There’s no way around it. No matter how precisely you express yourself, no matter how carefully you check your facts, no matter whether they’re even arguing with something you’ve said (!!), once your platform reaches a certain size, you’ll attract “haters.” As Heather Heying once put it: It's fascinating really, what agendas and traits people will attribute to others when what they actually want to say is, 'I disagree and I can't defend the disagreement.'
This is quite a study in how neo-progressivism can destroy some facets of rationality, while preserving the ability to rationalize. It's actually very depressing and frightening. DiAngelo and Kendi are being very successful in reprograming significant subsets of the society - unfortunately concentrated among the cultural, educational, and economic elites who have disproportionate power.
I did think you were a bit snippy and sarcastic. And that it would take a saint not to be in that context. I think it's a type of coping mechanism when confronted with "logic" so bad you don't know whether to laugh or cry - or look for another planet.
And yet J appears to be educated and intelligent and caring and to be trying to "do the right thing". Not motivated by simple ignorance, stupidity or malice. And yet...
---
Let me say more about the depressing part. For a long time, we've counted on the idea that good ideas can displace bad ideas, that good reasoning and evidence can win in the end. But I don't see any sign that your solid points are denting J's ideological armor. Maybe enlightenment values are meeting their match?
One of my "pet theories" is that in the West, the tools of the Enlightenment and science were sufficient to overturn the hegemony of the Church and traditional restricted thought (eg: kings rule by divine right) and created a more secular society. Not quickly or painlessly, but eventually.
However, neo-progressivism (with roots in postmodernism and critical theory) is like a new species of weed which emerged in a field previously controlled by herbicides. Obviously, such a new weed must have evolved resistance to the existing herbicides, or it would not be spreading.
Neo-progressivism (sometimes called "the successor ideology") aims to displace liberalism (in the broader sense of "liberal western democracy" not in the narrower US sense of Democrats). And as a competing mind virus emerging now, it has great resistance to control measure like logic and evidence, free speech, listening to all sides - better resistance than the now-relatively-tamed Church had. Postmodernism seems to be based on a challenge not to facts, but even to the nature of knowledge - a meta defense against rational rebuttal.
What we are seeing in the above interchange is an individual herbicide resistant weed (in the above metaphor, trying to describe the dynamics, not to disparage with emotive slurs). Spray, spray - weed sits there unhindered. Not just frustrating, but alarming for what it may portend. (Especially given that there are other alarming trends on the other side of the aisle).
---
What can we do but slog on? Keep trying. It may work on some, especially as some neo-progressives (at least on the margins) begin to realize that the new strategy is NOT accomplishing it's promised improvements to society and an endless set of excuses ("our strategies haven't worked yet because systemic racism/patriarchy is so deep that we activists need more power over society to root it out, so let us double down - again") doesn't change that failure.
Maybe the problem is not that the reality feedback loop is not working, but that it operates on a longer timespan than I expect.
Actually that last is almost certainly true - if the infection spreads widely enough, the society will collapse and other societies (displaced in time and/or space) will learn from that what to avoid. I'm pretty sure that China is watching and learning what to avoid. I'm just hoping for a shorter timescale than that, for reality feedback to bear fruit before that collapse - and before helping install an authoritarian right wing regime.
---
To balance the "pesticide resistant weed" metaphor, let's note that ideas like representative democracies operating under a charter have spread like weeds before. Being hard to suppress is not always a bad thing. But I believe that this time it is, and we may not realize it until too late, especially in the context of the "perfect storm" of other existential threats that are peaking at the same time (climate change, peak oil, fresh water shortage, antibiotic resistance, surveillance technology, maybe even the singularity, etc).
I read McWhorter's Woke Racism and had mixed feelings. A lot that I liked and enough that I didn't like to give it a so-so rating. One of the things I really didn't care for in that book was the idea that the infernal Woke are too far gone to even try to sway. McWhorter comes from the stance that they are lost and so trying to debate them would be to channel Sissyphus rolling that rock uphill. I thought that was a really binary thing of McWhorter to say and disagreed wholeheartedly. Maybe this was my inner humanist reacting. Who is really, truly "lost" anyway?
Well, I think now I get where he was coming from. J seems not just very, very lost but also unable to even have a good faith exchange of ideas. And my God, the smug complacency & entitlement just oozes off of each their responses. It's simultaneously frustrating, disturbing, and disgusting to see. Debating with him is like staring into the abyss but the abyss isn't staring back, it's trying to suck you in.
J has probably never worked a real job where he had performance reviews. You have to set goals that are measurable.
The stupid thing is that the "I'll know it when I see it" metrics he proposes are exactly the sort that allow for bias to seep in and color (no pun intensed) decisions. If I interview people and only go by my gut then it's possible that tj decision will be biased. But if I use a systematic process, that likelihood will be reduced
A metacomment,, not about this subject but more general. Not sure where else to post it.
Steve, I perceive this substack as in part a kind of space for you to come back to when you need to recharge, when you need to rotate off the front lines and spend some time in a community which on the whole "gets it", where sanity is prevalent. It's not a simple echo chamber; you may also get challenged or questioned - but mostly in a rational and thoughtful way, not for virtue points. You quote some wacko interactions, and it must be sometimes exhausting to keep politely engaging in other spaces (mainly on Medium?).
If so, I am glad to provide that kind of support. "Thank you for your service" out there, and I'm glad if I can help assure your unconscious that yes, objective reality is still a thing, despite rumors of its death.
And I use it that way as well. An oasis of thoughtfulness amidst a culture which seems to be losing it's collective mind in many ways. It's not just "these people think the same way I do so I'm comfortable here" (tho I cannot honestly deny that there is any element of that), but also that "these people THINK so I'm engaged and less frustrated here". I feel heard, and I learn from listening to others here.
You've attracted a small but very interesting group to this substack. Thank you for that too.
Hey Steve, I'm not sure how you continued such a long conversation with this guy. After a short time I just can't talk to these people, because they have no logic.
I was recently silenced on Medium for calling out one of these people since it was obvious she was virtue signaling. Telling the rest of us how racist we all are. Now I'm no longer on Medium. Oh well!
And there it is, Steve, there's your problem: You're not 'woke' :)
'Woke' in my mind has become the left-wing 'MAGA': It's just a massive mental mindblock. Racist, bigoted, sexist, infantilizing, anti-science, and religiously fundementedlist. They're two sides to the same social problems, and they've chosen to be the problems rather than the solutions.
Amen. In particular I agree that there need to be concrete things to work on otherwise it's all just pontification. Don't like contract buying or redlining? Pass a fair housing act and enforce it relentlessly. Takes time, but the progress is real and measurable. All of this "dismantling structures" nonsense is just inchoate Utopian bloviating that helps no one. And by wasting time and energy that could be used productively, is actually a big minus.
This morning, I'm still ruinating on that exchange (and responses), to see what can be learned from it. Thinking about approaches to doing something, not just agreeing that its bad out there.
---
My partner read it this morning, and a while ago I heard her laughing out loud from her office - you win the prize today, Mark, with your abyss statement!
---
My own understanding of the dynamics of the neo-progressive ideology (mind virus) is that it thrives among those whose world view valorizes caring about the downtrodden AND who carry a load of historic guilt. It hijacks those tendencies to gain control of their semantic systems. The infected are genuinely Trying To Do the Right Thing; that isn't just a pretense. But they are also trying to feel ok about themselves without actually giving up any of what they consider their privilege (which cognitive dissonance requires them to hide from themselves), creating an internal tension which distorts their thinking and reasoning. And then the ideology corrupts the most positive original motivations that drew them in, by providing a holier-than-thou payoff to the psyche. When you have the moral high ground, you don't need to be mutually respectful any more, or to seek reciprocal rights or mutual benefit win/win options - the other side owes you! Yes, it can be intoxicating. You can even be nasty to other people while feeling smugly superior rather than guilty about it, if that payoff appeals to you.
Once a person's perceptions and internal reward systems have been thoroughly hijacked by this mind virus, it's very hard to reach them. What do we have to offer such a person in the way of alternative rewards to the psyche or ego? "Come on over to our side, where you have to THINK, to tolerate dissent, to question your own narratives? Admit to yourself that you have been in something like a cult, and that your recent history of smug superiority was a sham you cannot be proud of" (even if we don't try to rub it in).
The payoffs of feeling like we're moving incrementally in the direction of a more accurate internal model of the world which will help up create more effective interventions - are thin gruel for somebody addicted to the spicy payoffs of being morally superior and on the right side of history. Especially because if they reject it, they will likely lose many of the friends and community they have built upon their ideology. It's not a very good sales proposition for our side.
So while I'm not casually rejecting the deeply woke as completely unsalvageable, they on average are going to be bad prospects, mostly a waste of our limited time (unless they are close to us, perhaps). Debating them with the goal of rationally persuading them is mostly spinning our wheels (if the real goal is to affect other readers, that can be a different case!); we have no traction. We might as well try to reason somebody out of a meth addiction. It might work - but very rarely.
What we need to do is contest the ideas at an earlier stage of the infection, and among the semi-woke where their interpretational and motivational systems have not yet been too hijacked.
In that light, the conversation you have excerpted, Steve, could be useful in identifying some of the memes that have been useful to the ideology in infecting people. Of course we can find many of them directly in DiAngelo, Kendi and Critical Race Theory - which we also need to analyze. But J offers us a glimpse into the ideas and framings which were actually effective in seducing his/her thought process.
This is more than a little analogous to analyzing a viral genome to see which genes help it to attach to a cell, penetrate the cell wall, fend off the cell's resistance, and hijack the cell's information reproducing mechanisms to replicate itself, and then spread to other cells. Knowing all that doesn't mean we can repair already throughly hijacked infected cells, but it may help us slow the reproduction and even to restore lightly infected cells to health, metaphorically.
As an example, consider the following meme from J (I use "meme" in Dawkin's sense of an idea seen as a self replicating information pattern spread from host mind to host mind, not "internet memes" of pictures with text on them; they were meant to be analogized to (selfish) genes in biology)
>"Now you just have to see that anyone not actively dismantling that racial hierarchy is in fact participating in it, since the system works mostly through passive consent."
I believe that that is one of the key memes which has facilitated the virulence of this ideology. We need to have a robust counterpoint - not because it will ever convince J, but because it might help prevent other people from suffering the same fate.
For some of the folks on this site, that concept seems immediately ridiculous, but obviously it has traction among many liberals - we cannot rely on their semantic immune systems automatically rejecting it. We need to develop and spread counter-arguments with traction on the psyches of non-infected (or lightly-infected) people.
And those counter-arguments cannot be evaluated by seeing whether or not they work on people like J! Bringing J back to reality cannot be our metric, we need to test it against our real target audience - the susceptible but not yet converted.
Wow. Just wow.
This is quite a study in how neo-progressivism can destroy some facets of rationality, while preserving the ability to rationalize. It's actually very depressing and frightening. DiAngelo and Kendi are being very successful in reprograming significant subsets of the society - unfortunately concentrated among the cultural, educational, and economic elites who have disproportionate power.
I did think you were a bit snippy and sarcastic. And that it would take a saint not to be in that context. I think it's a type of coping mechanism when confronted with "logic" so bad you don't know whether to laugh or cry - or look for another planet.
And yet J appears to be educated and intelligent and caring and to be trying to "do the right thing". Not motivated by simple ignorance, stupidity or malice. And yet...
---
Let me say more about the depressing part. For a long time, we've counted on the idea that good ideas can displace bad ideas, that good reasoning and evidence can win in the end. But I don't see any sign that your solid points are denting J's ideological armor. Maybe enlightenment values are meeting their match?
One of my "pet theories" is that in the West, the tools of the Enlightenment and science were sufficient to overturn the hegemony of the Church and traditional restricted thought (eg: kings rule by divine right) and created a more secular society. Not quickly or painlessly, but eventually.
However, neo-progressivism (with roots in postmodernism and critical theory) is like a new species of weed which emerged in a field previously controlled by herbicides. Obviously, such a new weed must have evolved resistance to the existing herbicides, or it would not be spreading.
Neo-progressivism (sometimes called "the successor ideology") aims to displace liberalism (in the broader sense of "liberal western democracy" not in the narrower US sense of Democrats). And as a competing mind virus emerging now, it has great resistance to control measure like logic and evidence, free speech, listening to all sides - better resistance than the now-relatively-tamed Church had. Postmodernism seems to be based on a challenge not to facts, but even to the nature of knowledge - a meta defense against rational rebuttal.
What we are seeing in the above interchange is an individual herbicide resistant weed (in the above metaphor, trying to describe the dynamics, not to disparage with emotive slurs). Spray, spray - weed sits there unhindered. Not just frustrating, but alarming for what it may portend. (Especially given that there are other alarming trends on the other side of the aisle).
---
What can we do but slog on? Keep trying. It may work on some, especially as some neo-progressives (at least on the margins) begin to realize that the new strategy is NOT accomplishing it's promised improvements to society and an endless set of excuses ("our strategies haven't worked yet because systemic racism/patriarchy is so deep that we activists need more power over society to root it out, so let us double down - again") doesn't change that failure.
Maybe the problem is not that the reality feedback loop is not working, but that it operates on a longer timespan than I expect.
Actually that last is almost certainly true - if the infection spreads widely enough, the society will collapse and other societies (displaced in time and/or space) will learn from that what to avoid. I'm pretty sure that China is watching and learning what to avoid. I'm just hoping for a shorter timescale than that, for reality feedback to bear fruit before that collapse - and before helping install an authoritarian right wing regime.
---
To balance the "pesticide resistant weed" metaphor, let's note that ideas like representative democracies operating under a charter have spread like weeds before. Being hard to suppress is not always a bad thing. But I believe that this time it is, and we may not realize it until too late, especially in the context of the "perfect storm" of other existential threats that are peaking at the same time (climate change, peak oil, fresh water shortage, antibiotic resistance, surveillance technology, maybe even the singularity, etc).
---
"Great pep talk, Pash, I feel much better now".
I read McWhorter's Woke Racism and had mixed feelings. A lot that I liked and enough that I didn't like to give it a so-so rating. One of the things I really didn't care for in that book was the idea that the infernal Woke are too far gone to even try to sway. McWhorter comes from the stance that they are lost and so trying to debate them would be to channel Sissyphus rolling that rock uphill. I thought that was a really binary thing of McWhorter to say and disagreed wholeheartedly. Maybe this was my inner humanist reacting. Who is really, truly "lost" anyway?
Well, I think now I get where he was coming from. J seems not just very, very lost but also unable to even have a good faith exchange of ideas. And my God, the smug complacency & entitlement just oozes off of each their responses. It's simultaneously frustrating, disturbing, and disgusting to see. Debating with him is like staring into the abyss but the abyss isn't staring back, it's trying to suck you in.
J has probably never worked a real job where he had performance reviews. You have to set goals that are measurable.
The stupid thing is that the "I'll know it when I see it" metrics he proposes are exactly the sort that allow for bias to seep in and color (no pun intensed) decisions. If I interview people and only go by my gut then it's possible that tj decision will be biased. But if I use a systematic process, that likelihood will be reduced
A metacomment,, not about this subject but more general. Not sure where else to post it.
Steve, I perceive this substack as in part a kind of space for you to come back to when you need to recharge, when you need to rotate off the front lines and spend some time in a community which on the whole "gets it", where sanity is prevalent. It's not a simple echo chamber; you may also get challenged or questioned - but mostly in a rational and thoughtful way, not for virtue points. You quote some wacko interactions, and it must be sometimes exhausting to keep politely engaging in other spaces (mainly on Medium?).
If so, I am glad to provide that kind of support. "Thank you for your service" out there, and I'm glad if I can help assure your unconscious that yes, objective reality is still a thing, despite rumors of its death.
And I use it that way as well. An oasis of thoughtfulness amidst a culture which seems to be losing it's collective mind in many ways. It's not just "these people think the same way I do so I'm comfortable here" (tho I cannot honestly deny that there is any element of that), but also that "these people THINK so I'm engaged and less frustrated here". I feel heard, and I learn from listening to others here.
You've attracted a small but very interesting group to this substack. Thank you for that too.
Hey Steve, I'm not sure how you continued such a long conversation with this guy. After a short time I just can't talk to these people, because they have no logic.
I was recently silenced on Medium for calling out one of these people since it was obvious she was virtue signaling. Telling the rest of us how racist we all are. Now I'm no longer on Medium. Oh well!
"Seriously Steve, you need to WAKE UP."
And there it is, Steve, there's your problem: You're not 'woke' :)
'Woke' in my mind has become the left-wing 'MAGA': It's just a massive mental mindblock. Racist, bigoted, sexist, infantilizing, anti-science, and religiously fundementedlist. They're two sides to the same social problems, and they've chosen to be the problems rather than the solutions.
Amen. In particular I agree that there need to be concrete things to work on otherwise it's all just pontification. Don't like contract buying or redlining? Pass a fair housing act and enforce it relentlessly. Takes time, but the progress is real and measurable. All of this "dismantling structures" nonsense is just inchoate Utopian bloviating that helps no one. And by wasting time and energy that could be used productively, is actually a big minus.
"Midwits" is my new favorite term!
This morning, I'm still ruinating on that exchange (and responses), to see what can be learned from it. Thinking about approaches to doing something, not just agreeing that its bad out there.
---
My partner read it this morning, and a while ago I heard her laughing out loud from her office - you win the prize today, Mark, with your abyss statement!
---
My own understanding of the dynamics of the neo-progressive ideology (mind virus) is that it thrives among those whose world view valorizes caring about the downtrodden AND who carry a load of historic guilt. It hijacks those tendencies to gain control of their semantic systems. The infected are genuinely Trying To Do the Right Thing; that isn't just a pretense. But they are also trying to feel ok about themselves without actually giving up any of what they consider their privilege (which cognitive dissonance requires them to hide from themselves), creating an internal tension which distorts their thinking and reasoning. And then the ideology corrupts the most positive original motivations that drew them in, by providing a holier-than-thou payoff to the psyche. When you have the moral high ground, you don't need to be mutually respectful any more, or to seek reciprocal rights or mutual benefit win/win options - the other side owes you! Yes, it can be intoxicating. You can even be nasty to other people while feeling smugly superior rather than guilty about it, if that payoff appeals to you.
Once a person's perceptions and internal reward systems have been thoroughly hijacked by this mind virus, it's very hard to reach them. What do we have to offer such a person in the way of alternative rewards to the psyche or ego? "Come on over to our side, where you have to THINK, to tolerate dissent, to question your own narratives? Admit to yourself that you have been in something like a cult, and that your recent history of smug superiority was a sham you cannot be proud of" (even if we don't try to rub it in).
The payoffs of feeling like we're moving incrementally in the direction of a more accurate internal model of the world which will help up create more effective interventions - are thin gruel for somebody addicted to the spicy payoffs of being morally superior and on the right side of history. Especially because if they reject it, they will likely lose many of the friends and community they have built upon their ideology. It's not a very good sales proposition for our side.
So while I'm not casually rejecting the deeply woke as completely unsalvageable, they on average are going to be bad prospects, mostly a waste of our limited time (unless they are close to us, perhaps). Debating them with the goal of rationally persuading them is mostly spinning our wheels (if the real goal is to affect other readers, that can be a different case!); we have no traction. We might as well try to reason somebody out of a meth addiction. It might work - but very rarely.
What we need to do is contest the ideas at an earlier stage of the infection, and among the semi-woke where their interpretational and motivational systems have not yet been too hijacked.
In that light, the conversation you have excerpted, Steve, could be useful in identifying some of the memes that have been useful to the ideology in infecting people. Of course we can find many of them directly in DiAngelo, Kendi and Critical Race Theory - which we also need to analyze. But J offers us a glimpse into the ideas and framings which were actually effective in seducing his/her thought process.
This is more than a little analogous to analyzing a viral genome to see which genes help it to attach to a cell, penetrate the cell wall, fend off the cell's resistance, and hijack the cell's information reproducing mechanisms to replicate itself, and then spread to other cells. Knowing all that doesn't mean we can repair already throughly hijacked infected cells, but it may help us slow the reproduction and even to restore lightly infected cells to health, metaphorically.
As an example, consider the following meme from J (I use "meme" in Dawkin's sense of an idea seen as a self replicating information pattern spread from host mind to host mind, not "internet memes" of pictures with text on them; they were meant to be analogized to (selfish) genes in biology)
>"Now you just have to see that anyone not actively dismantling that racial hierarchy is in fact participating in it, since the system works mostly through passive consent."
I believe that that is one of the key memes which has facilitated the virulence of this ideology. We need to have a robust counterpoint - not because it will ever convince J, but because it might help prevent other people from suffering the same fate.
For some of the folks on this site, that concept seems immediately ridiculous, but obviously it has traction among many liberals - we cannot rely on their semantic immune systems automatically rejecting it. We need to develop and spread counter-arguments with traction on the psyches of non-infected (or lightly-infected) people.
And those counter-arguments cannot be evaluated by seeing whether or not they work on people like J! Bringing J back to reality cannot be our metric, we need to test it against our real target audience - the susceptible but not yet converted.
Does this make sense to anybody?