7 ms·

The Age of Cretinism

33 points by dsr12 8y ago

tjr225 8y ago
Really well written article. It is hard to articulate what is so frustrating about the attitude of the far right, but it is captured here.
vixen99 8y ago
I'm amused to learn that "The term ‘parliamentary cretinism’ was coined by Marx to describe a condition ...' which is 'a stunted political imagination that is consistently out of touch with reality'. Excellent description of Marxism.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Linking everything, no matter how tenuous, to Marx for cheap shots is definitely cretinism.
- ben_w 8y ago
  I’m not saying I agree with it, but you should read the Communist Manifesto some time (it’s short and free on Kindle). Things it called for include stuff now totally non-controversial: free school education for everyone; women not being the personal property of their husbands; that sort of thing. Yes, there’s also stuff I can’t even comprehend well enough to either agree or disagree (it might have made sense to someone in 1848 but not to me), yet it is surprising how much of it is now “just the way things are” — even in nations which hate communism so much that mandatory private insurance is demonised as “socialist”.
nhanq 8y ago
Ctrl+F "reaction" highlights half the article. "not being a progressive makes you a cretin" is not a good argument, maybe you should look at yourself to see why Modi is winning. This notion that progressivism is inherently and unquestionably good is a blight that comes from the West and has to stop.
- ajkjk 8y ago
  Why do you think that?
- austincheney 8y ago
  I believe both the behaviors in the article and your point are well summarized by the word: conformity. The danger is when the behavior of conformity becomes more important than the subject matter regardless of how noble or moral that subject matter may appear or whether or not the conformist behaviors are apparent to the participants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    If you ever have the misfortune of being on the wrong end of injustice, particularly where perpetrated by greater authority, or number of authorities, you start to really quickly realize how pernicious conformity can be. It's still possible for one to be infected with the kind of unjust hatred that turns one into a bad or wrong kind of person. Perhaps our collective consciousness tells us that is not possible anymore--we are not really persecuting witches, anabaptists, the poor, racial minorities, etc, etc. It's deceptive because there's truth we have made lot of progress there. But what is still true is that these human behaviors that made all of this constantly possible throughout history are still a part of us. Hatred and wrongness is extremely infectious under the right circumstances and you would be amazed by how many people immediately conform to that, no matter how unjust, rather than at least ask questions. In that way the shadow of our unacceptable past still lives on in the present. If it were not for this experience, I believe I would be ignorant of this and unbelieving in it: that the willingness to conform to unjust authority--perhaps the vital ingredient in all of the mass injustices in the world--is still something that most of the human population possess, not unlike in our past. Which is really scary. I hope I'm just particularly unlucky and wrong about this conclusion.
    - austincheney 8y ago
      Perhaps the most finite ingredient (or virtue) is selflessness. Is the action or opinion expressed primarily for your own emotions or for something completely external? I suspect most people cannot honestly discern those two criteria and that indistinguishable quality is what allows people to conform unknowingly or fear originality.
fvdessen 8y ago
The concept of 'Godwin Point' seem to have been completely forgotten in the last two years. Gratuitous Hitler comparisons used to mean that the discussion had degenerated into meaninglessness. Now it's in opening paragraph of serious articles, by serious authors. The global debate has degenerated into meaninglessness.
- simonask 8y ago
  At what point does it become fair to describe literal imitations of the developments that led to the rise of Nazi Germany as such? Such comparisons should not be made lightly, but when how far do we have to go in that direction before "Godwin's Law" stops being invoked to stop criticism?
  - fvdessen 8y ago
    When a politician starts to literally call for the end of democracy, freedom of speech, genocide of people, conquest of neighbouring countries, nationalisation of major industries, etc ?
    - s_m_t 8y ago
      Yeah, Hitler was no trojan horse. He pretty much laid out his plans in a book... Which he wrote in prison after a failed coup.
    - bartread 8y ago
      I would suggest that if you wait that long you've waited too long.
      - fvdessen 8y ago
        Too long to fight against it, or to make Hitler comparisons ?
    - ben_w 8y ago
      All or some? Also: Freedom of speech is a gradient not a binary, so its loss is harder to notice if done slowly; ditto the balance between nationalisation and privatisation (the fomer I prefer lots; the latter, I don’t really care where the balance is so long as it’s not either extreme).
dandare 8y ago
I kind of started to believe in chemtrails, except the poison sprayed over the world is probably digital, not chemical. That is the only way I can explain this worldwide slide into cretinism so perfectly captured in this article. I would like to see what will science in the future say about this period - if the culprit was an orchestrated destabilization campaign by the likes of Russia or if it was a natural and inevitable outcome of the change of human communication patterns brought by the internet.
pjc50 8y ago
> "It is hard to imagine a time in recent history where political leaders openly support a culture of violence without compunction or any trace of self-consciousness, public discourse routinely carpet-bombs fine distinctions with a view to making any nuanced moral responses impossible, and sympathy is routinely so partitioned along partisan lines that the possibility of any human response to tragedy and atrocity seems like a distant gleam." Not sure about "hard to imagine a time in recent history"; "carpet-bomb" is after all a phrase from the Vietnam War. Or the 80s when nuclear MAD was such an omnipresent threat that it was all over pop culture. To me it all seems tied to colonialism, which despite what everyone thinks is definitely not dead. Colonialism always comes with justifications for violence against the colonized. Edit: ah, this article is about India, but I think the cultural drivers are the same - exclusionary nationalism by a group, in this case Hindus, opposed to the idea that minorities deserve rights as individuals.
misja111 8y ago
I read an interesting article recently related to this, which posted the following problem: that in recent times, moralism has become hijacked by the financial elite. For instance, to protect our environment you should eat local and organic food, which unfortunately tends to be more expensive than its mass produced alternatives. When you earn enough, you can live the 'right' way and telll all your friends; people who have to save money and buy cheaper mass produced foods are 'worse' not just because they are poor, but because they live their lifes the 'wrong' way. When you have a good job and live in a good neighbourhood, you might welcome immigrants and want to give them a new home in your country so they can escape all the sufferings from where they are coming from. But when you are poor, you might also have worries that those immigrants compete with you in your job or might overwhelm your neighbourhood. But again, morally this worry is 'wrong'; until recently, bringing this out in the open would make you a racist or worse. So lower classes see themselves pushed in a corner where they are not only the losers in a financial way, but more than that, they are 'bad' people because they dare to have second thoughts about all those morally right choices above. As a result, there is a growing movement to let go of morals altogether, which is the cretinism from the article.
- pjc50 8y ago
  These aren't the same kind of thing at all, though. "Ethical consumption" is a bit of a mess and I would agree that it's vulnerable to becoming just another form of conspicuous consumption unless people are diligently self-critical about their moralising. Migration, on the other hand, involves key elements of human dignity. The right not to be subject to racial discrimination (e.g. the bad old days of "no dogs, no blacks no irish" signs). The right to family life: to live with your spouse and children even if they weren't born in the same country as you. People who are worried about e.g. people moving from Mexico to California but not Ohio to California need to take a look at themselves. Are we really saying that to avoid overcrowding and ensure access to jobs for locals, that countries would be better off with internal migration control? You'd need a visa to move to the big city?
  - brobdingnagians 8y ago
    I think his point is that when morality gets co-opted and redefined to be a mind-control tactic of the wealthy to get the poor to do relatively meaningless things for the agenda of the wealthy, the poor stop caring about morality. That would go quite well with the point of the article about cretinism being a disregard of morality in political process; though it would also turn part of the blame from the poor to the rich. I don't necessarily agree with him, but it is a valid point connected to the article.

33 points by dsr12 8y ago

Really well written article. It is hard to articulate what is so frustrating about the attitude of the far right, but it is captured here.

vixen99 8y ago

I'm amused to learn that "The term ‘parliamentary cretinism’ was coined by Marx to describe a condition ...' which is 'a stunted political imagination that is consistently out of touch with reality'. Excellent description of Marxism.

pjc50 8y ago
Linking everything, no matter how tenuous, to Marx for cheap shots is definitely cretinism.
ben_w 8y ago
I’m not saying I agree with it, but you should read the Communist Manifesto some time (it’s short and free on Kindle). Things it called for include stuff now totally non-controversial: free school education for everyone; women not being the personal property of their husbands; that sort of thing. Yes, there’s also stuff I can’t even comprehend well enough to either agree or disagree (it might have made sense to someone in 1848 but not to me), yet it is surprising how much of it is now “just the way things are” — even in nations which hate communism so much that mandatory private insurance is demonised as “socialist”.

nhanq 8y ago

Ctrl+F "reaction" highlights half the article. "not being a progressive makes you a cretin" is not a good argument, maybe you should look at yourself to see why Modi is winning. This notion that progressivism is inherently and unquestionably good is a blight that comes from the West and has to stop.

ajkjk 8y ago
Why do you think that?
austincheney 8y ago
I believe both the behaviors in the article and your point are well summarized by the word: conformity. The danger is when the behavior of conformity becomes more important than the subject matter regardless of how noble or moral that subject matter may appear or whether or not the conformist behaviors are apparent to the participants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
- wallace_f 8y ago
  If you ever have the misfortune of being on the wrong end of injustice, particularly where perpetrated by greater authority, or number of authorities, you start to really quickly realize how pernicious conformity can be. It's still possible for one to be infected with the kind of unjust hatred that turns one into a bad or wrong kind of person. Perhaps our collective consciousness tells us that is not possible anymore--we are not really persecuting witches, anabaptists, the poor, racial minorities, etc, etc. It's deceptive because there's truth we have made lot of progress there. But what is still true is that these human behaviors that made all of this constantly possible throughout history are still a part of us. Hatred and wrongness is extremely infectious under the right circumstances and you would be amazed by how many people immediately conform to that, no matter how unjust, rather than at least ask questions. In that way the shadow of our unacceptable past still lives on in the present. If it were not for this experience, I believe I would be ignorant of this and unbelieving in it: that the willingness to conform to unjust authority--perhaps the vital ingredient in all of the mass injustices in the world--is still something that most of the human population possess, not unlike in our past. Which is really scary. I hope I'm just particularly unlucky and wrong about this conclusion.
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Perhaps the most finite ingredient (or virtue) is selflessness. Is the action or opinion expressed primarily for your own emotions or for something completely external? I suspect most people cannot honestly discern those two criteria and that indistinguishable quality is what allows people to conform unknowingly or fear originality.

fvdessen 8y ago

The concept of 'Godwin Point' seem to have been completely forgotten in the last two years. Gratuitous Hitler comparisons used to mean that the discussion had degenerated into meaninglessness. Now it's in opening paragraph of serious articles, by serious authors. The global debate has degenerated into meaninglessness.

simonask 8y ago
At what point does it become fair to describe literal imitations of the developments that led to the rise of Nazi Germany as such? Such comparisons should not be made lightly, but when how far do we have to go in that direction before "Godwin's Law" stops being invoked to stop criticism?
- fvdessen 8y ago
  When a politician starts to literally call for the end of democracy, freedom of speech, genocide of people, conquest of neighbouring countries, nationalisation of major industries, etc ?
  - s_m_t 8y ago
    Yeah, Hitler was no trojan horse. He pretty much laid out his plans in a book... Which he wrote in prison after a failed coup.
  - bartread 8y ago
    I would suggest that if you wait that long you've waited too long.
    - fvdessen 8y ago
      Too long to fight against it, or to make Hitler comparisons ?
  - ben_w 8y ago
    All or some? Also: Freedom of speech is a gradient not a binary, so its loss is harder to notice if done slowly; ditto the balance between nationalisation and privatisation (the fomer I prefer lots; the latter, I don’t really care where the balance is so long as it’s not either extreme).

dandare 8y ago

I kind of started to believe in chemtrails, except the poison sprayed over the world is probably digital, not chemical. That is the only way I can explain this worldwide slide into cretinism so perfectly captured in this article. I would like to see what will science in the future say about this period - if the culprit was an orchestrated destabilization campaign by the likes of Russia or if it was a natural and inevitable outcome of the change of human communication patterns brought by the internet.

pjc50 8y ago

> "It is hard to imagine a time in recent history where political leaders openly support a culture of violence without compunction or any trace of self-consciousness, public discourse routinely carpet-bombs fine distinctions with a view to making any nuanced moral responses impossible, and sympathy is routinely so partitioned along partisan lines that the possibility of any human response to tragedy and atrocity seems like a distant gleam." Not sure about "hard to imagine a time in recent history"; "carpet-bomb" is after all a phrase from the Vietnam War. Or the 80s when nuclear MAD was such an omnipresent threat that it was all over pop culture. To me it all seems tied to colonialism, which despite what everyone thinks is definitely not dead. Colonialism always comes with justifications for violence against the colonized. Edit: ah, this article is about India, but I think the cultural drivers are the same - exclusionary nationalism by a group, in this case Hindus, opposed to the idea that minorities deserve rights as individuals.

misja111 8y ago

I read an interesting article recently related to this, which posted the following problem: that in recent times, moralism has become hijacked by the financial elite. For instance, to protect our environment you should eat local and organic food, which unfortunately tends to be more expensive than its mass produced alternatives. When you earn enough, you can live the 'right' way and telll all your friends; people who have to save money and buy cheaper mass produced foods are 'worse' not just because they are poor, but because they live their lifes the 'wrong' way. When you have a good job and live in a good neighbourhood, you might welcome immigrants and want to give them a new home in your country so they can escape all the sufferings from where they are coming from. But when you are poor, you might also have worries that those immigrants compete with you in your job or might overwhelm your neighbourhood. But again, morally this worry is 'wrong'; until recently, bringing this out in the open would make you a racist or worse. So lower classes see themselves pushed in a corner where they are not only the losers in a financial way, but more than that, they are 'bad' people because they dare to have second thoughts about all those morally right choices above. As a result, there is a growing movement to let go of morals altogether, which is the cretinism from the article.

pjc50 8y ago
These aren't the same kind of thing at all, though. "Ethical consumption" is a bit of a mess and I would agree that it's vulnerable to becoming just another form of conspicuous consumption unless people are diligently self-critical about their moralising. Migration, on the other hand, involves key elements of human dignity. The right not to be subject to racial discrimination (e.g. the bad old days of "no dogs, no blacks no irish" signs). The right to family life: to live with your spouse and children even if they weren't born in the same country as you. People who are worried about e.g. people moving from Mexico to California but not Ohio to California need to take a look at themselves. Are we really saying that to avoid overcrowding and ensure access to jobs for locals, that countries would be better off with internal migration control? You'd need a visa to move to the big city?
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  I think his point is that when morality gets co-opted and redefined to be a mind-control tactic of the wealthy to get the poor to do relatively meaningless things for the agenda of the wealthy, the poor stop caring about morality. That would go quite well with the point of the article about cretinism being a disregard of morality in political process; though it would also turn part of the blame from the poor to the rich. I don't necessarily agree with him, but it is a valid point connected to the article.