Category: Culture

CDLXXII – Political Advertising

One of my faults is that I tend to take people at face value. If someone comes up to me and says “I am an honest and trustworthy person” then I tend to believe them. This is why I woke up one day and found myself surrounded by snakes, manipulators, and liars. I am a little more jaded now.

When I was younger and politics was the main thing I worried about, political ads used to infuriate me. Ads would say things that flew in the face of what I believed, and because it was an advertisement I thought that it was a reflection of what people actually believed. I was mad that so many people believed this thing that an ad was able to be made about it.

Now–as intellectually stunted as I am, and with such regressive and misanthropic notions as I have–I see the political ads as aspirational. I live in South Carolina, I am getting blasted by Nikki Haley content. I can see now that the reason I see her ads and not others are because she has more money, not more support; I can see now that the content of her ads are aspirational, not descriptive.

The ads don’t bother me as much as they used to. What’s one more car crash in the daily sequence of car crashes that beset us.

As a side note, following on from my point where I thought ads reflected a preponderance of people with the belief broadcast in the ad, I realize that no one really knows what they are doing. I used to think there was some code or book or some control that informed many decisions made invisibly behind the scenes. It doesn’t exist. Large institutions are held together largely by the will to live, and the fact that people show up day after day. If people unanimously refused to show up to a given institution to work, the institution would cease to exist. It might affect people, but also–everyone would adjust. Humans are simultaneously terrible planners and excellent improvisers. We fear chaos and yet we steer our little ships through the unknown every day of the week.

2024 is off to a rip-roarin’ start.

AMDG

CDXLII – Torturing An Analogy

This is a small part of JMSmiths latest, but since I have spent so much time in this space decrying voting I wanted to both share a useful analogy and torture it to death in the service of my own cynical aims.

JMSmith introduces us to the analogy of the five hungry men:

Five hungry men can vote on where they will go for lunch, provided their palates and budgets are broadly similar.  But five men cannot operate as democracy if all five men are not hungry, or their palates and budgets are radically dissimilar.  Any vote in the second group will cause radical dissatisfaction, very possibly revolt, in the minority that is forced to do, or eat, or spend what it really, truly does not wish to do, or eat, or spend.

The point of Smith’s article is not about voting, it is about something else. It is interesting in it’s own right, but I am interested in voting.

Smith is only suggesting that democracy fails when the five men are not hungry, or “their palates and budgets are radically dissimilar”. This is true. Because I am a fan of organized structures, let’s call this failure a Type I failure–the voting population is not equally hungry, wealthy, or tasteful.

Voting has another kind of failure. Five hungry men must first agree to vote on where they will go for lunch. None of the five hungry men is especially evil, none of the five hungry men is especially virtuous. By agreeing to vote on where they will go for lunch, they are agreeing to the decision making power of the collective. When the five men agree to vote on this decision, they are in effect saying “I will go eat lunch at the place we agree to go to lunch.” This is an unstated predicate to the analogy. But it causes problems if the five hungry men disagree. Let’s say each of the five men proposes a different place to eat, and votes for their own idea. Let’s call this a Type II failure–the voting population cannot agree on a path forward and so arrives at a stalemate. To be clear, a Type II failure includes everyone voting having a different idea, or exactly 50% thinking one thing and 50% thinking another. These are situations where people vote and no outcome is determined.

Because the five hungry men must agree to vote, and so agrees to the outcome of the vote, what if the outcome is morally bad? In an effort to resolve the stalemate, one of the savvy hungry men suggests that everyone goes to a strip club to eat, hoping that a majority of men will be enticed by something other than the promise of food. This illustrates a Type III failure–the voting population agrees to something morally ill, thereby binding those virtuous voters to the same moral ill.

You might be tempted to say, wait a minute, why don’t those virtuous voters leave and go somewhere else? They don’t have to go to the strip club! If this analogy were on a national scale, the idea of “taking your ball and going home” is also known as “secession“. Let’s call this a Type IV failure–some segment of the population is so offended that they organize their own votes and go their own way. They fragment from the main body in the hopes that doing so leaves them more equal in the way JMSmith described. Let me hammer this point home: If you don’t like the outcome of a vote, rejecting the outcome is secession (in thought and word if not deed). The alternative is remaining loyal to a voting system that is designed to eventually produce evil outcomes. Voters are stuck between a rock and a hard place: Secession or Evil.

There’s one more failure that I can think of. This is when the five hungry men are not all good faith voters. Let’s say one of the men has been sponsored by Joe’s Burger Joint, and has been paid to bring in customers. The five men vote and this sponsored man makes a heartfelt appeal that all of them should eat at Joe’s Burger Joint. The vote is cast and the outcome is that the men agree to go to JBJ. This is a Type V failure of voting–it was not an honest appraisal of the options. This dishonest appraisal of the options can come in the form of corruption, of people willing to pay for their preference to win, etc. The dishonest deal of one paid agent for an outside party has led to a decision which is legitimized by the crowd. Let’s say they all get food poisoning and somehow learn that the man was paid by JBJ to suggest it. When they confront him, he replies (correctly), “Hey I just suggested it, you all voted for it!”

America suffers variously from all five failures.

Type I – The voting population is not culturally, economically, morally homogeneous. This leads to different weights for different options, and different incentive structures in different places.

Type II – Americans are more or less 50/50 between either political party, and cannot agree on a path forward. Each party has a drastically different idea, which leads to stalemates and instability.

Type III – Abortion is legal. Hopefully not for long. But it is legal. ‘Nuff said here.

Type IV – Agitators on all sides of politics like to occasionally bring up secession. Either fragmenting states, forming a new country. All the other errors lead to moderately homogeneous groups to desire their own domain where their votes would not be so error prone.

Type V – Corporations, Countries, and other interested parties consistently lobby politicians and pay for public agents such that the public discourse is not one of honest appraisal of ideas. An outside party with an agenda has paid for the privilege to influence the discussion of the matter up for a vote.

One way you, personally, can avoid contributing to all of these failures and even help fix them:

Don’t Vote.

AMDG

CDXLI – How To Be Properly Condescending Against Climate Change

I’ve seen a lot online recently about climate change and it annoys me. It annoys me because I disagree, because I am alone in disagreeing, and because the people that agree with me seem to agree for the wrong reasons.

So here I am going to lay out my reasons for not caring about the climate change alarmism so that you can know what I think about it and you can decide whether or not we agree for the right reasons.

No. 1) Climate Alarmism Is Pride

The Earth survived the Chixculub impactor. The Earth can survive me driving my car to the grocery store. It is the height of pride to suppose that humanity is so great that we can destroy the earth irreparably. We don’t even remotely understand the self regulatory mechanisms built into nature. Nature always wins. Humanity is constantly mowing it’s lawn trying to keep the trees from growing up in that nice looking open field, and humanity will always be doing this. We have not conquered nature–we are and will always be fighting it, and we are always on the losing side.

No. 2) Climate Alarmism Is Political

The people pushing the climate alarmism are the same people pushing COVID agendas and other “well meaning” political nonsense. They are hyperbolic for no reason. I saw the movie “Don’t Look Up” and it was one big climate allegory and it just struck me as dumb. Experts with an agenda are experts only in storytelling. They are not looking out for the best interests of the common man.

No. 3) Climate Alarmism Presents No Alternatives

Oil is cheap and easy to use and burn and it has a high power density. No alternative energies can remotely compare to that. I support using “green” energy where it is available–hydroelectric is great in many instances; solar panels can do a lot to improve your houses efficiency and resilience. I also support being less wasteful as a culture. Recycling is, in general, good. You can support good energy and good practices without thinking the apocalypse is coming. Climate Alarmists need to present alternatives to the cheap and energy-dense power sources if they want people to stop using them. But if they want to go back in time and halt the advance of the industrial revolution, we would literally still be living in wooden huts and using candles to light and heat our homes. Progress isn’t always good but oil and coal got us this far and people seem to like it.

No. 4) Climate Alarmism Can’t Quantify Itself

I got this from a recently cancelled gentleman: If the science is settled, then how much of the temperature change is caused by humanity? How do we measure the change in the climate and how do we quantify the human element? If we suppose that the human element is extreme then it should be measurable. What is the measure? Are we saying water levels are higher? They are not, really. Are we saying temperatures are higher? Or lower? If so–what should the temperatures be? How much of the variance is caused by humanity? What other sources of variance are there? If I buy an electric car, how much will the temperature change? These things cannot really be measured.

No. 5) Climate Alarmists Are Smug

Climate Alarmists are just unpleasant people to be around. If their position were true, good, or beautiful you would think they would be nicer people. They shriek and they yell and they don’t behave like normal, nice, sane people. Their irrepressible smugness is a red flag.

This is your essential guide on how to be properly condescending against climate change.

AMDG

CDXXXVIII – Revisiting Jesus Christ Superstar

I am watching as I write this Jesus Christ Superstar. This musical is by no means an orthodox film, yet it holds a dear place in my heart because I often joke that it was my first catechesis, before I became Catholic in 2018. Besides that, I do enjoy the music, too.

When I watched it before, I viewed it’s presentation of Judas as tragic—he took a practical view and he had some legitimate philosophical questions: he thought they should devote every resource to serving the poor and winning a political fight.

Now, I see Judas as a blind curmudgeon. He completely misses the point of Christ as a spiritual king, one a mission that transcends politics.

One thing this movie did for me was it taught me some of the main events of Christs life without requiring me to read the Bible. Whenever we talk about Christ throwing the moneychangers out of the temple, I think of the scene from this movie. On watching it again I see the skeleton and even some of the inaccuracies that stuck in my head until they were corrected as a Catholic.

In one part Jesus says everyone can attain the kingdom, a kind of universalism. I never pondered whether universalism was true, but I did ponder how I would know the difference between being “saved” and being “damned”.

Another error is that the film largely treats Jesus as being only a man, which is heresy. Absent his divinity, the whole thing doesn’t make much sense. He comes off in the film as kind of a jerk, someone who has gnostic wisdom and he can’t tell you. The movie actually spends very little time on the gospel message. A lot of effort is on Judas as a foil to Christ, and on Pontius Pilate.

I remember being very disturbed over the treatment of Pontius Pilate. He tried to wash his hands, he did everything he could to avoid crucifying Christ. This is actually true, and yet Pilate still succumbed to the will of the Mob. He tried to pass the buck but ended up securing the outcome.

A travesty of catechesis is when they recreate the last supper and Jesus says “for all you care, this could be my body (…) and this could be my blood”. Then Jesus goes on a rant about whether he will be remembered. Again—the starting assumption of this musical is that Jesus was a man and not God incarnate.

This movie also made me wonder as a kid what would happen if Judas hadn’t betrayed him, or whether Judas had any other options. This goes back to my argument that life is on rails—God knows our hearts, and is capable of both knowing the outcome of free choice while experiencing incarnate reality as a temporal man. It could only have gone one way, there are no alternate realities.

You see though how Judas presents a problem to young impressionable minds like mine. How do I know I am not following the same path as Judas? The song “Damned for all time” hits a little harder—I am trying my best, so “just don’t say I’m damned for all time!” Again—how would I know? How would I recognize that I am on the right side of Jesus?

Their presentation of the Passion is problematic. I think they didn’t know how to present it–because to them, Christ was just a man, it popped their brains so they put it in, but it is clear that they don’t really know what it’s for. They don’t understand why Jesus died, or why he HAD to die. That’s a theme that comes up often–you can think of this musical as Andrew Lloyd Weber publicly wrangling with the facts of the gospel, and feeling the dissonance with what he actually believes. This is highlighted by the ecumenical song and dance number featuring an angelic (!!) Judas asking if Jesus is with Buddha or Mohammed in the afterlife that immediately precedes the passion.

This has been a bit of a stream of consciousness while I watched the movie again.

AMDG

CDXXXIV – Were The Genuis’s At

I saw a conversation, also on substack, that asked the question, “How do we cultivate Genius?”

This question has two parts. Part one is cultivation, what does that look like. Part two is Genius. What crop are we even trying to cultivate?

The conversation was by the same people who had the Utopia discussion so they can’t see their faulty assumptions. My guess if the conversation goes on for a long time that they would settle on a definition of Genius that means “very smart big brain people like us” and a mechanism of cultivation that looks very much like antiseptic bureaucratic tyranny.

All that I’ve told you so far is what I think about what I think they would say, and not what they have actually said, nor what I actually think about what they actually said. That’s because I’m a judgmental person as increasingly apparent by my writing. It wasn’t the content that intrigued me, but the question. How do we cultivate Genius? That’s what the rest of this article will focus on.

Genius I do not accept means big-brain-smarty-pants. A musical genius is a person who is talented at arranging music in a way that is beautiful and moving. A literary genius is someone who can write beautiful and evocative prose. Genius then means extraordinary talent. My personal belief is that everyone has the capacity for extraordinary talent in some field or other, but we use the word Genius to mark the best of the best. A society filled with geniuses would cease to consider themselves geniuses and only the best of the best of them would be extraordinary and so considered geniuses.

So if we accept that Genius is another way of saying extraordinary talent, then the only question remaining to us is cultivation. Thinking about genius naturally lends itself to thinking about the education system, and that is partly the right answer. It should be thinking about the vocation system, which for some means education. Industrial education has ruined society, forcing oddly shaped human pegs into uniformly round holes. Some people just don’t fit. True geniuses–people with an innate, natural talent in some aspect of things–become either depressed or suppressed, and the only kinds of geniuses we get are the kinds that are extraordinarily talented at navigating the academic system. Genius can fall into any category in any endeavor, which is why a vocation system is very important.

I wrote about this–without calling it vocation system–in my previous article on Scootland, which you can find here. In the article, I give responsibility for baseline education to the Church, and then make a proposal for advanced studies:

Advanced studies would take three different tracks: Professional/Vocational schools, Seminaries, and Philosophical universities. Professional/Vocational schools would train students for work in a trade, in a profession, in a service, whichever. I went to school for Accounting, I would have gone to a professional school for accounting. Seminaries obviously would train both Priests and teachers. Philosophical universities would be for the truly advanced and learned men and women who are studying and advancing the search for truth.

The idea here is that if you are a young Scoot and you find you have a talent for numbers and spreadsheets, you don’t need to waste your time learning Spanish or reading Dostoevsky; you should receive training to make you a good accountant. (Exposure to Spanish or Dostoevsky should happen in that basic education, as well as exposure to numbers and spreadsheets.) Creativity comes from connecting unrelated fields, but free learning should be a private endeavor. If young Scoot finds himself interested in languages, then he should go to the library in his spare time and study languages. Lots of resources should be available to encourage private study. Mentorships, internships, apprenticeships, should all be available to help young Scoot learn more from people than books, so that his knowledge is not confined merely to Accounting.

The idea is that talents should be identified early so that later work can allow one to focus on that talent and bringing out it’s full potential. This is NOT exclusive of other areas of learning, just aimed at drawing out natural talents.

So “cultivation” here means identifying talents and giving young people the resources and training to grow those talents. The identification of talents is up to parents and teachers and other wise older people around; the desire to pursue the training has to come from the student.

This idea is not without flaws–I welcome constructive critique! Let me know what you think.

AMDG

CDXXXIII – Checkmate, Blue Team

If you have been reading here for any amount of time, you understand as a given that classical liberalism is bad. There’s a phenomenon that we observe frequently, and if you’re anything like me, you probably lump this phenomenon in with “classical liberalism is bad.” I am starting to think it is a separate problem altogether.

The phenomenon is “political gamesmanship”. When I talk about political gamesmanship, it is the tendency for one political party, one political faction, one group of politically minded people, to value winning over anything else. Republicans today are accepting of the homosexual simulacrum of marriage. Republicans 50 years ago were not. That is because to be “republican” is to express allegiance to a team and not to a set of beliefs. Classical liberalism enables political gamesmanship, but if you think about it that phenomenon can exist and has existed wherever three or more people gather in the name of government. There will always be factionalism and where there is factionalism there will always be gamesmanship. That’s because gamesmanship is level-zero thinking: “I want power, doing xyz gains me more power. I will do xyz.”

Classical Liberalism is bad because it makes everyone think they are and ought to be kings and king makers. The society and the apparatus of government operates around the fulcrum of individual liberty, and there is no end to where that can go. Classical liberalism is an error of true liberty because true liberty is yoked to Christ. As I say in the linked article, the ideal of liberty is obedience.

Political gamesmanship is an error of the second pillar of the French Revolution: Fraternity. Political gamesmanship is a devastating lack of charity, lack of love for our neighbors. It encourages thinking of the other team as the Low Man.

An Anecdote that I will poorly remember, from my long past reading of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Rome once tried to drum up fervor over it’s periodic games and festivals by assigning one group of gladiators or charioteers or what-have-you as the blue team and the other as the green team. It succeeded in drawing attention to the games, but it also served to undercut the public peace. Fans of the Blue team would ambush Green teamers in the streets, eventually things escalated to the point that there were riots between the Blues and Greens. The Romans were forced to end their experiment.

This anecdote illustrates the fact that when people are given factions they pour their identity into it. The Catholic Church aims to leverage this feature of human nature for good; it can easily be manipulated for ill.

I just wanted to point out that Classical Liberalism is not the only issue even if it is the dominant one. There’s a dangerous dearth of love of our neighbors. We need to be attentive to this.

AMDG

CDXXX – Utopia

Over at substack, there’s a writer I am following who writes, researches, and generally exudes enthusiasm for concepts of Utopia. I follow more for the “writing” angle than the “Utopia” angle, but nevertheless I have to deal with the one to get the other.

The writer recently shared a picture of a book cover, the book is called “Utopia for Realists” and has splash-highlights calling out “Open borders!” and “15 hours work week!” and “universal basic income!”

I don’t know how much of those splash-highlights are satirical or how much of those are treated as ideals to be sought after by utopian idealists. None of those things sound “realist” to me, but I am a curmudgeonly reactionary and these are the high-falutin’ dreams of strangers.

Nevertheless, if people actually want to make a better world, and actually think some of these things are ideals that would make the world better, then they are quite clearly missing a few things.

First–the whole idea of Utopia as a goal to be attained (“Utopia” is a stand-in for “heaven” for atheistic post-modern liberals) begs the question in favor of cultural homogeneity. Look at Europe and the European Union–their common currency is wildly unstable and politically polarizing. It requires a monstrous bureaucracy to maintain it and the bureaucrats have done a terrible job because their goal has been to grow it and not keep it strong.

Second–uneven distribution of resources, wealth, culture, infrastructure, etc needs to be addressed. Utopia begs the question in favor of even distribution of all of these things, because in a Utopia people need to stay where they are. But it stands to reason that people who live in corrugated tin shacks with no running water on dirt roads will seek to migrate to places that have well constructed housing with internal plumbing on paved roads. When people migrate, especially en masse, it unduly burdens the people residing in the recipient location. Even if we suppose the recipient population was philosophically willing to receive a mass migration, the infrastructure must be scaled to support them before they arrive because it will become much more difficult to scale and maintain infrastructure after they arrive.

The bottom line here–I don’t want to do a point by point takedown, the idea is patently ridiculous–is that idolization of Utopia misses the dirty, unpleasant, unwashed side of human nature and presupposes that a sufficiently large population of culturally homogenous people will be able to create a self sustaining paradise.

I know I’ve written about Scootland and that might seem like my own version of Utopia–but at least in my version I am doing my best not to beg too many questions. It is and will always be a thought experiment. Utopians are looking for a stand-in for Heaven, and on this side of the Eschaton they will be woefully disappointed.

AMDG

CDXXIX – Mentorship

I am going to make a bold claim having done no research to back it up. There is a crisis of mentorship. Perhaps this crisis is limited to America, perhaps it is present in the whole world. Perhaps this crisis is a feature (not a flaw) of Modernity, perhaps it is an unintended consequence. But there is indeed a crisis in mentorship.

There’s a crisis of fatherhood too, of an altogether different variety. Fathers can be mentors. But the crisis of mentorship is not a consequence of the crisis of Fatherhood. In fact, if mentorship were in good standing, the crisis of fatherhood would be ameliorated if not altogether cured.

Mentorship is important because it transcends generations, skillsets, and community. A mentor can be wholly separated from his pupil except by correspondence. Mentorship is in crisis because there are few men aware that there are young men in need of mentorship; there are few young men aware that they need guidance and there are men available to help them.

Fathers should be mentors to their sons, Fathers should be mentors to their sons especially. But Men in general should be open to mentorship and to being mentored. Mentorship helps a man be more confident in himself, because he is passing on wisdom and being an example to a younger man. Being mentored helps young men have an example, helps them navigate life’s curious and complex challenges, and helps infuse ancient wisdom to protect that which youthful inexperience seeks to break. Many errors can be prevented with the help of a mentor. There is no need for young men of all stripes to make the same mistakes over and over again. Society cannot advance until men stop making the mistakes their fathers made.

I don’t know what to do with this realization. I have accidentally mentored people before, and I have accidentally been mentored. But I can’t help but think it ought to be more intentional. I can’t help but think of some situations I wish I had someone I could ask what I should do. I can’t help but think there’s someone out there making the same mistakes I made whom I could help, if only I knew who they were.

Perhaps to be a mentor one must first begin acting as if one is worth seeking mentorship from. And to begin acting that way, one must begin acting with strong (nay, Ironclad) public virtues, and learning some skill to expertise. Then young men might see you as having both virtue and skill, both qualities worthy of emulation.

Food for thought.

AMDG

CDVIII – Meet the Punks

While visiting friends for Christmas, at one point the Christmas music TV Channel reverted to the 75th anniversary broadcast of Meet the Press. I watched some of the self congratulatory spectacle before someone came along and found more Christmas music.

The broadcast was a parade of presidents and public figures across the 75 year history of the show–“Look at all my important friends” is how it looked to me. But all the clips that they showed of these presidents and public figures were discussions of trivialities.

That is–when rebroadcasting all of these public figures, the people you are most proud of interviewing, surely you would pick the questions you were most proud of asking them, right? But it was all trivialities.

There was a clip of the show’s host asking President Jimmy Carter if the US should boycott the Moscow Olympics due to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. This one clip blew my mind: They successfully brought up a big and important event in world history, and focused the discussion on the most useless and trivial thing about it.

There was a clip of the show’s host asking President Bill Clinton if he was covered fairly by the press, to which President Clinton answered cleverly and politely in the negative.

There was a clip of the show’s host having a panel discussion with President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush, and the host asked the latter what lessons he learned from the response to Hurricane Katrina, which he answered simply and honestly.

They then moved on to international leaders, and I listened to them ask and answer about the same problems we are dealing with today–most notably the question of “peace in the middle east”.

It just reinforced in me that Presidents are just people; that their public appearances are not for the press to push them but for the press to offer them a non-controversial moment on television; that nothing that happens on TV is supposed to be philosophically interesting.

It was nice to peek behind the curtain and see that everything I thought was there was, in fact, there.

AMDG