Oddbean

Gonna be an awesome convo. One angle I think about a lot: Don DeLillo described the Kennedy assassination as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” And he did so because after that Americans lost conviction in capital-T Truth, in a fundamental coherence of the universe. After all if we can’t even determine who committed the most famous murder since Franz Ferdinand, if we have to fall back on “magic bullet” theories, does anything mean anything? Is there something behind the curtain? This, coupled with Vietnam, creates the perfect backdrop for the intellectual revolution that is postmodernism and all its tributaries and outgrowths. Postmodernism takes over college campuses. Critical theorists like Derrida and Foucault and de Man become rockstars. Academia becomes almost a competitive game to see who can formulate the most radical understanding of the world. We go off gold in 1971, and inflation ensues. For the next 50 years everything gets more expensive, especially higher education. So at the same time post-structuralists and post-colonialists et al are saturating the academy, the number of folks who can actually afford to go to the academy is decreasing. So now we have elite schools increasingly captured by what is essentially an evolved viral (almost Darwinian) Marxism, teaching increasingly wealthy and well-connected kids. This is where we are now. With the country’s most affluent, privileged, educated kids becoming the most politically radical, and it’s all occurring in a way and in places more and more detached from the lived reality of normal people. And these kids of course grow up to take powerful positions in society (because they’re wealthy and well connected). So a schism between “the Left” and the constituents it purports to care most about, “the working class,” emerges and grows. Most regular people are basically just like what the actual fuck are you guys talking about. And so the Left becomes utterly detached from its target demographic and becomes instead like an eternal regress of theoretical nonsense. Like the bird in an early David Foster Wallace story (the title escapes me at the moment) that flies in increasingly narrower circles until it actually flies up its own ass. Voila here we are. nostr:note1vysmayhv5xa3hsj42vfs8jt0ze6kzf7vqpqn766yy0yrlk63vjnq8t05lw

College costs continued to rise, and did so in part because of ever increasing direct and indirect government subsidies. Couple this with 1971, the gutting of the manufacturing base, and the rise of the managerial class, and you have a bloated fiat system of higher education. Not only were the colleges and universities seeding the American workforce with the new managerial class, but their own hallowed halls as well, with ever growing administrative positions, chairs, and divisions—all without any real function in research or teaching, but a mandate to do something, anything in the realm of policy.

A lot of today’s conversations remind me of grad seminar discussions in the late aughts, early teens and I think to myself: oh god, the thoughts escaped into the wild! I was fortunate to be trained by a crusty, free speech-lovin, old school Marxist (pre-new left in thought and practically age). I do think Marcuse was basically right though—the critique of media and culture. But the left went off the rails somewhere between new left and deconstructionism/what-will-you. The right, in my view, has really taken up the mantle of post-structuralism in ways that are very serious (in contrast to the playfulness of the left) and frankly concerning (again, in contrast to the playfulness and almost sexiness of the left before it got too caught up with ellipsis).

Great overview Logan. When the quest for truth and reason is abandoned, when the concept of free will and individual sovereign decisionmaking is replaced by determinism and the belief that humans are merely a sum of their inputs, the logical outcome is an ideology that values power over truth. Those that believe that they cannot change the minds of others via truthful argumentation will arrive at the conclusion that the power to set the standards is the only method of attaining ethical behaviors; via nudging and programming. CBDCs and social credit scores is the logical destination of determinism, since there is an inherent assumption that the only realization of ethical behaviors is an external re-programming with values and ideals that have been stamped by the bureau as correct and appropriate. Political correctness emerged as an assumed path to an ideological paradise where all injustices are believed to be conquered, if only, and this minor detail aside, if only everyone accept and practice the enlightened re-programming of political correctness, communicated by central planners and received at the mountain of higher wisdom, to achieve this necessary utopia. Central planning being the root of totalitarianism didn't stop this quest for absolute power, perhaps because the imagined worst case alternative was the absolute power of some other group with a worse ideological framing. Yet now we are witnessing the emergence of decentralization as a potent force involving game theory mechanics. Property rights for all could suddenly be attained at a protocol level. Jurisdictions will now have to compete for capital and resources by providing and securing individual liberties. The game has changed in favor of allowing liberty, private property rights, sovereign individuals and the decentralized quest for truth to emerge as a greater movement. The future is determined by individuals, not by a centrally planned utopia designed by committees. A world where all risks are eliminated is an existence where all liberties have been dismantled. Give me a life of risk and infinite possibilities rather than a prison of bureaucratic intentions.