We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
freddiedeboer.substack.comWhen people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure.
The world is, as it always has been, tribal. The pressure to ensure that the out-group stays out and the in-group is protected is stronger than ever in the face of ever-present screaming voices from the out-group intruding on our lives.
We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. And we feel pressured to protect even the most lunatic fringe of our own before we make common cause with the most sane voices 'on the other side'
Trying to view the world through the lens of nominal logic will only drive you made with the inconsistencies.
> When people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure.
I can’t find it, but I remember someone on HN sharing one of the earliest movies from the early 1900s of a farmer born in the 1800s critiquing “modern” (1900s) city life.
I can see how cultural/technology change takes some flexibility and effort to learn how to survive or thrive in a new environment and how that is probably annoying as you get older.
I’d imagine it’s like you mastered, excelled or did well at a game and now someone’s changing the rules. I’m sure it’s also embarrassing or isolating if the rules of the game change but you don’t/won’t adapt and fewer people want to play the game of life according to your now less popular rules.
But in watching that old video and watching my progressive friends get older and start to resist change, it seems more like a natural evolution for many to at some point firm up their beliefs and take aim at those who keep changing.
> We hold to tribes first, not beliefs.
By default yes, but we broadly overcome the default in many aspects of life so we should be collectively beating back political tribalism as much as possible. We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.
> We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.
Individually, yes, but only in a limited fashion.
But with so many paths for tribalism, with each taking so much effort to bring under our conscious control, that the average person only seems to change the direction of their tribalism rather than bringing tribalism itself under control.
> in a limited fashion.
With the proviso that everything human is subject to limitation, I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept. An only marginally curtailed tribalism doesn’t resemble English Common Law, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention etc, even in their imperfect implementations. We can do better and sure as heck don’t need to backslide.
> I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept.
I have argued my point poorly, I think, to have left you with the sense I am throwing up my hands and saying fighting tribalism is pointless.
Probably a discussion for another day as I need to focus on work right now.
We use beliefs to link tribes to a common cause.
A fantastic example of this is USA. so many different Abrahamic tribes all operating under the same beliefs to push a common social and political system.
Beliefs are earworms and dangerous.
Collective human nature is horrible, but it is at least not 100% consistently horrible. In the relatively good times we must make the wise rules that get us through the bad times.
Articles like this that miss out the primal tribalist nature of politics always make me wonder when the author started paying attention to anything. Yes, everything since 2015 or so has been exhausting, but do they not remember the mental gymnastics of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!", or any other number of farcical political expressions in the last couple of decades?
The examples in the article are pretty easy to rationalize once you understand the tribes. Modern anarchist antifa types are more keen to fight right-wing reactionaries than the government itself; thus anti-vaxxers, as a grassroots movement coded as right-wing, would be higher up on their agenda. (Historically who would the SPD Iron Front rather fight- the Weimar government, or fascist paramilitary street toughs?)
By that same token, "liberals" (who? Establishment Democrat Russiagater types?) support federal law enforcement agencies out of the perception that if far right forces take control, things would be even worse for them than rule by those existing bureaucracies. Ditto for deplatforming- but that hardly confers "blind faith" in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies.
Conservatives "casting off" Christianity seems to ignore decades of the American right falling into lockstep despite the personal flaws of its leaders, from '80s televangelists to Gingrich's infidelities to Bush's alcoholic past to all sorts of scandals. And any religion can have some degree of malleability to support cognitive dissonance and selective reading, so it so crazy to see Jon McNaughton pictures of a pious Trump in prayer?
"Democrats gin up a new red scare and call out for war" - the (D) focus on Russia is somewhat of an ironic turn after Romney was likewise mocked for some Russia caution in his 2012 campaign, but this is just a natural consequence of foreign interference becoming the narrative to explain the rise of the previous president. But are they even the ones calling for war, or is that a simplification of a situation involving many shadowy and mutually-interchangeable diplomatic and military agencies, foreign relations think tanks, and military contractors?
"Republicans care more about trans swimmers than small government" - has the author been asleep for the entirety of culture wars, which date back to the '90s if not the Reagan administration?
"You can easily imagine a world where vaccine skepticism was left-coded - indeed, in the Trump years it was!" - not really. There is that one high-profile quote of then-Senator Harris publicly distrusting a Trump-created vaccine, but the anti-vaxx movement has been around for a long time and it has been a pretty even stew of both far left lifestyle Green/New Agey and anti-pharma psuedoscience and far right and libertarian anti-government mandate sentiment which dips into anti-NWO conspiracy theories and the Mark of the Beast. Vaccine skepticism was not left-coded two years ago because that was when anti-5G was big too, and that definitely had conservative elements in it, and there was also not really any vaccine boosterism that was right-coded other than from the administration itself because they were trying to make a vaccine via Operation Warp Speed.
WSWS.org declaring Corbyn a "pseudo-leftist" is the easiest thing to understand of all. Leftist firing circles have been going on since like French Revolutionary times, and there are plenty of purist/kooky socialists online.
Beyond the viscerally ironic image of anarchists protesting in favor of government mandates (and are they really, or are they there because they're protesting the protesters?), his examples are easily deconstructed and understood.
Truth be told this has been happening for several decades now:
"The Age of iPod Politics" (2004)
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.h...
> The great American pacifier is our love of stuff and our ability to fashion our own insular worlds through our staggering selection of things to buy (even if we can't actually afford an SUV). But consumer America is different from political America. In consumer America, diversity of preference is not just tolerated. It is mandatory. [...] You make your choices, and I make mine. Yours, of course, are wrong. But what do I care?
> Patching together customized networks of pundits, political comics, online news feeds and talk shows, we can choose among universes in which the polls show a dead heat or a blowout, the National Guard memos are truthful or fraudulent, the economy is rebounding or relapsing. You can watch Fox News and see your surrogate reduce my surrogate to a sputtering fool. I can go to my favorite political sites and follow the blogrolls, link after link, discovering how vast is the universe of people who realize that I am entirely right about everything. This virtual self-gerrymandering promotes black-and-white thinking. [...] You know that my naive ideas will lead America to crumble like Rome, and I know that morons like you are going to get me killed by a dirty bomb, but we never need to actually say a cross word to each other. Or anything at all, for that matter.
It's hard to say when it all started, and you could probably say it's been going on in this country since the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists (or the Tories vs. Patriots, even). But growing up extremely online during the War of Terror, none of this is different to me in kind, only quantity.
> Our moment is one in which anything is possible because nothing means anything.
It would have been useful if the writer added more historical context to this. In 1946, for instance, Orwell raised some of these points in his essay, "Politics and the English Language" [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Hokey old values like "respect your neighbors, and their right to be wrong" will still work.
"Chaos is coming" hah! It's been here all along, you've just been lying to yourself about its distance from you.
In moments of peace and plenty when your neighbor is largely right or wrong about matters of trivial import like which version of god to bow before and what sports team to root for it is easy to let your neighbor be wrong.
When both have very strong opinions about matters of vital import both sides have strong motivation to mind their neighbors business. I think that is trivially justifiable on many issues.
It's kind of a weird rant, but a real problem. The divisive effect has been to weaken the US as a world power.
Meanwhile, Russia's leadership apparently has just issued the orders to move on Ukraine.[1] Putin sees the US as weak and divided, and is taking the opportunity to restore the Russian Empire. (One step at a time. First South Osseta, then Crimea, then Donetsk. How big a bite this time?)
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-intel/index.html
Weakening the US as a world power seems OK until you look at who is stepping up to take its place.
You may be interested in "The Storm Before The Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond" by George Friedman.
Published February 2020 (wow timing), he lays out a plausible-seeming decade based on historical patterns of culture in the US.
You may not buy the premise, but it is still comforting to read someone predicting "don't worry, this only lasts about a decade" written right before everyone went crazy.
At this point I agree with Hobbes; language is an impediment to understanding.
https://i1.wp.com/footnotes2stories.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
lmao this is great.
one thing ive always felt about moments of impossible to understand chaos and vertigo is that if want to find some sense of understanding, then look to the kids.
for young people, all of the chaos is normalized. theyre not having to deal with foundation-shattering down-is-now-up redefinitions, "once in generation economic recession" every 10 years, etc etc. i mean they see all of the same noise, but i think theyre still very able to identify the signal and make sense of what is actually nonsense and what is meaningful. like, think back to when you were a kid when everyone was screaming that the sky was disintegrating in an ozone hole.
and so if i look at the kids today, im reassured. theyre dealing with all of it much more amusingly than when millennials were kids (haha! anxiety is a tik tok dance! lo-fi mix to dissociate to), and theyre still doing stuff like unionizing their local starbucks, and actually reading bakunin and kropotkin.
This article smells like cynicism pretending to be self-congratulating intelligence. Painting whole swathes of groups to be all the same ("Liberals cheer the FBI and CIA, call for limitless censorship, and insist on blind faith in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper.") and saying they should've been something else is... meh, stupidly reductionist.
Perfectly put. Without the reductionism the whole article falls apart.
Is not the point of the article that people tend to be extremely reductionisty though?
> Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper.
Baptist here. Yeah, we're on the same course we ever were.
If "Conservatives" have veered off, it's because they've more regard for the Gospel of Klaus Schwab than for the one pertaining to that one dude.
Oh, I don't know. Whatever the faults of $CURRENT_YEAR, it still compares favorably to that time when we randomly invaded a country because a two-pizza team in the White House thought it'd be awesome.
And then we re-elected the guy who led the circus, because YEAH! WARTIME PRESIDENT! USA! USA! USA!
We've always been tyrannized by a majority of unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters. This is why democracy sucks and has to be checked by an anti-majoritarian constitution that enshrines basic liberal values.
It doesn't stop every horrible thing from happening, like the aforementioned stupid war, but it sure helps stop the worst stuff.
> unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters
The Iraq war was authorized by Congress including most of the Democrats and The NY Times and other left media backed the war, at least at first. It’s sad to say that it was a bipartisan war albeit with a vocal minority who opposed it.
Yep. Everyone showed us who they really were during that time.
We are a silly and foolish people. Blundering comes naturally to us.
It's Authoritarianism in disguise.
Co-opt the symbols that are antithetical to your cause and turn them to your own.
It's a tragic and pathetic point of human civilization. People gathering behind a symbol that historically represents the opposite of what they are fighting for whilst totally naive to the irony.
Children who are adults but can't think for themselves like adults so they need a parental figure in the form of authoritarian institutions to tell them what to do because self reliance is just so scary. If they can't think for themselves how could anyone else in the country be mature enough to think for themselves.
This will be contested but to blame the historic "left" and "right" as equally responsible for the erosion of sanity is dishonest. I've been "left" my whole life but this drastic transition to Authoritarianism is firmly the blame of the modern "left". I'm considering adjusting my party alliance in response to this new world order.
After the era of Trump and now this current era of book banning and preventing race-based topics in schools (among other things), I’m not sure how you can say the Authoritarianism comes from the left… unless you’re talking about temporary measures that were taken due to a global pandemic.
Wow, are we even experiencing the same world?
Democrats are in favour of giving the government lockdown power because of a flu with sub 1% mortality rate, promote cancel culture, promote racial discrimination ("positive discrimination") and limits freedom of speech ("hate speech").
20 years ago I was often debating against republicans who were against gay marriage and cannabis legalisation.
Oh, how the tables have turned.
Less that the tables have turned, and more that you define “progressive” using 20th century standards, not 21st century. Society caught up to you, and that’s good enough for you.
The mortality rate isn’t really the problem with covid, it’s the way it overwhelms the hospitals, as has been demonstrated over and over again. Anyone who thinks the measures have been overblown has simply not talked to anyone who works in healthcare for the past two years.
On top of that cancel culture is barely a real thing, it’s really more like “consequence culture”, something that has always existed.
This may be a more controversial opinion, but I believe limiting hate speech is a good thing. I think you can make concrete rules around it, so I don’t buy the arguments that it will lead to a slippery slope of more speech being blocked.
I would say the Democrats were making it up if the USA were the only country experiencing this pandemic. Unfortunately, I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus and it would disappear two weeks after Biden was elected.
> I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus
Trump never said that: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-rel...
Well he did say “this is their new hoax” (at 7:30 in this speech: https://youtu.be/H2BO_2bnx3k).
And yeah, he wasn’t talking about the virus itself, but about how the democrats were turning it into a big issue… which of course they turned out to be right about. This is the same speech where he bragged that there were no American deaths, and now there are over a million.
Covid isn't "a flu" and 1% mortality rate combined with very high permissibility in a disease that hospitalizes more like 10% of naive hosts and often keeps people in the hospital for weeks or even months is on net potentially disastrous because it had the potential to trivially overwhelm our health care resources leaving us with a mortality rate that would have included many of the 9% who would survive with hospitalization but not without.
This is why people especially in 2020 were freaking out. Not JUST the 3M we projected we might lose letting it run through us but the effect if it were to crash our health care system.
Please don't make throwaways to post covid misinformation here that you wouldn't post on your main account.
> the effect if it were to crash our health care system
The effects that we did see when it crashed the Italian, New York, UK, Iranian, Russian, etc. health care systems. Wherever sars-cov2 got away on the population, the results were absolutely devastating to the healthcare system. Blows me away that there are people who forget seeing bodies piling up like cordwood during the worst weeks of this pandemic.
Mostly false. Missing context.
People are now stuck in hyperreality [1] with an inability to tell the difference between the simulation of reality (news, social media) and actual objective physical reality.
Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Consume a diverse set of news media. If your watching a corporate news network you're most certainly being lied to more than you'd believe.
I’m not sure how that relates to this at all? If you think anything I wrote is untrue then point out which specific items.