Vol wrote: but it does make me wonder, because the bland politico-speak deference to abstract groups and committees for what should be personal answers has to come from somewhere.
It's largely this:
Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights LawCome to think, I haven't explicitly spelled out a somewhat big shift in how I think about this stuff that I've gradually gone through over the last few years. I've been talking about it but never laid it out in an organized fashion. I used to think about this stuff as being revolutionary. "These people are Bolsheviks and they really seriously want to overthrow current society and replace with a very different one and they are willing to use violence and overt authoritarianism to get what they want." Now, I don't really think that. What's going on is much more depressing if much less threatening to societal stability. I can't really explain it well without writing half a novel. Apologies in advance for the hugeness of this post.
The biggest component is that we have an economic, social, and aesthetic elite who comprise somewhere around 5-10% of the population. They disproportionately occupy positions of power in cultural institutions, information dissemination institutions, and government bureaucracies at the federal level. They dominate pretty much all of these institutions other than the judiciary, (sometimes) Congress, and various foundations and media that are explicitly branded conservative like Fox News or Focus on the Family. All the top universities, all the top social media firms, most national media, Hollywood, all big publishing houses, a huge percentage of foundations, and a huge chunk of the federal bureaucracy are controlled by these people. Because they dominate them they have massive power to dictate the goals and culture of all those organizations and because those organizations have massive cultural power, they have a huge impact on culture in general. These people are not Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos has a ton of money but his ability to pull culture in directions he wants is very limited. The uber rich are actually massively uncool.
These people are *not* revolutionary because their power is very, very much invested in all these foundations and organizations continuing to exist and continuing to have power. They
aggressively pursue the perpetuation of their own class interest at
the expense of the aesthetic and economic desires of the rest of the country. They justify their position with the concept of meritocracy and high levels of technical expertise bestowed by education. This (along with technological changes) dramatically changes how they signal their class and social status.
Classical aristocrats were defined by *lack* of work, meaning they procured so much from their rents (from mostly land) that they could be gentlemen of leisure and never needed to sully their hands with labor. This was one of the chief moral justifications used for the "need" for aristocracy. "Life sucks and is grueling and everybody must work like a dog merely to live. Therefore we must have some small x% of people who are so fabulously wealthy that they don't have to work and this frees them up to do all the high pursuits of art, government, philosophy, science, and so on on the behalf of everybody else." Nobody pretended that such aristocrats earned their position in some way. They were set in place by God or the natural order of things.
Fancy things in the past were ludicrously expensive. It might cost a full year's normal wages from labor to make 1 fancy gown. It was very hard and expensive to get silk all the way from China and pay all the skilled craftsmen needed to make it by hand. Thus, ownership and display of ostentatious things was an excellent way to signal one's power and class. Medieval books such as the
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are so beautiful because books were fabulously expensive to make. There is so much blue here because blue pigment was made from ground lapis lazuli gemstones which came all the way from Afghanistan and thus was particularly expensive. This is pretty much a brag in book form.
All this began to change with industrialization. It became exponentially cheaper and faster to mass produce things or import things from China or Afghanistan or wherever. Now the emerging middles classes could begin buying items that improved living standards but also that advertised their socially upward trajectory. In the Middle Ages, a fancy carriage with enough horses to pull it is a rare, expensive thing to own. With the Model-T, everybody gets to ride and not walk. Eventually, at some point in the 20th century, consumption became a mostly useless way to really set yourself apart unless you are buying something at the Trump golden toilets level, which only the 1% can afford. (Housing actually is an excellent continuing social signal which is one reason people will compete so feverishly for it and spend so much on housing space they don't need).
Concurrent with this was the evolution of
High Modernism which I have already gone over before. Basically, a gigantic bureaucratic state appeared in the period from about 1910 to around 1950 for various cultural, economic, and security reasons I don't need to go over here. Suffice to say, it happened. These bureaucracies and agencies needed educated people to work in them which helped spur massive growth in universities and created pipelines of interdependency between universities, governments, and foundations. The people who ran these things accrued more and more institutional power at the same time that conspicuous consumption as class signal became more useless and that culture shifted towards high optimism about what technology, education, and massive government projects could do.
In other words, these people were true believers in progressivism because moral, technical, and social progress was the whole point of all these giant institutions they worked for and ran *and* they wanted ways to justify their power because it aligned with their class interest. The fates align and the best way to signal your social class becomes to show everybody that you believe the correct things. The "correct things" are socially progressive especially on culture issues. This works nicely to differentiate the PMC class because the rube lower classes naturally incline towards conservative cultural positions and the uber rich are essentially amoral Scrooge McDuck/Ferengi avatars (they will go with whatever social position ends up making them more money).
Social signaling by consumption did not completely go away for this class but it became decoupled from expensiveness. The chief way this manifests is using consumption to demonstrate your social values instead of your wealth. It's not *that* much more expensive to buy cage-free, free-range eggs or whatever, but it's still a great social signal. (Yes, yes, I know people buy organic for other reasons than just this. I *hate* this class of people I am describing and I buy mostly organic, non-processed stuff). Even if you don't believe this stuff in a moral sense, it still creates an aesthetic class standard, which is one reason for the gigantic class disconnect between the Republican Party base and the Republican party elite. The Republican *elite* are aesthetically
crunchy cons who drink craft beer and eat organic Angus steaks while the base are Budweiser/Domino's Pizza people. The Republican elite are also much more highly educated like the progressive elite which is why they focus so much more on text and word than their base does which is very talk radio/talking head motivated.
To summarize this point, this 10% or so PMC class came to justify their positions of power relative to everybody else because they earned it through educational merit and because they were good people doing the correct things
The thing with giant bureaucracies though is that they massively defuse power which also means they massively defuse responsibility. If the Nile floods too much and destroys the city and lots of people die, it's clearly Pharaoh's fault. If the Mississippi floods and destroys New Orleans and lots of people die, it's the fault of the US Army Corps of Engineers for the shoddy work they did on the levies, and also FEMA for their crappy aid response, and the police force in New Orleans for being racist, and the media for sensationalizing everything and making people terrified of mass chaos and looting that mostly didn't exist, and on an on. This may be more technically accurate than saying Pharaoh controls the Nile, but it also means you can't point at any particular person or entity whose job it is to face the firing squad because this happened or to do something to make it not happen again. Every individual at just about every level in all those organizations can completely 100% accurately say "I was just doing my job in the way the bureaucracy expected me to do my job; I wasn't being negligent so it's not my fault." You can symbolically sack the guy in charge of the bureaucracy and put a new guy in place, but the new guy inherits the exact same machinery and the forces resisting change within the bureaucracy are *very* strong. Everybody agrees what happens in New Orleans sucks and we should not do that again, and yet nothing happens. This is
Moloch, the mass coordination problem where everybody wants to fix problem X and yet we still never fix problem X. But coordination requires somebody or something to have the agency or authority to direct that coordination and collectivization and sprawling bureaucracy disperse authority. (To be fair so does anarchy. Everybody becomes an individual agent and 1 person can do 0 about preventing New Orleans from happening again. This is why hierarchy is necessary but bloat is bad).
To bring this back to the new elites, this means these PMCs get to justify their positions by their supposed merit and good works, and yet never have to individually be responsible for anything their organizations do. To go back to the very first article I posted, they can mindlessly apply well intentioned civil rights law through the horrible apparatus of HR departments or diversity offices or whatever.
I'll use Title IX (which is about guaranteeing equal access to education despite sex) to illustrate my point. Back in 2011, the Obama administration issued the notorious
Dear Colleague letter. This basically told a bunch of educational institutions that if they didn't do more about sexual harassment they would lose their government funding. All these universities which are *very* dependent on government money duly freaked out and instituted much more strict policies around sexual harassment and tasked their labyrinth of compliance offices with doing this. One way this was done was by lowering the legal standard needed to find someone guilty of sexual harassment to "preponderance of the evidence." This standard means you only need to prove sexual harassment with 51% probability. You don't have to *prove* harassment happened; you only need to prove it was more likely harassment happened than that it didn't. Cue a giant flood of university proceedings accepting dubious accusations and students and professors getting kicked out or sanctioned with very weak evidentiary standards and utter lack of due process. There are dozens of examples of this happening from the last 10 years. I don't feel like fishing for them. Reason magazine has published many, many specific cases of it. Meanwhile, there's no particular evidence that actual rape has diminished at all or that real rapists are getting caught at higher rates.
This can all happen with the PMCs running these offices 1) 100% just doing their job and not being personally negligent or malevolent, 2) being completely convinced what they are doing is morally correct without being radicals or revolutionaries, 3) being completely convinced they are the best suited to do this work because they have 14 degrees in gender studies or whatever, 4) never having to individually accept responsibility for any fuck-ups. The process also gets immense cultural power behind it because its Harvard and Yale that are doing it.
This whole process explains a huge, huge, huge percentage of where whatever weird moral fad of the moment comes from and why it has so much power and won't go away even though 80% of people think it's stupid.
I'm not saying this 100% explains everything that's happened with social issues in the last 100 years, but it's a gigantic component of it. There's also lots more that contributes to what the PMC are doing such as the Rise of the Therapeutic and safetyism and the specific technology of the internet and how it spreads information. But I've already written an unreasonable amount.
Another way of putting all this is that the
Great Awokening itself is Moloch.
I will address your questions about antiracism later. I just wrote a novella and I have actual work I have to do.
*Edit* One additional thought I will add. A similar process explains "systemic racism." Systemic racism does exist. It is also Moloch. The Awokening is a Moloch problem created partially by trying to fix another Moloch problem. (Cars solve the problem of cities being covered by horse poop. But now we have smog everywhere).
*Edit*
One more. This also explains why the rubes will sometimes ally with the Jeff Bezos class to fight these people. They instinctively understand that Jeff Bezos and those schoolboard people in San Francisco are very, very different. I haven't read enough about it to verify this but I remember seeing/hearing that the peasants in the early stages of the French Revolution remained broadly sympathetic to the king while being hostile to the aristocracy and clergy. There might be some similar interesting dynamic here. A giant tome on the Napoleonic Wars is one of a couple of books I'm considering after finishing the Piketty book so maybe I'll get an answer.
There's also another class of rural and suburban elites you could call the petite bourgeois that matter a lot in this analysis. They have huge electoral power but little cultural power. I didn't even get into them. These people have Jacksonian aesthetics and ethics for the most part and are the USA's original, native elite class.
Our native aristocracy (the Southern planters) went extinct.
This analysis broadly overlaps with Marxism in lots of ways which is one reason I read Marxists and have some respect for Marxist *theory* while thinking Marxist application is utter trash.
What is the realistic worst case scenario of destroying, physically or metaphorically, all anti-racist groups, works, laws, and discourse, and letting people be as racist or humane as they please, versus the best case scenario of letting these groups, works, laws, and discourse continue?
In our current society, I think these scenarios would be about equal honestly. We have mostly successfully expunged virulent racism such that even if you explicitly allowed racial discrimination or the like in law, Jim Crow wouldn't come back because the vast majority of people wouldn't want it. The best case scenario of the anti-racism infrastructure continuing as it currently is would be that it was useless at solving the lingering racial problems we have but also mostly harmless at the aggregate level. One would mean some some random cafes in rural Alabama won't serve black people. The other would mean some hapless person occasionally gets canceled. Other than those outliers, both of these are status quo scenarios really.
The specific calculus on this shifts dramatically depending on the society in question.
Or another way, what is the highest price you would pay to keep the principle of equality?
For equality before the law, I'd be willing to give up a fair amount. I'd be willing to emigrate if this went away and it was still possible to emigrate.
For
equity, basically nothing. Luckily I'm not realistically called to give up anything for it because it can't exist in the way radical egalitarians want it to exist. It's a unicorn. As my giant WoT above argues, the people currently in charge are bureaucrats not revolutionaries, and there are no actual revolutionaries anywhere capable of seizing the bureaucracies.
For some materially redistributive but demonstrably effective things like singlepayer that everybody gets something from, I'd be willing to pay considerably more taxes.
For dumb things that try to redistribute respect & dignity (like affirmative action) which pretty much never work, I'm not violently rebelling but I do speak out against them, vote against people who advocate for them, and donate money to people and causes that resist it. Need a non crazy institution that consistently fights woke bureaucrats (and censorious Republicans) and often wins? Here's
one.
What would you resign yourself, other people, and America as a whole, to if it meant we could at least not be openly racist?
We are already at the level where you can't be openly racist and have been for years. The only way the bureaucratic infrastructure can keep going is to constantly redefine what "openly" racist means. Since it's a bureaucracy tasked with finding and ending racism, it's very much incentivized to keep doing this forever. But as it turns out *any* bureaucracy tasked with solving a problem does this and there are tons of them that have other goals. Thus this busybody bureaucracy is yet another in a long line of busybody bureaucracies shoving its way into my life in various ways.
I would be willing to sell everything I own apostle-like and follow after anybody who could realistically deliver a society entirely free of such bureaucracies. Since communitarian Jesus or whatever is nowhere to be found, the question of how much DMV like dystopia I'm willing to put up is a good one. I cannot quantify it precisely. But less clear is why I should be more upset about the woke bureaucrats as opposed to, say, HOAs. There's a completely sensible series of arguments to be made that HOAs have done much more cultural and material harm and also routinely inconvenience or actively harm more people.
I'm not saying the woke stuff is small potatoes. It's not. I'm trying to illustrate how interconnected all this is and how anyone getting upset about *just* that is in some ways missing the forest for the trees.
