Making it a matter of 'who-whom?'

A civilisation of broken feedbacks generating expanding social dysfunction: II

This is the thirty-eighth piece in Lorenzo Warby’s series of essays on the strange and disorienting times in which we live.

This article can be adumbrated thusly: A bizarre combination of ‘not noticings’ with discreet obsessions—think Israel—means the accuracy of any information we get is systematically degraded.

The publication schedule and links to all Lorenzo’s essays are available here.

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Housekeeping: Lorenzo has had minor facial surgery so our December Chatham House chat for paid subscribers will have to wait until after the stitches are out! It will however take place as normal and be advertised in advance. Stay tuned.

Because Lorenzo’s Australian time zone creates difficulties for our North American subscribers, in addition to our usual Chatham House chat this month, we’re also going to release a pre-recorded paid subscriber “Christmas chat” using Substack’s new video feature.

This obviates the need to provide an unlisted YouTube link and means the recording can be made available to free subscribers at a later date without triggering YouTube’s propensity for banning things.

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Given the productive capacity of modern economies, our societies should be doing rather better than they are.¹ Part of the problem is that we are awash in evolutionary novelty. The end of presumptive sex roles is an evolutionary novelty, as is our ever-more processed food culture, our information culture, our media ecosystem … .

Managing all this change requires acknowledging and discussing the evolutionary novelties, so we can address their patterns and consequences. Yet, we’re also experiencing systematic feedback dysfunctions, in part due to the sheer mass of available information. A dramatic reduction in the cost of producing content has created a dramatic rise in the amount of content.

Feedback dysfunction

Much of the appeal of prestige-opinions and luxury beliefs—that is, prestige opinions with entry costs—is precisely that they allow us to economise on information and its processing. They provide ready-made framings through which to view the world, reducing people’s cognitive load. They also furnish markers of social status and—via control of moral legitimacy—social leverage.

Different social experiences and concerns generate different politics. If you curate information flows politically, you cut out many people’s concerns.² This curating has become pervasive. As one founder of Wikipedia observes:

You can’t cite the Daily Mail. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned. So what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream centre-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.

Ground News has built its business model on the reality that whether and how issues are covered varies by each media outlet’s politics. Much of the feedback dysfunction of “quality” media comes from its distortions-by-omission—seen particularly clearly in the coverage (if that is the word) of the Dublin stabbings and riots—rather than outright misrepresentation.³

This interacts with distortion-by-focus, which often amounts to obsession: think the left obsession with Israel-Palestine at the expense of most or all other conflicts. Such focus-and-framing can both feed the status strategy of journalists and their audience, at the cost of generating a seriously distorted media environment and “elite” understanding.

The New York Times and Washington Post clearly do not operationally care if African-Americans kill other African-Americans but have obsessively focused on the (rare) occurrences where police kill unarmed African-Americans.

Police killings of other unarmed Americans have been largely ignored, despite being more frequent. All this leads to distorted information and feedback, enabling anti-police activism that resulted in a withdrawal of effective policing from crime-prone localities and a consequent predictable (and predicted) surge in homicides. 

There’s a direct line between highly distorted in focus-and-framing “quality” media reporting to thousands of avoidable homicides. This means the Very-Smart-So-Moral People who buy into media narratives that flatter their cognitive and moral identity are now systematically misinformed:

1. The available data on police shootings of unarmed Black men is incomplete; however, existing data indicate that somewhere between 13-27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Adjusted for the number of law enforcement agencies that have yet to provide data, this number may be higher, perhaps between 60-100.

• Yet, over half (53.5%) of those reporting “very liberal” political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed, a likely error of at least an order of magnitude.

2. The available data suggest that 24.9% of people killed by police in 2019 were Black. However, across the political spectrum, survey participants overestimated this number.

• Those who reported being “liberal” or “very liberal” were particularly inaccurate, estimating the proportion to be 56% and 60%, respectively.

The strategy of building a narrative — and then seizing on a useful incident — bore horrible fruit as homicides surged in fiscal-sink localities,⁴ both after the death of Michael Brown, and even more that of George Floyd.

This is a particularly blatant example of how an elite culture of required affirmations and not noticings—in order to mark one’s in-group adherence to prestige-opinion and luxury-belief status-markers—degrades societal feedback mechanisms.

Such an elite and media culture also makes it much easier to prosper through social dysfunction. If one is primed to notice, affirm and celebrate intention—but also primed not to notice anything that undermines the extolling of virtuous intent—then the colonising of social dysfunction that gains resources by addressing but never solving pathologies can be done much more reliably.⁵

The trick is to notice social dysfunctions that are status and/or social leverage useful—and extol the intent to “address” them—while not noticing how virtuous intentions fail to make things better. It’s particularly important to not notice them making things worse.

Either way, the flow of funds supporting grand intents can keep going. It’s much less helpful to pay attention to outcomes. As noted in my previous essay, the US West Coast “homelessness industrial complex” is a particularly dysfunctional case in point.

The above means an expanding problem: everything progressives get control of turns to crap. Progressives get hold of universities, they become toxic nonsense factories, losing credibility as they undermine any notion of service to the wider citizenry. They get hold of cities, and policing and other basic services begin to degrade. They get hold of schools and crackpot “critical pedagogy” aimed at graduating little activists (“change agents”) replaces education. They get hold of media, and its credibility tanks as it pushes preferred narratives. They get hold of beloved movie and other franchises, and audience numbers and popular rankings begin to tank as story-telling is sacrificed to The Message.

The pattern, again and again, is that progressives evolve new ways—from Marxism to Post-Enlightenment Progressivism—to make things worse thanks to a pathological approach to information.

This pathological approach to information is baked in. The imagined future is their benchmark, a benchmark with no reality test, as there is no information from the future. Past and present are realms of sin, so provide no positive examples to follow. This includes all past progressive failures. These failures serve to prove historic progressives were doing it wrong. They had not yet achieved the correct union of Theory and practice, the correct praxis.

Again and again, progressives hugely under-rate the significance of state predation—and the social-structuring role of the state—because the State is their preferred vehicle for social transformation. So, instead, the sins of past and present have to be the result of “capitalism”, “the bourgeoisie”, “white supremacy”, “heteronormativity” or whatever.

The result of this systematic mischaracterisation of states’ predatory capacity⁶—coupled with the splendour in their heads being the source of all legitimacy—is that they create much more predatory states and enable much more predatory bureaucracies, all covered by grandiose moral masks.

A Marxist is someone for whom no amount of tyranny and mass murder will stop him worshipping the splendour in his head. But in this, as so much else, Marxism only provides the template from which later versions of progressivist political faith evolve. Social outcomes—rather than being the outcomes of different life-strategies interacting with circumstances—become social “goodies” that the righteous can hand out, provided they get enough control over…whatever. 

As legitimacy is determined by commitment to a transformational future, and prestige opinions and luxury beliefs only grant moral and cognitive superiority if contradicting them become a matter of inferiority—of malice, bigotry, ignorance, stupidity—alternative viewpoints are delegitimised via attacks on the moral character of those who advance them. This blocks alternative viewpoints from being seriously considered, or even expressed, increasing the problem of broken feedbacks. It also selects against independent thinkers and thinking and in favour of toxic zealots and fearful conformism.

This commitment to the legitimating narratives profoundly undermines careful analysis of social dynamics, of what works. Instead, it becomes a matter of who whom? (Kto–kogo? in its original Russian.) Who are the Smart and the Good? Who are the malicious/bigoted? Who gets to rule over whom?

This is buttressed by a further who whom? ranking system. Who are the marginalised? Who are the oppressed? This ranking is based on unchangeable—because you cannot change the past—legacies of a sinful past.

Various commentators have noted how equal Western societies were becoming in the wake of the various civil rights movements and yet we are seeing a rebirth of ranking folk by immutable characteristics. That, however, is not a bug, but a feature. Homo sapiens, and especially elite—so status-demanding—Homo sapiens, cannot stand too much equality.

As in so much else in our time, the Late Roman Empire provides a useful case study. When all freeborn folk were granted Roman citizenship in 212, the honestiores versus humiliores distinction became more and more legally significant.

Yes, the entire tradition from Marxism to Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) goes on endlessly about equality, yet they are forever grading people. This starts by asking whether they have the “correct” outlook (“critical consciousness”) or not. Meanwhile, a person of colour is better than a white one, queer better than straight, trans than cis, female than male, etc. These ideas come out of elite institutions, operate via the non-electoral politics of institutional capture, and are all about variably grading, and balkanising, the demos.

The iron law of woke projection operates repeatedly. If everything is socially constructed then it is determined by social interactions. In particular, it is determined by power. Power relations dominate everything. So, it becomes a matter of Who Whom? Who has power over whom? Who oppresses whom?

Moreover, freed from the constraints of careful evidence-based understanding of reality such cognitive framings are able to evolve for rhetorical, motivational, coordination and signalling effectiveness. We become more susceptible to self-deceptive rationalising and moralising of self-interest.

The other thing that turns to crap in progressive hands is scholarship. All activist scholarship is degraded scholarship, as the intended activist goal normatively and analytically dominates any evidence and analysis. This is yet another manifestation of a pathological relationship with information, enabling the creation of Theories that are mountains of bullshit built on molehills of truth.

As part of the process, the development of industrial-strength status strategies has gone along with intellectual decay. There is never any serious mechanism proposed for creating the transformational future, only one to smash what already exists.

But the less such content, the fewer reality tests, the less intellectual constraint, so the more space for status strategies to operate and evolve to be more effective. The effectiveness of the status strategy is increased by this analytical and operational nihilism. The worship of the splendour in their heads becomes more unconstrained and better able to evolve for maximum operational effectiveness as its fundamentally pathological nature leads to institutional decay.

Flattening achievement

The transformational future is pure imagination. So, it is not in history. In a real sense, it’s a denial of history. It’s a denial that there is any legitimate continuation of, or from, the past.

This may seem paradoxical, as the politics of the transformational future is all about the direction of events, the arc of history, being on the right side of history. Yet that is precisely what divorces it from actual history. It demands that history be characterised by, and follow, the narrative required by such politics, not the messy contingency of events. The Hegelian Dialectic—in its various forms—is a mechanism for replacing history with motivating and justificatory myth.

In the politics of the transformational future, authority comes from rejecting the past and present, that is, rejecting history’s sins and constraints. This is in service to the authority of an imagined future that lacks any reality test because none exists.

The transformational future is also not fleshed out, nor are there any serious steps to its achievement. Those would put it into history, with all the limitations, constraints and contingency that being in history imply.

The transformational future can only sparkle with the required moral splendour—and generate the required common focus—if it remains an imagined splendour, without any definitive content subject to critique. Moral perfectionism gives the splendour in their heads unparalleled rhetorical advantage while disabling accurate and analytically serious analysis of human possibilities. The endless progressivist war against evolutionary understanding of Homo sapiens exists to defend a perfectible future.

The steps to seize power in service of an imagined future, the strategies to assemble the required social leverage by the believers: those may be pragmatic. Those things, along with the status- and social-leverage plays, are the functional point.

Any plan with specific details to achieve the transformational future has to start with existing structures. The point of the transformational future is to transcend existing structures. So, how do you start with structure and end with transcending structure in a laid out, planned sense? The answer is, you don’t.

As documentary filmmaker Mike Nayna puts it: there is always a “scene missing”. There is the noxious present. There is a glorious future. The detailed steps of how you get from one to other? That scene is missing. And always will be.⁷

What is never missing is the demand that one defer to those committed to a glorious future, or that they should have ever more say over ever more resources. Hence Diversity-Inclusion-Equity: Diversity gives them control over hiring; Inclusion over speech and association; Equity over resources. The cover of grand purpose is used to create more predatory—consuming resources without general benefit—bureaucracies.

All of which is expressed and justified by the heroic narrative of commitment to a transformational future. The ostentatious commitment to social justice is a heroic narrative, used for justification, for recognising the like-minded, for rhetorical and normative dominance, for moralising the status-and-social-leverage strategy. It is to game our evolution, in the name of completing it.

All of this is compatible with a bleak view of history. Indeed, it more or less requires it. But it’s also compatible with a bleak view of the future, if the future is simply an extension of the present, which is an extension of the past, which is a litany of sin. There is a bleak view of any continuation of history that has created the oh-so-oppressive present.

Modelling success then modelling failure

The history of the ex-slaves and their descendants after the 1865 US end of slavery is, in many ways, a history of triumph. Yes, there were the appalling oppressions of Jim Crow. Yes, there was deliberate residential segregation. Yes, their communities were systematically under-policed. But there was also rising literacy, the development of a commercial middle class, strong patterns of stable families: until the 1960s.

Those decades of improvement were based on strong efforts—from within and without African-American communities—to model and impose middle-class life strategies. Then, a new strategy was adopted. This was the progressive notion that an authority can allocate good things to those below from above.

Busing of students destroyed the connection between schools and communities, shoving together folk who did not wish to associate, alienating African-American students from education, bringing their relative education advancement to a halt.⁸

The Great Society welfare surge subsidised chaotic and disordered lives. Affirmative action in federal employment bled off the African-American commercial middle class, creating a public sector middle class that benefited from social pathology through being paid to administer it.

Public housing concentrated low executive function people in specific geographical areas, separated from middle-class strategies and values. The War on Drugs generated a profitable (and violent) black market that naturally gravitated to under-policed fiscal-sink localities. Offshoring and intense capitalisation of manufacturing reduced access to high-paying jobs.

Then, the Sexual Revolution undermined marriage norms. Access to income—whether from work or welfare—made mothers more independent. Yes, among people with strong executive function, this had little impact. Lower down the social scale, however, with the removal of the pressure that human societies have long exerted to suppress short-term mating (casual sex) to protect long-term mating (marriage), the effects were disastrous. Fatherlessness surged and then became endemic. This had deleterious consequences for children and communities, especially boys.

Private sector middle-class folk tend to vote conservatively (in the US, Republican). Progressives therefore have an incentive to block movement by their voters into the private-sector middle class. The current shift towards the GOP among Hispanics is a case in point, just as the more the private-sector middle class in California shrinks, the more reliably Democrat-voting the State becomes.

A “progressive” Anywhere elite—educated people whose networks are not based on a specific locality—is demonstrably willing to let the lower orders rot, as we see from “defund the police” and other disastrous policies in progressive-dominated US cities. Any serious sense of duty or custodianship has been swallowed the belief that they own morality, with feminisation acting to undermine social solidarity.

The claim to own morality means that they clearly do not do things for status reasons, for social leverage, for social domination or other social gain reasons. Clearly, they do what they do because it is the moral thing to do and they are so moral that they embody—indeed own—morality. The mask of morality hides them from themselves.

When one encounters historical elites who seem blind to patterns within their own society, who exploit their society to their own benefit—to the point of causing serious social damage—we do not have to imagine what that looks like. We can see it happening in front of us with our own Anywhere elites.

It may be obvious to those with eyes to see in progressive-dominated cities in the US—the US is a worse-governed society than the rest of the developed democracies—but there are plenty of examples from elsewhere in the West. Being next to Mexico makes the US look better governed than it is: Detroit is a level of public policy disaster one cannot find elsewhere in developed democracies.

We are experiencing the disruptive effects of technology. Online IT and personal devices are having a similar disruptive effect on the public sphere as the printing press. The printing press, recall, let loose the witch craze (murderous fake news), the Reformation (with iconoclastic destructions of statues + renamings), and the Wars of Religion.

We are experiencing massive evolutionary novelties in our diets, in abandonment of presumptive sex roles, in information and sleeping patterns, in our chemical environment. This flood of change may drown us.

Bureaucracies have expanded beyond the level of available operational talent. We have too many midwit bureaucrats looking for framings that will protect them from the pressures of complexity beyond their level of competence. This explains the increasing adoption within bureaucracies—public, non-profit, corporate—of Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) and its required narratives that systematically degrade or break feedback mechanisms behind expedient moral masks.

The next essay explores the weaponising of emotions as part of breaking feedbacks.

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References

Books

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men,  Oxford University Press, 2010.

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Stuart Buck, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, Yale University Press, 2010.

Ben Cobley, The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, Societas essays in political & cultural criticism, Imprint Academic, 2018.

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, 2014.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, Polity Books, 2022.

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright Publishing, 2017.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent, Harvard University Press, 2003.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Articles, papers, book chapters, podcasts

Paul G. Cassell ,Ronald N. Boyce, ‘Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities: The “Minneapolis Effect” and the Decline in Proactive Policing,’ Research Paper No. 377 S.J. Quinney College of Law University of Utah, September 10, 2020.

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

Russell Hardin, ‘The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism,’ in A. Breton, G. Galeotti, P. Salmon, & R. Wintrobe (Eds.), Political Extremism and Rationality, Cambridge University Press, (2002), 3-22.

Rob Henderson, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update,’ Quillette, 16 Nov 2019.

Jacob Mchangama, ‘The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws: A tenacious Soviet legacy,’ Hoover Institute, December 1, 2011. https://www.hoover.org/research/sordid-origin-hate-speech-laws.

Lawrence Rosenthal, ‘The Law and Economics of De-policing,’ Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 33, No. 1-2, 128-141.

Manvir Singh, Richard Wrangham & Luke Glowacki, ‘Self-Interest and the Design of Rules,’ Human Nature, August 2017.

Cass R. Sunstein, ‘The Law of Group Polarization,’ John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 91, University of Chicago, 1999.

Philip E. Tetlock, Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Jennifer S. Lerner and Melanie C. Green, ‘The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, Vol. 78, No- 5, 853-870.

Peter Thiel, ‘The Tech Curse,’ Keynote Address, National Conservatism Conference, Miami, Florida, September 11, 2022.

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, ‘Moral Grandstanding,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016, 44, no. 3, 197-217.

M. “Lorenzo” Warby, ‘The Migration Scam,’ Lorenzo from Oz Substack, Nov 20 2022.

The migration scam

Robb Willer, Ko Kuwabara, Michael W. Macy, ‘The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms,’ American Journal of Sociology, Volume 115, Number 2 (September 2009), 451–90.

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25.

1. Though there is increasing failure to share that prosperity: mechanisms such as mass migration interact with restrictions on supply of land for housing, which drives up rents and house prices; mass low-skill migration suppresses the Baumol effect, so suppressing the ability of wages to respond to rising productivity; and bureaucracies (state, private, non-profit) consume, or otherwise divert, more and more resources.

2. Either by being unaware of them or dismissing them with adverse framings.

3. Though when “quality” media refers to the far-right, there’s a good bet it will be a misrepresentation.

4. Fiscal-sink localities are localities where the government expenditure is higher than revenue. Due to how government feedback works, such localities tend to systematically lose out in budgeting, so service-allocation, decisions—including for policing. Crime is a highly locality-driven phenomena, so police under-servicing—especially if aggravated by police withdrawal in the face of anti-police activism—will disproportionately affect already high-crime localities.

5. The recent indigenous Voice proposed constitutional amendment in Australia, which lost in all States, would have constitutionally-entrenched this pattern.

6. Predatory in the straightforward sense of consuming others’ resources beyond any benefit provided to those others.

7. As James Lindsay regularly points out, the process is literally alchemical. You burn away the sinful structures of the present and the transformational future will emerge. That is, the golden future will emerge from burning away the “base metal” of oppression. A claim of astonishing—and incredibly destructive—stupidity that justifies believers in a transformational future taking over every institution.

8. The movement of Afro-Caribbeans (British West Indians)—and later African immigrants into the US—complicates the statistical picture.