13 ms·

I feel the same way, but I think this era is much more directly similar to the "red guards" period during the Chinese cultural revolution than Soviet examples.

by AlanYx 6y ago

I feel the same way, but I think this era is much more directly similar to the "red guards" period during the Chinese cultural revolution than Soviet examples. Some of the parallels are just so direct -- students denouncing their professors, forcing them them to recant, the ideologies of the students growing more and more rigid and narrow through the conformity of the mob, until they often ended up even denouncing the professors who encouraged the movement to start. No one ends up being safe from this kind of thing as it grows. Even Mao almost lost control of the tiger, even though he thought he could steer it. My grandfather fought the Japanese as a preteen and later fought with Mao, and even he was disappeared for three days by the mob during the cultural revolution because someone denounced him as not ideologically pure enough.

stopachka 6y ago
Agreed. Recently read Born Red by Yuan Gao. Harrowing, both in what happened and how plausible it sounds today
ekianjo 6y ago
The first best instance of this was during the French Revolution. People were guillotined in droves for being not merely enthusiastic enough.
- AlanYx 6y ago
  I think there are some important qualitative differences with the French Revolution, at least in its relationship with the academy (although I'm not an expert). During the French Revolution, most of the aristocratic cadre of scientists did lose their positions, but less than a year into the Terror, the Institut de France was established with more-or-less conventional takes on merit and the scientific method. In the cultural revolution, it was different. More than three fourths of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were persecuted, most of whose work did have scientific merit and had no direct nexus with politics. But that was the problem -- just doing science wasn't sufficiently political/ideological for the mob.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chillacy 6y ago
    There was a section on this in the sci-fi novel Three Body Problem. The students force a professor of physics to recant his claim that relativity is a legitimate theory, and he refuses, then gets beaten by students. I remember thinking at the time it was such a bizarre piece of fiction, then I later found out this kind of stuff really happened.
    - stepstop 6y ago
      I’ve heard the phrase “history is stranger than fiction” before .. and you discovered that!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
BurningFrog 6y ago
I see the similarities, but one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies and reshape society to serve him more fully. What's happening in the US emerging from below, without anyone orchestrating it.
- AlanYx 6y ago
  >one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies... No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong. The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames of the movement (being a kind of political endorsement), and from that point Red Guard cells sprung up organically across the country. From that point, things became chaotic and the leadership in Beijing made a series of sometimes opposing moves, some of which tried to restrain the movement to preserve the government and others which fanned the flames.
  - missosoup 6y ago
    This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now. This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the cultural analogue of a cancer, and it masks its initial growth phase by pretending to rally behind a virtuous cause, and then shutting down any criticism of it as anti-virtuous. People from Cambodia, USSR, China, Vietnam, Germany, etc. have seen this before, but the current generation of westerners has not, so they're giving it the benefit of doubt and allowing it to gain momentum - it seems to be rallying behind a virtuous cause, after all. This is what GP and I are saying: alarm bells are going off in our heads because we have 1st or 2nd hand experience of how this plays out. And just like back then, people now are going 'naaaah, it'll be fine'. Lord of the Flies should remain mandatory school reading forever. It's a warning tale exactly about this.
mcguire 6y ago
Now, what happens to the "conventional" in Paul Graham's independent-minded world? Can you be independent-minded in the wrong way? What if you're not independent-minded enough, according to someone?
Tiktaalik 6y ago
Sounds scary so long as everything is discussed in such vague terms, which is why those decrying "cancel culture" always keep it in the theoretical space. When the "conformity of the mob" is a concrete example, such as leftists fighting for basic human rights, eg. access to medicine so that you don't die, not getting murdered by the police, etc, well it's hard to make this sound troubling.
- sampo 6y ago
  Cancel culture is equally strong in the UK, where they have free public healthcare and the UK police kills about 2 people per year (usually well justified). These issues seem to be orthogonal.
  - sparkie 6y ago
    The issues of cancel culture and "fighting for rights" should be unrelated. You can be against cancel culture and also against police brutality, for instance. The mob (and GP) wants to categorize you in an out-group so that one opinion you hold which they don't agree with means all your other opinions are irrelevant or invalid. If you ask anyone on the Right what they think about police brutality or racism, more than 99% will agree with those on the Left that is an issue. We're pretty unanimous in this regard, but we disagree on what to do about it. The mob wants to sew division, so they will try to get you to "take the knee" to prove you're on the right side, but in fact, taking the knee is simply bowing down to the demands of the mob. If you don't take the knee, you're obviously "a racist" and deserve to be cancelled. The problem is the mob has a ringleader, the innocent sounding "Black Lives Matter", which is an openly Marxist organization which is using the race issue as a shield against criticism of its real aims. The clever naming means that when you criticize the organization, you're criticizing it's name, so you mustn't care about black lives - you're racist, again. Everyone will agree that you have a right to life - there is no division here. In the US, this right, among others, are constitutionally protected so that lawmakers cannot (should not be able to) change the law to say otherwise. Interestingly, those "fighting for human rights." are largely the same people trying to deny others their basic rights, such as possessing firearms for their personal protection. In regards to "access to medicine", this is not a basic human right. GP is simply misunderstanding what is meant by the term. Anything that involves action from another person or group is not a right - it's a privilege. A right can only apply to an individual. You have a right to receive healthcare, go and forage for ingredients to make your own medicines, or provide healthcare to others - but there is no "right" that confers other people to provide you healthcare. Providers of healthcare and medicines have the right to request compensation for their services. How much compensation they want is up to them. The state should not be involved. The state cannot grant rights, it can only take them away. It is state involvement which causes medicines to be so highly priced - because the State enforces patents - a tool which strips away your natural right to produce something because somebody else has declared a monopoly on doing so. If there were no patents in medicine, all medicines would become cheap generics, with the lower bound on price essentially being the cost to produce (which declines over time). It is also state involvement which props up the salaries of healthcare providers, because they're protected from wider competition through licensing and regulatory capture. In the UK, however, the State involvement puts an upper cap on what most healthcare providers can earn - particularly nurses who are essentially minimum wage earners and can't take their services elsewhere, because there's (almost) no competition to the NHS, which of late has itself become part of the mob with the cult-like celebration of its workers. The conformists are precisely the Thursday evening clappers, and those who don't clap, for whatever reason, are terrible people who ought to be shamed.
michaelmrose 6y ago
Perhaps before we worry about imaginary communists we can worry about the party actually trying to dismantle public health and the rule of law in front of our faces. You know the same way we wouldn't debate whether we ought to paint the wall a different color while the house burns down.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  This tends to be my gut reaction too. Maybe because I live in a very conservative area and come from a very conservative background. In my filter bubble I consistently see people saying really horrible, legitimately and unapologetically racist and mysoginist things and not being called out or cancelled in any meaningful way but actually encouraged. That makes it hard to take complaints about cancel culture seriously. That being said I'm very sympathetic to people saying they've seen this before and know where it's headed. So I want to understand GP and try to act accordingly. I just can't stomach lending support to the gun-toting, trigger-happy, unapologetically authoritarian Trump regime.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    It's literally our fascists trying to paint the opposition as fascists, marxists, traitors. It's not that the Democrats are blameless far from it its just that the Republicans have wandered so far afield that they are no longer in the same universe and nothing they say even makes sense anymore.
  - jariel 6y ago
    So a key understanding here is the difference between common crude rhetoric - and other dynamics. Concern over 'cancel culture' has nothing to do with the right for people to be racist jerkoffs. It mostly a concern over people not to be able to hold opinions, intellectuals not allowed to speak, for actors not to be 'shamed' because they played someone of a different ethnicity - i.e. a lot of things for which there are thresholds of sensitivity but otherwise, most people are not offended because actions are not objectively offensive. This idea that 'cancel culture' is defending the KKK or people calling people the 'n-word' is the biggest straw-man of the era. Nobody cares about Nazis or Harvey Weinstein. But Nick Cannon, Kevin Hart, Jordan Peterson, JK Rowling etc. - this is ridiculous. I'll bet $100 that the public at large is 'correct' in most cases of 'cancel culture'. Should 'Weinstein' be cancelled? Probably 99% agree. JK Rowling? Probably 1% agree. Kevin Hart? Probably 2% agree. People are not hopped up on ridiculousness and have some sensibility - the fighting is mostly on twitter and in the news.

by AlanYx 6y ago

stopachka 6y ago

Agreed. Recently read Born Red by Yuan Gao. Harrowing, both in what happened and how plausible it sounds today

ekianjo 6y ago

The first best instance of this was during the French Revolution. People were guillotined in droves for being not merely enthusiastic enough.

AlanYx 6y ago
I think there are some important qualitative differences with the French Revolution, at least in its relationship with the academy (although I'm not an expert). During the French Revolution, most of the aristocratic cadre of scientists did lose their positions, but less than a year into the Terror, the Institut de France was established with more-or-less conventional takes on merit and the scientific method. In the cultural revolution, it was different. More than three fourths of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were persecuted, most of whose work did have scientific merit and had no direct nexus with politics. But that was the problem -- just doing science wasn't sufficiently political/ideological for the mob.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chillacy 6y ago
  There was a section on this in the sci-fi novel Three Body Problem. The students force a professor of physics to recant his claim that relativity is a legitimate theory, and he refuses, then gets beaten by students. I remember thinking at the time it was such a bizarre piece of fiction, then I later found out this kind of stuff really happened.
  - stepstop 6y ago
    I’ve heard the phrase “history is stranger than fiction” before .. and you discovered that!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

BurningFrog 6y ago

I see the similarities, but one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies and reshape society to serve him more fully. What's happening in the US emerging from below, without anyone orchestrating it.

AlanYx 6y ago
>one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies... No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong. The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames of the movement (being a kind of political endorsement), and from that point Red Guard cells sprung up organically across the country. From that point, things became chaotic and the leadership in Beijing made a series of sometimes opposing moves, some of which tried to restrain the movement to preserve the government and others which fanned the flames.
- missosoup 6y ago
  This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now. This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the cultural analogue of a cancer, and it masks its initial growth phase by pretending to rally behind a virtuous cause, and then shutting down any criticism of it as anti-virtuous. People from Cambodia, USSR, China, Vietnam, Germany, etc. have seen this before, but the current generation of westerners has not, so they're giving it the benefit of doubt and allowing it to gain momentum - it seems to be rallying behind a virtuous cause, after all. This is what GP and I are saying: alarm bells are going off in our heads because we have 1st or 2nd hand experience of how this plays out. And just like back then, people now are going 'naaaah, it'll be fine'. Lord of the Flies should remain mandatory school reading forever. It's a warning tale exactly about this.

mcguire 6y ago

Now, what happens to the "conventional" in Paul Graham's independent-minded world? Can you be independent-minded in the wrong way? What if you're not independent-minded enough, according to someone?

Tiktaalik 6y ago

Sounds scary so long as everything is discussed in such vague terms, which is why those decrying "cancel culture" always keep it in the theoretical space. When the "conformity of the mob" is a concrete example, such as leftists fighting for basic human rights, eg. access to medicine so that you don't die, not getting murdered by the police, etc, well it's hard to make this sound troubling.

sampo 6y ago
Cancel culture is equally strong in the UK, where they have free public healthcare and the UK police kills about 2 people per year (usually well justified). These issues seem to be orthogonal.
- sparkie 6y ago
  The issues of cancel culture and "fighting for rights" should be unrelated. You can be against cancel culture and also against police brutality, for instance. The mob (and GP) wants to categorize you in an out-group so that one opinion you hold which they don't agree with means all your other opinions are irrelevant or invalid. If you ask anyone on the Right what they think about police brutality or racism, more than 99% will agree with those on the Left that is an issue. We're pretty unanimous in this regard, but we disagree on what to do about it. The mob wants to sew division, so they will try to get you to "take the knee" to prove you're on the right side, but in fact, taking the knee is simply bowing down to the demands of the mob. If you don't take the knee, you're obviously "a racist" and deserve to be cancelled. The problem is the mob has a ringleader, the innocent sounding "Black Lives Matter", which is an openly Marxist organization which is using the race issue as a shield against criticism of its real aims. The clever naming means that when you criticize the organization, you're criticizing it's name, so you mustn't care about black lives - you're racist, again. Everyone will agree that you have a right to life - there is no division here. In the US, this right, among others, are constitutionally protected so that lawmakers cannot (should not be able to) change the law to say otherwise. Interestingly, those "fighting for human rights." are largely the same people trying to deny others their basic rights, such as possessing firearms for their personal protection. In regards to "access to medicine", this is not a basic human right. GP is simply misunderstanding what is meant by the term. Anything that involves action from another person or group is not a right - it's a privilege. A right can only apply to an individual. You have a right to receive healthcare, go and forage for ingredients to make your own medicines, or provide healthcare to others - but there is no "right" that confers other people to provide you healthcare. Providers of healthcare and medicines have the right to request compensation for their services. How much compensation they want is up to them. The state should not be involved. The state cannot grant rights, it can only take them away. It is state involvement which causes medicines to be so highly priced - because the State enforces patents - a tool which strips away your natural right to produce something because somebody else has declared a monopoly on doing so. If there were no patents in medicine, all medicines would become cheap generics, with the lower bound on price essentially being the cost to produce (which declines over time). It is also state involvement which props up the salaries of healthcare providers, because they're protected from wider competition through licensing and regulatory capture. In the UK, however, the State involvement puts an upper cap on what most healthcare providers can earn - particularly nurses who are essentially minimum wage earners and can't take their services elsewhere, because there's (almost) no competition to the NHS, which of late has itself become part of the mob with the cult-like celebration of its workers. The conformists are precisely the Thursday evening clappers, and those who don't clap, for whatever reason, are terrible people who ought to be shamed.

michaelmrose 6y ago

Perhaps before we worry about imaginary communists we can worry about the party actually trying to dismantle public health and the rule of law in front of our faces. You know the same way we wouldn't debate whether we ought to paint the wall a different color while the house burns down.

grahamburger 6y ago
This tends to be my gut reaction too. Maybe because I live in a very conservative area and come from a very conservative background. In my filter bubble I consistently see people saying really horrible, legitimately and unapologetically racist and mysoginist things and not being called out or cancelled in any meaningful way but actually encouraged. That makes it hard to take complaints about cancel culture seriously. That being said I'm very sympathetic to people saying they've seen this before and know where it's headed. So I want to understand GP and try to act accordingly. I just can't stomach lending support to the gun-toting, trigger-happy, unapologetically authoritarian Trump regime.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  It's literally our fascists trying to paint the opposition as fascists, marxists, traitors. It's not that the Democrats are blameless far from it its just that the Republicans have wandered so far afield that they are no longer in the same universe and nothing they say even makes sense anymore.
- jariel 6y ago
  So a key understanding here is the difference between common crude rhetoric - and other dynamics. Concern over 'cancel culture' has nothing to do with the right for people to be racist jerkoffs. It mostly a concern over people not to be able to hold opinions, intellectuals not allowed to speak, for actors not to be 'shamed' because they played someone of a different ethnicity - i.e. a lot of things for which there are thresholds of sensitivity but otherwise, most people are not offended because actions are not objectively offensive. This idea that 'cancel culture' is defending the KKK or people calling people the 'n-word' is the biggest straw-man of the era. Nobody cares about Nazis or Harvey Weinstein. But Nick Cannon, Kevin Hart, Jordan Peterson, JK Rowling etc. - this is ridiculous. I'll bet $100 that the public at large is 'correct' in most cases of 'cancel culture'. Should 'Weinstein' be cancelled? Probably 99% agree. JK Rowling? Probably 1% agree. Kevin Hart? Probably 2% agree. People are not hopped up on ridiculousness and have some sensibility - the fighting is mostly on twitter and in the news.