Off the Rail Politics

[JeffS7444]

Were he stilll around, I imagine that Alvin Toffler would have much to say about the world circa 2024. But in recent times, his works have been out print, and unavailable through my extended library system, so I had to track down an old paperback book.

As a collective whole, I think we haven't quite gotten the hang of navigating the flood of information available to us, distinguishing bits likely to be true, if not always agreeable, versus comfortable falsehoods.

 

[chuckroast]

Were he stilll around, I imagine that Alvin Toffler would have much to say about the world circa 2024. But in recent times, his works have been out print, and unavailable through my extended library system, so I had to track down an old paperback book.

As a collective whole, I think we haven't quite gotten the hang of navigating the flood of information available to us, distinguishing bits likely to be true, if not always agreeable, versus comfortable falsehoods.

This becomes increasingly impossible when several generations of citizens have been so miseducated as to be unable to think critically or contextually. We used to mock nonsense. Now the President of the US promote Nonsense Day Of Visibility.

 

[JeffS7444]

This becomes increasingly impossible when several generations of citizens have been so miseducated as to be unable to think critically or contextually. We used to mock nonsense. Now the President of the US promote Nonsense Day Of Visibility.

It's my hope that cultures such as ours can mature over time with regards to "fake news" and social media, just as it did with television advertising.

 

[Retro-Grouch]

It's my hope that cultures such as ours can mature over time with regards to "fake news" and social media, just as it did with television advertising.

Television advertising just became more sophisticated; it's better at manipulating us now than it's ever been. The proof? We don't think we're being manipulated.

 

[chuckroast]

Television advertising just became more sophisticated; it's better at manipulating us now than it's ever been. The proof? We don't think we're being manipulated.

You know, I'm not sure if that's it, or that the larger culture is buying what they're selling in desperate hope that it is true: That money will make you happy, that pills will make you thin, the clothes will make you sexy, that cars will make you attractive, that everyone can have a life of easy comfort, etc.

 

[Retro-Grouch]

You know, I'm not sure if that's it, or that the larger culture is buying what they're selling in desperate hope that it is true: That money will make you happy, that pills will make you thin, the clothes will make you sexy, that cars will make you attractive, that everyone can have a life of easy comfort, etc.

Of course. People are anxious, no, terrified; and always, the worst decision are those made out of fear. People choose what looks like an easy fix.
I might modify my post above; people perhaps do know they're being manipulated, but don't care, or even embrace it. The day after Super Bowl, all the buzz is about who had the best commercials.
Of course, I'm firmly convinced that the latest Leica will make me thin, sexy, attractive, and very happy.

 

[chuckroast]

It certainly worked for me. You should see the ladies swoon when they see my Jubilee M5 ...

 

[Retro-Grouch]

It certainly worked for me. You should see the ladies swoon when they see my Jubilee M5 ...

Maybe what makes them swoon is your smelly feet.

 

[AndyCapp]

We can talk about how other people think with their biases, ignorance and tribalism.
There is nothing we can do about it.
Studies about influence show that people cling harder to their oldideas if they face resistance. Being in contact with opposite views does not increase understanding but polarises us more.
I try to stay in my senses, curious and critical. The number of open people around me who might broaden their scope or adapt new ideas in a discussion is desperately low. The only person I can educate is me.

 

[chuckroast]

We can talk about how other people think with their biases, ignorance and tribalism.
There is nothing we can do about it.
Studies about influence show that people cling harder to their oldideas if they face resistance. Being in contact with opposite views does not increase understanding but polarises us more.
I try to stay in my senses, curious and critical. The number of open people around me who might broaden their scope or adapt new ideas in a discussion is desperately low. The only person I can educate is me.

In his book "The Psychology Of Totalitarianism", Mattias Desmet makes a strong argument that it only takes about 10% of the population to stop a bad or dangerous societal trend. He is both a research psychologist and a highly accomplished statistician. So. by his research, resistance actually does work very effectively even with only a small population resisting. He says this is because the binding of people to these totalitarian ideas (and let's face it, that's what we're discussing here) is fairly weak. People gravitate toward them mostly for social connection and that's not enough to get them to stay under strong resistance.

The contemporary lunacy is held by a relatively small percentage of the population. The problem is that the mainstream, traditional, normal people are not vocal enough in their opposition.

 

[AndyCapp]

In his book "The Psychology Of Totalitarianism", Mattias Desmet makes a strong argument that it only takes about 10% of the population to stop a bad or dangerous societal trend. He is both a research psychologist and a highly accomplished statistician. So. by his research, resistance actually does work very effectively even with only a small population resisting. He says this is because the binding of people to these totalitarian ideas (and let's face it, that's what we're discussing here) is fairly weak. People gravitate toward them mostly for social connection and that's not enough to get them to stay under strong resistance.

The contemporary lunacy is held by a relatively small percentage of the population. The problem is that the mainstream, traditional, normal people are not vocal enough in their opposition.

Does Desmet quote numerous similar incidents so much that his statement crosses from opinion to data?
I have my doubts. I always feel weary when materials are presented and compared without paying attention to the situation's specifics.
I was shocked to see the American and British police forces turning to defend criminals as long as they had the correct political opinions.
I do not know how he collected his material, but I am curious.
American social scientists lost their credibility some years ago. I would like him to present his sources.

 

[chuckroast]

Does Desmet quote numerous similar incidents so much that his statement crosses from opinion to data?
I have my doubts. I always feel weary when materials are presented and compared without paying attention to the situation's specifics.
I was shocked to see the American and British police forces turning to defend criminals as long as they had the correct political opinions.
I do not know how he collected his material, but I am curious.
American social scientists lost their credibility some years ago. I would like him to present his sources.

Desmet is a legitimate researcher and expert statistician. His findings are data based.

He is NOT one of the fake modern academics and has also written extensively about academic fraud.

 

[DownUnder]

Rand's thinking and writing reflected the prevalent social mentality of the 1950s. I was a child back then, but I recall the critical years when e were all convinced the Soviets would nuke the entirety of North America. In 1957 at a lobster festival in New Brunswick (Canada), the federal government had a stall handing out pamphlets of how to build a nuclear shelter in one's back yard and what to stock it with.

Now, six decades later, the thought that an isolated and completely unimportant part of eastern Canada would be completely devastated along with the important cities of the country, make me laugh.

But we believed it.

The mass paranoia was very real. Ayn Rand had nothing on our glorious leaders in Ottawa, who seemed to have been feeding off the paranoia of Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and (earlier in the history) Macarthur who wanted to nuke North Korea but was then himself terminated by Truman. Seen from the perspective of almost 70 years later, the Eisenhower era was one crazy time.

Moving' on, I agree with chuckroast's comments about Rand's The Fountainhead. To my thinking, all of Rand's philosophical concepts are now vastly outdated, and many are childishly naive.

Yet I've met many people, even well-educated university graduates with master's degrees and even PhDs, who fervently believe everything she wrote.

Such are the times we live in. Sadly.

 

[AndyCapp]

Desmet is a legitimate researcher and expert statistician. His findings are data based.

He is NOT one of the fake modern academics and has also written extensively about academic fraud.

I am interested in the data and the conclusions, not the person.

 

[chuckroast]

I am interested in the data and the conclusions, not the person.

I can only point you to his body of work.

 

[chuckroast]

Rand's thinking and writing reflected the prevalent social mentality of the 1950s. I was a child back then, but I recall the critical years when e were all convinced the Soviets would nuke the entirety of North America. In 1957 at a lobster festival in New Brunswick (Canada), the federal government had a stall handing out pamphlets of how to build a nuclear shelter in one's back yard and what to stock it with.

Now, six decades later, the thought that an isolated and completely unimportant part of eastern Canada would be completely devastated along with the important cities of the country, make me laugh.

But we believed it.

The mass paranoia was very real. Ayn Rand had nothing on our glorious leaders.

I agree with chuck roast about Rand's The Fountainhead. I also believe that Rand's philosophical concepts are now vastly outdated, and even childishly naive.

Yet I've met so many people, even well-educated university graduates with master's degrees, who believe everything she wrote.

Such are the times we live in. Sadly.

As someone who lived in Europe not so long after this, I can assure that the Soviet threat was very real. It wasn't a Cold War, it was a Simmering War that absolutely had nuclear overtones. I have family that flew jets in Europe in joint US, UK, Canadian missions and those planes carried nukes.

The Sovs might not have nuked New Brunswick, but London, Bonn, Paris, Toronto, Ottawa, NYC, Washington D.C., Chicago, LA, et al. were very much in their sights. The fallout, both figurative and literal would have been horrific.

Rand's warnings were relevant and pitch perfect about the Soviets then, and the collectivists/socialists invading the West now.

But her great failing was assuming that all you needed was some versions of pure reason - a position she never really ably defended. She just took it as axiomatically so. Her approach was soulless, unempathetic, robotic, and essentially inhuman.

But, sometimes, the wrong argument makes the proper predictions. What was true in 1955 for the Soviets, was true for the 1960s counterculture, and is true today for the woke and their ilk. We abandon the traditions that enforce Family, Faith, Freedom at our own peril. That's why the Marxists and their foul offspring attack these institutions - because they are a natural preventative to totalitarianism.

As just one example, consider the sudden uptick in demanding that alternative sexualities be treated as important and legitimate, when only 2-3% of the population so indulges itself. It's because these are a direct assault on traditional family and very much a conscious attempt to further weaken the barriers to collectivist rule. It's not the alternative sexuality itself that is the assault. It's the demand that said sexuality be given the same standing as traditional family and marriage.

This has a long and well documented history. Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who defected to the West in the 1980s, taking decades of KGB operational documentation with him as his way out. In his book "The Sword And The Shield", he describes - in excruciating detail - just how deeply the Soviets penetrated Western cultural, social, and political movements. The 1960s counterculture was infested with KGB influences promoting their anti-establishment, anti-family, anti-faith agenda to the West. It's a sobering book - especially for me, as my family saw some of this up close and personal as the Sovs rolled across Eastern Europe in the 1950s and beyond. Solzhenitsyn tried to warn the West as well, but the perverted, stoned 60s generation in the West couldn't be bothered.

You cannot abandon the behaviors that make society work well, without destroying society. That's what we're witnessing right now.

 

[AndyCapp]

I can only point you to his body of work.

I looked around a bit.
Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology in Ghent, Belgium. He has received social media attention commenting about the mass madness related to the Covid-19 epidemic. He used the association of some big names to add weight to his message.
About the body of his work: His list of publications contains nothing about the social phenomena he discusses in the public media or his book. You can check here.
He is not a great speaker; he has difficulty clarifying his points and is slow in getting there.
I'll read passages from his book; maybe I will get a different idea of his significance.
Are we talking about the same Mattias Desmet?

 

[chuckroast]

I looked around a bit.
Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology in Ghent, Belgium. He has received social media attention commenting about the mass madness related to the Covid-19 epidemic. He used the association of some big names to add weight to his message.
About the body of his work: His list of publications contains nothing about the social phenomena he discusses in the public media or his book. You can check here.
He is not a great speaker; he has difficulty clarifying his points and is slow in getting there.
I'll read passages from his book; maybe I will get a different idea of his significance.
Are we talking about the same Mattias Desmet?

Yes. The book I mentioned is brilliant, if a bit impenetrable. He is an academic for whom English is not a first language. His style of speech is understandable.

His primary area of research is psychology, as the bibliography shows. But his Masters degree (or one of them?) is in statistics. In writing "The Psychology Of Totalitrianism", he stands on the work of people like Hannah Arendt. The book is essentially in three parts:

1. How moving from superstition to the Enlightenment to now treating reason and science like a religion has created a vast loneliness in society and people thus ache for connection with one another. The technology has moved from being a useful tool to now an isolating instrument of enslavement.
2. How this loneliness drives people into the arms of totalitarian movements, and what it takes to break their grip.
3. How we might examine the world and make judgments beyond just those found in technocratic/mathematical structures of reason.

 

[AndyCapp]

Yes. The book I mentioned is brilliant, if a bit impenetrable. He is an academic for whom English is not a first language. His style of speech is understandable.

His primary area of research is psychology, as the bibliography shows. But his Masters degree (or one of them?) is in statistics. In writing "The Psychology Of Totalitrianism", he stands on the work of people like Hannah Arendt. The book is essentially in three parts:

1. How moving from superstition to the Enlightenment to now treating reason and science like a religion has created a vast loneliness in society and people thus ache for connection with one another. The technology has moved from being a useful tool to now an isolating instrument of enslavement.
2. How this loneliness drives people into the arms of totalitarian movements, and what it takes to break their grip.
3. How we might examine the world and make judgments beyond just those found in technocratic/mathematical structures of reason.

He has improved as an English speaker. As a "foreigner" myself, I find dialects and accents pose no problems.
If I understood him correctly, the root of confusion in today's West is anxiety. People are anxious because their values are being peed on, and nobody seems to do anything about it. The great propaganda machine of The Haves is feeding this anxiety with mortal epidemics, end-of-the-world climate scenarios, and international conspiracies of the Extreme Right, the Islamists, Chinese spies, and Vladimir Putin. Our food is poisoned, the Pharma is corrupted, Pinocchios run the news agencies, and so forth.
In a traditional society, anxiety is soothed by personal contacts, family, priests, gurus, teachers, etc.
In modern society, the trend is to eliminate personal contacts and replace them with the Collective.
In his talk, Desmet said that 40% of people on the Internet do not have one single personal friend. He did not mention the sample studied.
What we are witnessing is "mass formation," where people put their trust in the narrative created by the Haves. As the mass formation progresses, people become less and less tolerant of diversity of views and opinions and resort to extreme measures to cull any wrong thought.
This is where we are now: Three FBI agents arrived at a lady's house because of an FB posting. The Machine is mobilized; there is no denying that.
The mass reaction is to protect the narrative. People want more censorship. A phenomenon like Elon Musk is a great threat and needs special attention. We have seen what Joe Biden thinks of him as an automaker.
Desmet is a clinical psychologist like Jordan Peterson. Their scientific work is in that field.
He presents a well-informed point of view.
What to take home about it?
I fully disagree that too much rationalism is a major problem today. It may be in his academic bubble but not in the real world.

A late thought: The emotional structures of the human mind have attracted the attention of neuroscientists quite recently.
What is coming from the cross-section of neurophysiology, perception psychology, and behavioral sciences will change the way the human being is seen through the lenses of science.

 

[Richard G]

Wow. I feel like I’ve turned on the TV in the closing minutes of a rescreen of Deliverance and missed the banjo duel.

Then as I rewind to the beginning, this movie seemed to start in the middle of something. The guy who asked woke is bad, with a question mark, is out early.

Just read an article in The Australian this morning by one of my favourite columnists, holidaying in Canada. Trudeau finally achieves something worthwhile: wokeism is plummeting amongst the young. One of Janet Albrechtsen’s finest traits is her championing her children’s generation.

During the divisive referendum here last year I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. A few years ago I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Those classics helped orient me in current debates. Now, taking in the rarity of the civil discourse in this thread and on RFF generally, so often, and considering the warnings about AI above, I’ve just started reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary. It’s about the structure of the brain but later goes beyond that. One of its implications for us is that the advice above to just go out and shoot (cameras, photographs) will be a step for the good towards salvation. A neuroscientist/psychiatrist, he too may think too much rationalism is a fault of our recent societal development. I’ll have to see what I think when I finish it, which will take a while. It’s long, and dense.

On the way to this point early in the year I read John Gray’s The New Leviathans. A much chillier message from that book.

I have a love hate relationship with books. Why are there so many, why are they on the bookstore shelves. Why were they published or written? Then I pick one, like the sculptor Anne Trufitt’s Day Book and read it and couldn’t put it down and marvel at such a life and present mind, her childhood resonating with different chords throughout her life. A random pick.

Good to see the word evil above. Childhood, including what of it can be maintained during schooling, is under threat. Jonathan Haidt leads one pushback.

The ideas in this thread matter. Children and young adults are precious as they are our only hope.