominating by social factors, like how our ideas appear to the judging minds of others, or how popular our solutions are. Complex and difficult thoughts will never be as popular as a harmless scapegoat that allows people to avoid any real change. And so the circus bleats on.

Posted in: Conservation.
Tagged: · ·

Appeal

Jan 22nd, 2012
by Nicholas Marville.
4 comments

Oftentimes one hears it whispered that we live in an age of appearance rather than substance. An age of what seems to be, rather than what is. An era when impression weighs heavier than content. Something catches our eye; we glimpse at it for a brief moment. Perhaps we let the thing slide through our fingers before putting it back on the stack and leaving it be. We move on, elsewhere.

To many, that is what the Postmodern era –- or rather, living within the Postmodern era –- feels like. We lack the time and clarity of mind to focus upon a thing; there is always the next thing to do, the next place to be. We have to do with snippets of information; we are too much in a hurry to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The picture of the greater whole escapes us, and we accept this because we are busy.

And sometimes we are driven by a quest for meaning to glimpse past the part of the puzzle to comprehend the greater whole. The greater whole is not formed of parts, but the relationship between those parts, and from the interaction and interconnections between them, a greater structure and order emerges. One such glimpse is a fleeting vision of the value of culture.

Cultural awareness is more valuable and important than a dismissive attitude toward other races or cultures. There is some moral difficulty in being proud of the acts of our ancestors, in the sense that there is no point in being proud of something over which one totally has no influence. It’s the same thing as being moody when a certain football team loses a match. If we feel pride over what our ancestors did, must we also be ashamed of — for example — the slave trade?

Yet, and this is more important, we need cultural awareness if we are to make sense of the country in which we live. Of the rules and customs, for example. As a student once said to me: “People laugh about an aboriginal wearing a penis-tube, but if you ask him why he’s wearing that penis tube, he will tell you a story. Western people today won’t be able to tell you anything about what they wear other than; ‘it’s fashion’ or; ‘it’s my taste’.”

We can take our ancestors and their actions as models. Of what we aspire to be, and of what we do not aspire to be. When the Roman historian Livy described the actions of Romulus, he did not intend his reader to blindly revere and imitate the founder or Rome. Instead, he wanted his reader to look at Romulus’ actions, to study the circumstances under which those actions took place, and to make his own conclusions about that conduct as a matter of learning.

Those who stumble on the value of culture feel something rumbling within their minds. They feel the weight of a dying society, and the choking futility it creates. They seek escape in an artistic muse, in an age of aristocratic elegance. An age where girls could be girls and boys could grow up to be men. And everywhere around us glimmered golden-yellow and green, everything rocked and shone, caressed by the fresh breeze of spring and accompanied by orchestrated music.

Those who resist modernity are fed up with a decadent and aimless age, so they invent new symbolism from summaries of the past. They mold together Teutonic knights, the genius inventors of the industrial age, proud castles, innocent maidens and idyllic towns. They forge a ‘utopia’ from ranks of disciplined and confident soldiers, exquisite dining rooms, majestic architecture and craftsmanship.

And this is what our leaders and representatives must do in a fractured and shattered age. In this age, cognitive learning is vastly undervalued, and as such the iron logic of facts hardly makes an impression on anyone safe a few. Our leaders and representatives must learn to speak a language of images, of painting a beautiful landscape that seduces both listener and viewer. Not until art has won the heart of the audience reason and logic can captivate its mind.

Posted in: Conservation.
Tagged: ·

Being a fan

Jan 21st, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
19 comments

Bizarre as it is, most people identify more with sports teams than they do with important questions of their future.

For example, to me it would seem important to know what direction we’re heading in, or what our culture is, or even what our values are. In service of those values I’d camp out at a giant stadium to scream slogans, eat $9 hot dogs and throw beer cans at the umpires.

However, study after study shows that people go into elections knowing (on average) no more than they did incidentally, meaning that whatever was on the TV or in the newspaper on the desk when they passed by is the limit of their knowledge.

In addition, many people find little of identification in elections, issues, philosophies or discussion. While these things aren’t complicated, they also aren’t fun, and so people would rather pursue the game than pay attention to more important things.

But the games themselves are baffling. The teams are composed of professional athletes from all over the world, owned by people from all over the world, and really have nothing in common with the city for which they are named, except that they play their home games there.

In addition, the franchises are insanely expensive and the cities dish out hundreds of millions for the stadiums. It’s one thing to complain about military expenses or bemoan the state of the schools, but then the voters seem to approve these bread and circuses initiatives every time.

Not that more money will solve our education problem; if it were that easy, we would have solved it long ago.

I’m not against games. In fact, I like the games people play in these big stadiums. Perhaps if I went down my street, recruited a few dozen people, and set up massive games of touch football or baseball, we’d all have a lot more fun. It would be easier to engage than watching tiny figures on a screen.

Yet sports remains the national passtime, and it’s a safe activity that lets us discharge our aggression in “harmless” ways, and it keeps the herd from getting too unruly. As a result, we encourage it, perhaps not aware that energy which should go to more essential matters is getting frittered away.

Even worse is our tendency to make all things into a game which resembles mass media produced TV sports instead of the pickup football and baseball games of our communities past.

As a wise man has said, it’s irrational to attempt to roll back the past. All you can do is point our future in a saner direction, even if toward the values of the past. Along those lines, we can make a few suggestions.

First, games could become more natural. No one plays on a team unless they were born in the place that team claims to be from. Second, instead of politics being Republican and Democrat teams, we need it more like pickup games — shirts versus skins, on a specific issue, or even better, value.

For example, our bloated plutocratic politicians could gather in DC and call a game on whether our goal in schooling is to educate to an average, or to educate the best to the highest ability. Take them all out to a big open field and let them have at it. We’ll each cheer for the idea we want to win.

This vision is implausible perhaps, but no less implausible than the idea that a nation which values TV sports more than values can exist for much longer.

Posted in: Socialization.

The Immune System

Jan 20th, 2012
by Ted Swanson.
10 comments

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche cannot be described as a traditional philosopher.  He consistently returns to the the theme of health, he refers to himself as a cultural physician, and he famously wrote, “my genius is in my nostrils.”

He may be referring to how in everyday life we are predominantly conscious of the divide between true and false, and less aware of the divide between healthy and sick. Some would say this occurred because we have taken our more primitive functions for granted and fallen in love with our brains instead, forgetting the wisdom of our other organs.

The metaphor of the immune system will help explain this. When a disease invades the body, the immune system is not at all obliged to accept the disease at face value — in other words, to accept the “truth” of the disease.  If it did, it would be a pretty shoddy immune system. 

In a sense, the function of the immune system could be described as irrational. The immune system clashes with disease in a war for power. Each fights for the ultimate prize: more life! The immune system cannot wait for the brain to make a decision. It must be constantly xenophobic and warlike.

The immune system does not operate on the level of true/false. The same is true at the cultural level.  We are too in touch with our brains, and not enough with our immune system and our nostrils. Training our brains to become comfortable with cultural ruin is not a solution; it is a rationalization.

Avoiding rationalization requires we embrace the irrational. Our cultural antibodies must irrationally fight the disease without appeal to the brain. Today we are reliant on medicine in both a literal sense, and a metaphorical one. Like a patient who becomes accustoms to antibiotics, and thus loses the ability to fight disease without them, our rationalization of the status quo on a cultural level has weakened us.

Imagine three different tribes. Tribe A has superior intelligence, medicine and technology. Tribe B has superior spirit, religion and willpower. Suppose that these two tribes are warring with each other.  Tribe A uses medicine and technology to heal its sick and wounded at all costs. Tribe B shuns medicine and instead puts its faith entirely in the will of the universe to heal its sick and wounded. Clearly, Tribe A will crush Tribe B, and perhaps only a very few of exceptional health from Tribe B will survive.

But out of the mist comes Tribe C! Tribe C uses medicine only in emergencies and otherwise puts its faith in the will of the universe. They believe that the strong will survive with or without medicine. Perhaps in the short term Tribe A will get the better of Tribe C thanks to their superior technology and medicine. But it’s not at all hard to imagine that in the long run,  Tribe C will emerge victorious. The literal and metaphorical immune system of Tribe A will become dependent on medicine, while the literal and metaphorical immune system of Tribe C will remain robust thanks to nature.

There is nothing moral or immoral about a disease invading a body.  The disease does what it does.  But by the same token, the immune system does what it does. It is no different when a native culture resists and rejects foreign ideas and influence. It has nothing to do with morality nor does it have anything to do with what is “true” or “false.” 

The antibody is as irrational as the disease, and as single-minded. The question is not about true and false, but a will to power and the will to life. We should not fight or justify our own irrational cultural impulses. We should integrate them. They like our immune systems ensure a long and healthy life.

Posted in: Conservation.
Tagged: · ·

SOPA a distraction

Jan 19th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
7 comments

The hysteria sweeps the country like a giant wave. If you do not join it, it threatens to crush you with its weight.

Almost literally everyone you know has participated. The peer pressure is immense. Equally huge is the need to have some kind of response when people talk about it. The correct response is “I signed the petition and I’m really worried about this.”

Like most panics, it is designed to be something you cannot refuse. You look bad for not taking part. As a result most people join in, repeating the exact same phrases and the same dire warnings. This could be the end of all good things, they warn.

The hysteria itself is infectious. In a time that prides itself in safety, very little happens. In fact, we’re so safe, regulated, managed, administered and overseen that life is generally boring. We are always ready for that great hype that could rocket us into full-on feeling like we’re alive.

But even more, the people around us want a reason to be important. They want to be the brave revolutionaries standing up to a vile government, or fascist corporation, or even diabolical king or religion. Even more, they want it to be easy to do so, like signing a petition.

There is defiance in their eyes, but it is the kind of defiance that fills the eyes of a bully who knows that there are no real consequences for his actions. People are distracted. Soon it will be over, with no witnesses. Instead here, people relish the chance to act like rebels with no penalties to pay.

People on the internet adore pseudo-activism like this. It makes them feel huge and important. It has zero actual consequence. It’s a talking point. The novelty of it makes them seem like good people and morally upstanding citizens to their social groups. Even for just a few clicks.

SOPA/PIPA are reputed to be the start to George Orwell’s 1984. The government will gain the ability to shut down websites, and so the censorship will begin, with the next stop being telescreens and secret police.

Except that George Orwell’s vision was government-approved. It fit right into the narrative that the West needed during the Cold War: the other side were authoritarian, controlling, paranoid and against fun, love and freedom. Therefore, fight back against government power!

What they didn’t tell you of course is that acting in that way made government more powerful. An official list of impermissible acts had been agreed on, so people would stop looking for other violations. And any time government needed a distraction, it could offer a sacrificial Orwellian gesture to distract us.

SOPA/PIPA are government bills to allow the USA to shut down websites that are pirating warez/media or selling counterfeit goods. The government already has the ability to do this through the DMCA; it can submit a ton of those and force a site offline, if it’s in the USA, or encourage major providers to block external sites.

Even more, the average citizen has this ability. If you spot an offensive website, call up the hosting provider (easily found) and complain about the offensive content. If enough people do it, the web site goes away.

True, there are now free speech and semi-free-speech hosts. If you take your $200 down to a courtroom and have your lawyer fill out some papers, you can initiate a lawsuit that will cost that website more than it can afford to keep running. Censorship has always been the way of the internet.

Of course, it’s not government doing it, and that’s what they’ve trained you to look out for. If a news source claims it’s not from the government, you trust it. If a political movement claims to be fighting the government, you join it. If ideas get censored because they’re unpopular, you’re OK with it.

Right now the hype is at epic fever pitch. The Crowd is swarming and wants to ensure that you join. However, they’re hyping a non-issue and the whole point is to force you into their circle, so you start doing what they want. How easily you are controlled.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · · ·

The NPR style

Jan 18th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
9 comments

Back in the 1980s, we heard a lot about how communist countries had “state-run radio” or some other obvious propaganda device. It conjured up images of banks of censors in basements producing irrationally exuberant radio and TV to manipulate a sleepwalking population.

Now the sleepwalking population is us. Method is often irrelevant; it doesn’t matter whether a large company produces the media, or some dissident hipster alone in a toolshed, or some vast Communist empire of college-trained propagandists. The result is the same.

For example, what does the Communist government preach?

Everything is fine; we have it under control; things are even going great; the bad guys are really bad and will kill your babies; join us and fight them and you will always be accepted.

But really corporate radio is not much different.

Everything is fine; your life will be even better with our product; it’s totally great and will get you laid; there are people who are not fun and they don’t like our product and want to control you; join us in the fight for freedom and buy our product and you will always be accepted.

And hipster radio is even closer to the original.

Everything is fine if you’re one of us; we’re living the good life by not being like the others; while they suffer in boring Catholic jobs and conservative sex lives, we’re rocking hard; the bad guys want to ruin your fun; join us in conforming to non-conformity and you will always be not only accepted, but hipper than others because we accept you.

With that little illusion out of the way, we can take a look at state-run radio in the United States. While our National Public Radio is not fully funded by the state, or directly controlled, it seems to share its personnel exclusively with media and government elites. It handily releases stories that are convenient. And it pumps out propaganda as much as Pravda or East German radio did.

NPR however is subtler. To maintain the illusion of freedom, our propaganda must disguise itself as the alternative to propaganda. This means it must be permissive, but also have a sense of higher moral calling, so you sense that (a) there are no rules but (b) good people behave a certain way and we’ll tell you what it is.

To that end, NPR has developed a distinctive style. If it were music, it would be minor-key. It is a lamentation that wraps itself around “uplifting” ideas that never quite change the mood. It is an affirmation of the crushing power of normalcy while doing its best to notice all the quirky, off-beat, ironic, unique, different and non-conformist details.

In short, it’s a deliberate paradox designed to hide its agenda behind a social statement. Its predominant hook is that its announcers use big(ger) words than average, and speak in hushed tones of awe about weighty topics, and basically act like the kids in the theatre department in high school.

A typical NPR broadcast resembles the ones from the Katrina era:

This block once rang out with the vibrant calls of children at play. A neighborhood for the disadvantaged, Skull Head Point was in the process of pulling itself up by its bootstraps when the storm hit and all but obliterated any hope. Here, neighbors dodged bullets to put together a community eatery and vegetable co-op. Teachers concealed the bodies of the previous night’s shooting so their children could have a few minutes of unabridged delight in a quick pick-up soccer game. Even the local police got in the act, dressing up as Santa and handing out toys made from old warrants. It was a neighborhood of hard times but good spirits, of a dark past but a bright future. And then came the storm.

Now the only basketballs are deflated in ponds of water from which shiny white bones protrude, and the nightly violence is so intense that residents have stopped buying doors because they are simply stolen too fast. Skull Head Point, like so many other aspirations in the twilight of this city, was crushed by the storm that tore down half the neighborhood and flooded the rest. Ida May Barnes, a pancake cook at the bullet-riddled 666 Diner in town that’s the last good employment most residents can get, doesn’t fault President George W. Bush for the storm. “But he sure could get us some new roads, a little faster,” she says with a laugh before she returns to her task of picking up the metatarsals of the dead.

This is intoned in a warm, full voice like 1970s teachers reading from children’s books. Sentences are pronounced with a distinct downward slant, modulating toward a lower key and slower pace as they go on. The timbre of the voice changes too and gets fuller and huskier, as if sadness pervaded it without invitation. Lots of trendy topics are cited to either make you feel like part of the gang, or remind you that you have work to do in order to be as cool as the others.

All of this conceals the fact that the people on this radio station are doing the bidding of their masters, and make ludicrously low salaries, and probably are not qualified for anything outside of this type of “social” job, where a worker is not valued for ability so much as the ability to make other people pay attention to that worker.

The NPR style has infested all forms of mass communication now. It used to be “edgy” and “hip” because it was both bleak and yet trendy and hopeful, so all the dummies in the marketing departments decided to emulate it in the hopes it would sell their products. Legions of blogs and podcasts also imitate it because it is their ideal. Other radio stations took it on to compete.

The result says a lot about the American spirit at this time. We don’t crave red-blooded, clear-sighted and realistic news. We don’t even crave the venal. Instead, we like this mish-mash of the pathetic, lurid and state propaganda, all disguised as an ironic human interest story for intellectuals.

It’s as if we have given up on substance and affirmed style itself. In doing so, we have revealed how empty we are. We don’t want solutions to our problems; we want distractions. We don’t want reality; we want to feel like a nation of self-appointed intellectuals, pushing away problems not because we’re in denial but because we are somehow wiser than reality itself.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · · ·

Turnabout

Jan 17th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
13 comments

Sit down and have a cold drink. The projector comes on and the movie is starting. You can see from the grain and color of the film that it is older, but not that much older — maybe when your parents were young.

This is a movie about teenagers. They’re taking borrowing cars from their parents and driving down to the wharf, going to smoke cigarettes and fool around. One of them lights up a joint. Purloined beers get passed around. One girl starts dancing. They’re away from home, actually having fun! It’s a magic moment.

But a bright light comes out of nowhere. They shield their eyes, children again. Men in blue uniforms swarm the wharf and take them downtown to the police station. Parents are called. An old fogey judge shakes a judgmental finger at these kids, and he says:

“Smoking dope! Staying out late! Drinking and carousing! No good will come of you. You need to learn a lesson and learn it good. We won’t tolerate your misbehavior here. You’re threatening the values and morals that hold our society together.”

What a fascist. He’s telling you what you can’t do. He’s trying to control you with his dried-up old accusations and out-of-date morality. Makes your blood boil? Fast-forward by thirty or forty years.

Those kids got their parents to pay bail. They went home and took their lumps. Then the next year they went off to college. There it was a non-stop party: drugs, free love, booze and giving the finger to those old fogeys!

They graduated, went out into the world. They found careers, and made money. Many of them work for the government now and rub shoulders with the same men in blue. Most of them do not want their children to experiment with drugs, free love and alcoholism.

And still their tiresome morality rules us. They have become the fogeys, shaking their finger at anyone who does not do exactly what the fogeys want him to. If anyone steps out of line, that person is threatening the values that hold our society together.

  • In a 1993 Ron Paul Survival Report newsletter, alarm was raised about “The Disappearing White Majority.” The newsletter referenced the growing birth rate of people of color and expressed a pro-segregation stance with this comment: “It is human nature that like attracts likes. But whites are not allowed to express this same human impulse. Except in a de facto sense, there can be no white schools, white clubs, or white neighborhoods. The political system demands white integration, while allowing black segregation.”
  • In May 2011, Paul told MSNBC that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended Jim Crow. He questioned the act because it took authority away from property owners. Evidently, Paul values the rights of racist property owners over those of African Americans whose housing, employment, schooling and leisure activities were all dictated by Jim Crow.

– “Top Five Racist Ron Paul Quotes,” By Nadra Kareem Nittle, Loop 21

For those who grew up in 1968, the Civil Rights struggle was part of their identity. They were going to show the old fogeys, because they had a new weapon. They could call them racists, Hitlers even! That’s how the kids were going to beat back the fascists and smoke dope, have sex and have fun.

But now, new generations have risen. Starting with Generation X, we’ve grown up in the liberal paradise. We know that smoking dope means irresponsibility, free love means divorce and hateful parents, and “fun” means being a hippie while your society falls apart.

We don’t agree that we should all imitate the Baby Boomers and be exactly like them. We’ve also grown up in a more complex world, even a racially-integrated one. To us, being racist or not is just another choice. In fact, many minority groups dislike other minority groups. It’s just how it is.

We don’t want their tired fascist old morality. They are dinosaurs, fossils even, who want to force us to re-live their youth. But we want our own, and our own lives too. Their crusade dies with them. We have our own concerns and we may not agree.

They’re going after Ron Paul this week for some newsletters that someone wrote for him, and may or may not have been racist, but no one really knows. Ron Paul shows no signs of being racist. However, he’s going to be the figurehead for this issue, since it has brought itself to him.

The Baby Boomers are hoping the accusation That’s Racist! will work on us as it worked on their parents. They’re trying to use it to shut Pat Buchanan out of MSNBC, to ignore scientific evidence, and stop us from talking about whether multiculturalism is a good idea or not.

But we’re tired of the old fogeys. We want them to go away. Times they are a-changin’, and we need something different for our generation. So we’re going to borrow cars, drive to the wharf, and maybe vote Ron Paul or not, but we’re not going to listen to these old fogeys and their dried-up accusations.

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Next revolution, don’t put the extraverts in charge

Jan 16th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
47 comments

The hard part of a revolution is not the overthrowing. Any idiot can do that. It’s what happens when you win and you suddenly realize you have a country to run.

For our next revolution, we really should put an introvert in charge. The extraverts have been in charge of the last dozen or so, especially Russia, France, the 1968 hippie revolution and now the Occupy protests.

While they have done a great job of tweeting, Facebooking, and keeping interest high, extraverts don’t do so well with the organization of the society to follow. In fact, things tend to fall apart, and then the basest human impulses (murder, theft, rape and television) take over.

Extraverts have proven ineffective at running the countries they take over. When you put extraverts in charge, you get catchy songs and engrossing movies that make it all seem like fun, and as a result you have a huge popular movement.

This is because, among other things, extraverts are excellent at social communication. To them, it makes sense to spin any idea into something that other people like because it appeals to their basic instincts. The only glitch is that these spun ideas are often unrealistic and civilization falls apart as a result.

No matter. In the next revolution, we’re putting the introverts in charge. Gone will be the flamboyant movements with the enigmatic motifs (like “occupying,” “tuning in and dropping out” or even “the guillotine”). Instead, you’ll have a bunch of nerds designing a future society.

True, the Twitter stream and Facebook page will be awful sparse, and that’s the best possible outcome. Otherwise the damn nerds will be tweeting and status-updating with complex equations about crop yields and population growth. That stuff’s boring as cardboard.

But you will get practical results. Extraverts are good at socializing; introverts are better at paying attention to practical consequences of their own actions. Extraverts see the world through this social filter. It’s incompatible with the introvert’s more cause-and-effect view.

  • Extraverts like socializing, which deals with effects (“how would Bill feel about that?”) and appearances (“what would others think of you?”) but not what introverts and policy makers do well, which is finding the cause to any effect and changing that cause so the effect will be different.
  • Extraverts address the individual and what it wants, while policy makers pay attention to statistics, demographic change, and effects on the whole.
  • Extraverts focus on emotions and feelings, while introverts believe good policy starts with cold hard function and putting aside our emotions for a few moments so that we can figure out the process and fit in. Extraverts like to socialize, where intraverts feel better knowing systematic order is present.

The hippies, French revolution, Russian revolution, Occupy movement, etc. are all the dominion of the extravert. They came up with a grand plan that made no sense, but sounded like dynamite at a cocktail party, so they were able to network and get people excited and then make a mess.

The introverts are still busy discussing the feasibility of those plans, and they’re just not sure.

Extraverts do not trouble themselves with silliness like consequences, side-effects, long-term results and precedents. They know that when you say things to other people, it’s to make friends. Whatever you’re talking about does not matter. Making your audience feel good is what matters.

They know that whatever they’re saying doesn’t need to be accurate. It’s more of a symbol exchange where the real topic is the interaction between people, not whatever airy political hocus-pocus they’re going on about.

90% of revolutionaries are there to network and meet chicks. It’s a big party and they have no care for what happens tomorrow. It’s a brutal truth, but biology comes before ideology. The introverts are still theorizing about that one.

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