9 ms·

I don't see it that way. I see it as a simple recognition of a reality and a call to engage in primary research and reasoning from first principles. It is herd

by api 12y ago

I don't see it that way. I see it as a simple recognition of a reality and a call to engage in primary research and reasoning from first principles. It is herds and movements that are disempowering. It's still possible to organize too. People should organize on concrete issues and leave the ideology (levers for mass manipulation) at the door. That way it's a lot harder to leverage group identity signifiers and mythological elements to manipulate large numbers of people while masking ones real agenda. For example, we might create an agency whose goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. That's it. No other bandwagons are implied. Don't get me wrong. I do see the universality of manipulation as a serious social pathology. I just don't know what to do about it in a world where people have to get paid. Seems to me that if money is required to make things happen, only things that are motivated by money or that serve the agendas of those with it will happen.

pmoriarty 12y ago
"It is herds and movements that are disempowering." The Civil Rights movement. The labor movement. The environmental movement. The suffragette movement. The abolitionist movement. The free speech movement. The list can go on and on. Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization.
- api 12y ago
  Maybe something has changed then. The only movements I see today are right wing movements that use religion to get the poor to vote against their economic interests and left wing movements that are all about maintaining high food and real estate prices in wealthy enclaves, not to mention tons of salesmanship for questionable and expensive alternative medicine products. None of it seems related to improving life for anyone disadvantaged. If anything they result in the opposite -- NIMBY induced urban real estate hyperinflation is a great example. I see very little on the contemporary stage that in any way resembles those movements. More specifically I see almost nothing that is in any way about improving human life. It all just looks like sneaky forms of marketing or ideological wank that is irrelevant to any actual measure of freedom, dignity, or well being. IMHO it all went off the rails in the 70s. It's interesting to me in light of Peter Thiel's contention that fundamental technological innovation has stagnated since then, a view I very strongly agree with. Maybe something really deep and fundamental broke and both these things are symptoms.
  - judk 12y ago
    Maybe we have already won all the easy battles, and the remaining ones are the impassible disputes between powerful entities. Or maybe the Internet has made most people not care about modern movements, and billionare backdoor power has made it safe to ignore popular unrest.
  - calibraxis 12y ago
    Very interesting point. A couple days ago, Thiel debated one of the earliest Occupy members, David Graeber. On that very subject you mention. (http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social) The radical left (like Graeber and Chomsky) points out one factor since the 70's is the financialization of the economy. (Financial institutions prefer short-term profits to long-term development.) Also, there's the rise of "neoliberalism", which Graeber argues prefers to destroy capitalism just to achieve one success: getting people to believe there's no alternative to capitalism. If all that capitalist propaganda's been successful in beating imagination out of people, that they can do far better than the status quo, maybe that explains why people are so depoliticized. Fewer people have passionate visions for a better world.
    - api 12y ago
      I'm gonna have to check that one out. I'm a big fan of Thiel even when I don't agree with him (e.g. on politics to some extent) -- he's one of those people who makes you think even when you think he's wrong. Getting back to the pragmatic, I think environmentalism is an exception among the movements listed above. I'm not saying it has no good points -- it has many good points. Yet it's a movement that seems to embody the problem I'm talking about in a number of ways. Not coincidentally IMHO it came of age as a movement in the 70s. (Maybe we should just strike all thought from the 70s from the intellectual record and make the calendar go 1969, 1980, 1981...?) Case in point: Nobody can seem to explain to me how simultaneously ditching fossil fuels and nuclear power without replacements is going to do anything other than impoverish the majority of humanity. I'm all for renewable energy, but it's not ready yet and won't be until the storage problem is well and truly solved. If you talk to greens on this issue you get denial or cognitive dissonance. If you dig deeper, I personally have found that you run into what seems to be a quiet belief that losing most of humanity would be a good thing... especially if the loss occurred mostly among the poor. I'm not saying all greens hold this view, but it's in the milieu. Don't believe me? Head over to Reddit and read the comments to any article about the Ebola epidemic. I've also personally heard greens express this view verbally to me, like one anti-vaccination dude who told me that "there's too many people anyway" implying that we need more disease. He said that people with "a strong immune system and good nutrition" don't need vaccines -- in other words the wealthy and the genetic ubermenschen. A century ago that would have been considered a radical right wing social Darwinist opinion and would have put you in the same camp as all the budding European fascists obsessed with the arguments of Oswald Spengler. Yet today it's a "left wing" viewpoint. Blech. What bullshit. IMHO there is no left today. There are reactionaries of the right and reactionaries of the "new left." Among the greens who don't hold this view, you nevertheless get total cognitive blank-out on this issue. Either they remain committed to the idea that we could just swap out solar and wind for fossil fuels and nuclear despite the copious math that says otherwise, or they just flat out refuse to think about it in any depth. You also see a lot of marketing of poverty as a good thing. "Back to nature," some forms of minimalism, permaculture which was called land-serfdom in the 1500s, etc. These things are poverty, folks, and you're not going to like it once the novelty of it wears off. I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage. Meanwhile we need to get off fossil fuels yesterday. I can't help but at least suspect that the movement is co-opted and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry behind the scenes with the goal of using green ideology to prevent the emergence of any real competition. I also can't help but see the Malthusian elements of green ideology as a pressure valve permitting the release of latent economic/cultural elitism and racism that are no longer politically correct to state explicitly and openly. It's a perfect example of the kind of large scale systematic deception by social movement that I'm talking about -- the actual goals are not the stated goals and are hidden behind ideological and symbolic blinds.
- lutusp 12y ago
  >> "It is herds and movements that are disempowering." > The Civil Rights movement. > The labor movement. > The environmental movement. > The suffragette movement. > The abolitionist movement. > The free speech movement. > The list can go on and on. Indeed it does, and some will argue that, with some noteworthy exceptions, your list, and other similar lists, proves the point being made by the OP. Most public movements only postpone what they protest against -- the labor movement stands as a classic case. > Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization. From a scientific standpoint, we cannot say whether these movements were causes or effects. By the time people were rightly condemning slave ownership on any scale in the U.S., Great Britain had abandoned slavery decades before, and many civilized people in the U.S. and elsewhere saw slavery's abandonment as inevitable. As to the labor movement, historically it described an arc between ineffectiveness and corruption -- between a promise of a solution, to becoming a bigger problem than the issue it claimed to address. As to free speech -- well, I see this as a classic example of modern government's basic strategy, which is to find out what people are going to do anyway, order them to do it, then try to take credit for the outcome.
  - maxxxxx 12y ago
    I don't think it's right to doubt that these movements at least accelerated improvements. I am sure the South would happily have held slaves for much longer than it did. I remember when I was a kid car manufacturers claimed they would go bankrupt if they had to install catalytic filters. Only the pressure from the environmental movement build up the momentum for requiring those filters. Without the labor movement we would probably still work 12 hours six days a week.
    - lutusp 12y ago
      > I don't think it's right to doubt that these movements at least accelerated improvements. But I didn't do that. I only said we cannot know scientifically whether they're causes or effects. That's an important distinction, one often overlooked in historical accounts.
justin66 12y ago
> It is herds and movements that are disempowering. As an absolute statement - condemning all movements and all ideology without distinguishing between their intrinsic merits - this is extremely odd. Without "herds and movements" we'd still be clever mammals without the power of speech. Something below even tribal societies, without the ability to even teach one another how to use tools or to act ethically. The recognition that some ideals are false does not preclude having them. > People should organize on concrete issues and leave the ideology (levers for mass manipulation) at the door What do you think motivates people to "organize on concrete issues" and pick a side on those issues? Ideology does, 100% of the time. How is this even controversial? More concretely, the notion that we cannot engage in an ideological movement - a party voting bloc, for example - without being subsumed by that ideology or engaging in self-defeating behavior is demonstrably false. People form coalitions because coalitions work. It's a pretty basic thing in voting theory and political science that you win more for your side if you are willing to form coalitions with differing parties and compromise.

by api 12y ago

pmoriarty 12y ago

"It is herds and movements that are disempowering." The Civil Rights movement. The labor movement. The environmental movement. The suffragette movement. The abolitionist movement. The free speech movement. The list can go on and on. Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization.

api 12y ago
Maybe something has changed then. The only movements I see today are right wing movements that use religion to get the poor to vote against their economic interests and left wing movements that are all about maintaining high food and real estate prices in wealthy enclaves, not to mention tons of salesmanship for questionable and expensive alternative medicine products. None of it seems related to improving life for anyone disadvantaged. If anything they result in the opposite -- NIMBY induced urban real estate hyperinflation is a great example. I see very little on the contemporary stage that in any way resembles those movements. More specifically I see almost nothing that is in any way about improving human life. It all just looks like sneaky forms of marketing or ideological wank that is irrelevant to any actual measure of freedom, dignity, or well being. IMHO it all went off the rails in the 70s. It's interesting to me in light of Peter Thiel's contention that fundamental technological innovation has stagnated since then, a view I very strongly agree with. Maybe something really deep and fundamental broke and both these things are symptoms.
- judk 12y ago
  Maybe we have already won all the easy battles, and the remaining ones are the impassible disputes between powerful entities. Or maybe the Internet has made most people not care about modern movements, and billionare backdoor power has made it safe to ignore popular unrest.
- calibraxis 12y ago
  Very interesting point. A couple days ago, Thiel debated one of the earliest Occupy members, David Graeber. On that very subject you mention. (http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social) The radical left (like Graeber and Chomsky) points out one factor since the 70's is the financialization of the economy. (Financial institutions prefer short-term profits to long-term development.) Also, there's the rise of "neoliberalism", which Graeber argues prefers to destroy capitalism just to achieve one success: getting people to believe there's no alternative to capitalism. If all that capitalist propaganda's been successful in beating imagination out of people, that they can do far better than the status quo, maybe that explains why people are so depoliticized. Fewer people have passionate visions for a better world.
  - api 12y ago
    I'm gonna have to check that one out. I'm a big fan of Thiel even when I don't agree with him (e.g. on politics to some extent) -- he's one of those people who makes you think even when you think he's wrong. Getting back to the pragmatic, I think environmentalism is an exception among the movements listed above. I'm not saying it has no good points -- it has many good points. Yet it's a movement that seems to embody the problem I'm talking about in a number of ways. Not coincidentally IMHO it came of age as a movement in the 70s. (Maybe we should just strike all thought from the 70s from the intellectual record and make the calendar go 1969, 1980, 1981...?) Case in point: Nobody can seem to explain to me how simultaneously ditching fossil fuels and nuclear power without replacements is going to do anything other than impoverish the majority of humanity. I'm all for renewable energy, but it's not ready yet and won't be until the storage problem is well and truly solved. If you talk to greens on this issue you get denial or cognitive dissonance. If you dig deeper, I personally have found that you run into what seems to be a quiet belief that losing most of humanity would be a good thing... especially if the loss occurred mostly among the poor. I'm not saying all greens hold this view, but it's in the milieu. Don't believe me? Head over to Reddit and read the comments to any article about the Ebola epidemic. I've also personally heard greens express this view verbally to me, like one anti-vaccination dude who told me that "there's too many people anyway" implying that we need more disease. He said that people with "a strong immune system and good nutrition" don't need vaccines -- in other words the wealthy and the genetic ubermenschen. A century ago that would have been considered a radical right wing social Darwinist opinion and would have put you in the same camp as all the budding European fascists obsessed with the arguments of Oswald Spengler. Yet today it's a "left wing" viewpoint. Blech. What bullshit. IMHO there is no left today. There are reactionaries of the right and reactionaries of the "new left." Among the greens who don't hold this view, you nevertheless get total cognitive blank-out on this issue. Either they remain committed to the idea that we could just swap out solar and wind for fossil fuels and nuclear despite the copious math that says otherwise, or they just flat out refuse to think about it in any depth. You also see a lot of marketing of poverty as a good thing. "Back to nature," some forms of minimalism, permaculture which was called land-serfdom in the 1500s, etc. These things are poverty, folks, and you're not going to like it once the novelty of it wears off. I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage. Meanwhile we need to get off fossil fuels yesterday. I can't help but at least suspect that the movement is co-opted and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry behind the scenes with the goal of using green ideology to prevent the emergence of any real competition. I also can't help but see the Malthusian elements of green ideology as a pressure valve permitting the release of latent economic/cultural elitism and racism that are no longer politically correct to state explicitly and openly. It's a perfect example of the kind of large scale systematic deception by social movement that I'm talking about -- the actual goals are not the stated goals and are hidden behind ideological and symbolic blinds.
lutusp 12y ago
>> "It is herds and movements that are disempowering." > The Civil Rights movement. > The labor movement. > The environmental movement. > The suffragette movement. > The abolitionist movement. > The free speech movement. > The list can go on and on. Indeed it does, and some will argue that, with some noteworthy exceptions, your list, and other similar lists, proves the point being made by the OP. Most public movements only postpone what they protest against -- the labor movement stands as a classic case. > Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization. From a scientific standpoint, we cannot say whether these movements were causes or effects. By the time people were rightly condemning slave ownership on any scale in the U.S., Great Britain had abandoned slavery decades before, and many civilized people in the U.S. and elsewhere saw slavery's abandonment as inevitable. As to the labor movement, historically it described an arc between ineffectiveness and corruption -- between a promise of a solution, to becoming a bigger problem than the issue it claimed to address. As to free speech -- well, I see this as a classic example of modern government's basic strategy, which is to find out what people are going to do anyway, order them to do it, then try to take credit for the outcome.
- maxxxxx 12y ago
  I don't think it's right to doubt that these movements at least accelerated improvements. I am sure the South would happily have held slaves for much longer than it did. I remember when I was a kid car manufacturers claimed they would go bankrupt if they had to install catalytic filters. Only the pressure from the environmental movement build up the momentum for requiring those filters. Without the labor movement we would probably still work 12 hours six days a week.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    > I don't think it's right to doubt that these movements at least accelerated improvements. But I didn't do that. I only said we cannot know scientifically whether they're causes or effects. That's an important distinction, one often overlooked in historical accounts.

justin66 12y ago

> It is herds and movements that are disempowering. As an absolute statement - condemning all movements and all ideology without distinguishing between their intrinsic merits - this is extremely odd. Without "herds and movements" we'd still be clever mammals without the power of speech. Something below even tribal societies, without the ability to even teach one another how to use tools or to act ethically. The recognition that some ideals are false does not preclude having them. > People should organize on concrete issues and leave the ideology (levers for mass manipulation) at the door What do you think motivates people to "organize on concrete issues" and pick a side on those issues? Ideology does, 100% of the time. How is this even controversial? More concretely, the notion that we cannot engage in an ideological movement - a party voting bloc, for example - without being subsumed by that ideology or engaging in self-defeating behavior is demonstrably false. People form coalitions because coalitions work. It's a pretty basic thing in voting theory and political science that you win more for your side if you are willing to form coalitions with differing parties and compromise.